DISQUS

FYI, Wikipedia has some interesting bits about the "IP" word: "The earliest use of the term "intellectual property" appears to be an October 1845 Massachusetts Circuit Court ruling in the patent case Davoll et al. v. Brown. [...] The term's widespread popularity is a much more modern phenomenon. It was very uncommon until the 1967 establishment of the World Intellectual Property Organization, which actively tried to promote the term."

A quick Google News Archive search seems to confirm this: the use of the term "intellectual property" seems rather uncommon in the first half of the 20th century (compare with copyright, for instance). Also worth a look: this 1938 Time Magazine article in which the term "intellectual property" is used in a non-copyright/patent related context.

"[...] it's all about intellectual property rights."
And about the SL ToS defined by Linden Labs, of course.

A couple of points:

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"But the vast majority of them seem to agree that property rights are being violated and that something must be done soon before the virtual economy within Second Life begins to deteriorate."

This is exactly the problem with VR environments: players feel this is about property rights (which it is not), while in fact, it's all about intellectual property rights.

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See the parallel with the music industry scenario. The labels started to release music in a digital format in the 80s, when mp3 compression and file-sharing technology weren't around yet. After having created a business model around selling high-fidelity digital audio, the internet and mp3 compression came around, undermining the very basics of the labels' model. We all know the results...

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"A new world has been born and now its citizens are struggling with defining the basic principles and laws that will govern it. It's what political scientists refer to as a nation's "constitutional moment.""

There's a difference with real world scenarios though: the entity defining SL's rules is Linden Labs, not the community (although they can of course exert pressure, as has happened here). As Cory Doctorow says: "benevolent dictatorships aren't the same thing as democracies." Curious how this will work out.

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Pogue's review is spot-on. Curious if the Zune is gonna be a hit — I have my doubts with regards to the new DRM format and how it's sooo not PlaysForSure compatible.

Apparently, my previous comment was lost. A quick recap:

Something similar is going on with Japan's chaku-mero/chaku-uta market.

Chaku-mero or ringtones, are polyphonic karaoke versions of popular songs, and mostly produced by third-party vendors. These vendors pay a fixed fee to JASRAC and they're set. Mostly DRM-free too.

Chaku-uta or ringtunes were introduced at a later point in time (backed by the music industry as they wanted a piece of the chaku- cake). Chaku-uta are 30 second remixes of popular songs, so also neighboring rights have to be cleared = you need to have permission from the record labels. This put the labels in an advantageous position, which they used to 1. shove DRM down everybody's throat, and 2. slow down or refuse licenses to third-party vendors and sell their own chaku-uta through a dedicated website instead. More background here.