27 March 2008

Unicorns, Trademarks, and other ramblings

As some denizens of the grid have already discovered, I've got some new unicorn ( or horse or pegasus ) avatars up for sale. They're the first quad I've ever made. I used them in another "making an avatar" article for Avatar Toolbox. I have to go through AT and check it for trademark stuff, and I want to update it with some new links (and some links to a couple of Torley's new videos, especially the advanced attachments video.)

Still fussing around with the motorcycle. Did some clothes shopping. Visited a couple people I hadn't seen in a while. Had to go to sleep before Veyron's party, but I gave her a party favor the day before. Timezones suck. :P

I'm wondering why Linden Lab doesn't have some sort of official contact for the blogging community, and one for businesses on the grid. The concierge group just doesn't cut it - some issues overlap but many don't. It would have been a simple thing to have a channel (blog, forum, mailing list) where they could put up a discussion about "How the new trademark rules affect you" and clear up all the confusion and upset. A wee comment buried in a long blog post is not good communication.

And I'm very curious to see how they're going to handle domain and business name cases like SLExchange or the Second Life Herald. The old trademarks page said "You agree to refrain from using any domain name that closely mimics our proprietary domains, including secondlife.com and lindenlab.com." I don't know if that would have had additional meaning in lawyer's english, but in typical usage it didn't suggest that you needed two nouns in your name if you included SL as a reference to Second Life.

The new inSL logo makes me wonder what was being smoked in the Lab - when the eye-hand image has such recognition, why would you rip it out and replace it with something that no one recognizes and (I know I'm being catty) is so unappealing? Were they playing off of the SLGrid icon, or thinking of your basic plywood cube? If you're going to dump the recognizable, at least give us something with style!

No comments: