If you live on DreamScape Islands, this affects you. If you create any content on Second Life, this affects you. Please read!

Gwyneth Llewellyn, is respectfully demanding a clarification/ of the policy as regards bloggers and others and she won’t step down. I support Gwyn’s efforts and I hope you take the time to read the newest from the Lindens and her take on what is going on!

“Recent developments

Possibly advised by their legal advisers, Linden announced on their blog, that they would start as of now to aggressively discourage the usage of all Linden-related registered trademarks, thus effectively reverting its four-year old policy of co-promotion through marketing crowd sourcing. The major issue with the current population of Second Life® users is that dozens of thousands of products and services were created within compliance with the old guidelines, and there is no provision made by Linden to “grandfather” existing services now currently in existence. Almost all have no legal protection that will allow them to contest any of Linden’s claims in court to shut their services down if they receive Linden’s Cease & Desist letters. Linden’s claim to their trademarks is, naturally, factually correct, unambiguous, and entirely within Linden’s rights.

There is, however, one aspect of Linden’s claims where we feel the Guidelines are overshooting the legitimate intent of Linden Research in preserving their trademarked brands and preventing their dilution. We refer to the section “Proper Reference to Linden Lab’s Brand Names in Text“, which basically outlines how any mention of terms trademarked by Linden has to be written any text published. Among other things, it claims to make sure the brand names are only ever used with an “appropriate generic noun” of which Linden provides a list, and that “as often as possible”, down to capitalization, spelling, elisions and contractions. In effect, this precludes any usage of trademarked terms in text in most of the forms current nowadays, and dictates to commentators, bloggers and critics how and what to write when referring to trademarked terms…”

Lets hear from you with your support too! This affects more people than you can even imagine!