Support Ticket and a worrying thought about TOS.

15 June 2008 By Talia 1 In From InWorld, From the InterWeb

Okies, due to something I am doing to help out the Commonwealth War Graves Commission I found myself inspecting the TOS in some detail, which has lead me to a worrying point. If anyone knows more about this than the TOS and can point me to references I would be most appreciative. As you will probably get from the support ticket I will quote below, This is something that will affect most of the more active people within Second Life if you take the TOS to the letter. I have a feeling this is mainly just my misunderstanding of legal speak, and it’s certainly something that LL have had issues with before (ie. most their major policy changes).

It really does make you wonder if LL should issue two versions of the TOS and most statements. One for your average person and another for lawyers and people with some understanding of legal speak.

Anyways.. My Support Ticket…

Hi I was looking for some clarification on the subject of using Snapshots for out of world purposes. In this specific case I have created a scene within Second Life to demonstrate a possible future for War memorials if the level of respect shown to them does not improve. Obviously due to the very nature of the subject I cannot dress up a war memorial in real life, as that in itself could be considered a show of disrespect. So I went ahead and created a small in world scene to demonstrate “what could be..” in order to take some snapshots…
It will be used by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, which is a non-profit making organisation. The picture will be used purely for educational purposes in schools, so that young people can get a glimpse of the possible future of war grave cemeteries. This, we hope, will spark off debate and alternative innovative suggestions.
It is to be used within a Power point presentation initially with possibly some machinima film if this is okay.
Now the potential stumbling block is in the TOS.
“3.4 Linden Lab licenses its textures and environmental content to you for your use in creating content in-world.
During any period in which your Account is active and in good standing, Linden Lab gives you permission to create still and/or moving media, for use only within the virtual world environment of the Service (”in-world”), which use or include the “textures” and/or “environmental content” that are both (a) created or owned by Linden Lab and (b) displayed by Linden Lab in-world. ”

Seeing that I created pretty much all the textures/objects in the scene except for the sky and some trees in the background, is this likely to be an issue? It does actually get me to thinking, how does this apply to a lot of things, for example, blogs, Flickr, external sales sites? Are the thousands of people that display images from within Second life outside the “Virtual World Environment”, myself included, breaking TOS by doing so? I do find this worrying as doing a search on Google images for “Secondlife” pulls up nearly 300k results and the same search on Flickr gets 375k.
Please can you clarify this clause for me.

I will post the snapshot I had in mind for this as another post after this one. Note that this snapshot is already on KoinUp and Flickr.

Now this whole thing could be my being overly paranoid about this as there are 1000’s of websites displaying content from within Second Life, there are many Lindens themselves with flickr account, personal sites, and Torley himself recently was a judge and part the prize on a competition for taking Windlight related snapshots on KoinUp, But having read the clause in the TOS over and over… I can’t see it meaning anything else.

I will post the reply to this when I get it.. (not holding my breath here).. right here on my blog.