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Portal Cooperative Bots Chalk Art [Pic]
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In one of the stranger court cases of recent times, a court has rejected a request to remove virtual nourishment for virtual pets in the virtual world of Second Life.
The case involves a copyright dispute with one company claiming it created the idea of selling in-game animals that were capable of breeding with one another. Ozimals Inc filed a complaint under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act demanding that Second Life operators Linden Research remove the virtual horses introduced by Amaretto Ranch Breedables, claiming it copied its own line of virtual rabbits.
Leaving aside the issue of potential confusion between horses and rabbits, the most amazing element of the complaint, formally known as a Takedown Notification, was that it didn’t simply ask Linden to alter its coding or flick a few buttons to make sure the horses were removed from the “game.”
Instead, as TechDirt’s Mike Masnick spotted,:
The Notification sought, among other things, the removal from Second Life of Amaretto’s virtual “food” and “water.” Had the takedown occurred, the virtual horses would have “died” from “starvation” and/or “thirst” within 72 hours.
To its credit, the court didn’t simply laugh at the very idea or tell everyone involved to stop wasting its time. Instead it looked at the code that created the horses and rabbits (no, not DNA) and concluded that although the two sets of virtual products had traits in similar, there was no direct copying.
Although the ruling was made earlier this year, the case is now back in the news because Amaretto returned to court to demand that Ozimals be punished for filing a bogus takedown request. That demand was rejected on the basis that Second Life never carried out the takedown request and thus no direct harm was caused. That in turn is prompting debate about whether there’s enough protection against firms filing dubious takedown requests that are rejected but still lead to disruption and legal costs.
There was a time when “Jaws” was more popular than “Star Wars”, believe it or not. It wasn’t a long time, but it did happen. When the new space opera overtook the world’s most fearsome killer fish in the theaters, director Steven Spielberg published a congratulatory open letter to his long-time pal George Lucas in the December 2nd, 1977 issue of Variety.
Check out more info about this and other Letters of Note.
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Yep, I know, this is almost as old as the Internet, but seriously, keeping up with everything that’s out there is almost impossible, so for everyone who’ve already seen it: We’re sorry.
If you have a geeky tattoo and you’d like to share it with our geektastic community, be sure to send us a picture of it via the contact section on top of the blog. We’ll publish them on [GAS] as soon as we have enough pictures to make a feature post.
We all know it, seeing a water filled balloon burst in slow motion is something that everyone likes to watch. But the slow mo guys wanted to take things to the next level by using a giant balloon instead of one of a more conventional size. Check this out, this is pretty epic.
Biotechnology corporation Genentech set a world record last month for creating the Largest Human DNA Helix. Most of the more-than 2,600 people were employees at Genentech’s headquarters in San Francisco, but the gathering also included U.S. Rep. Jackie Speier, D-San Mateo. It’s hard to tell how it was accomplished from the overhead helicopter view above, but each person was given a colored hat to wear and then arranged in groups accordingly. No word on how big the previous World’s Largest Human DNA Helix was.
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