second life: paradise for counterfeiters?
Posted on | June 19, 2006 | 3 Comments
jeremy pepper wrote an interesting post about trademark infringements in the virtual world of Second Life.
for those who haven’t been on the ‘grid’: players of Second Life spend a good amount of online-time and -money on shopping virtual clothing, accessories, vehicles and more. these items are created by other players (often professional 3d-/graphics-designers), who are selling them online. the punchline being, that the in-game currency, ‘Linden-$’, is convertible to realife US-Dollars using a creditcard.
with more than 130.000 regular players willing to spend several millions (reallife!) Dollars a month, Second Life allows top-designers to make a living of their virtual sales. naturally, many designers are tempted to include reallife-brands on their items to increase both their authenticity and monetary value. roaming one of the countless virtual shopping-malls, users will find Nike-sneakers (screenshot below), Adidas-jackets, Rolex-watches or Mercedes-SUVs – copycats, each infringing the reallife-brand it’s modelled after.
until today, these issues don’t appear on the affected companies radars – maybe because the virtual prizes are ludicrously low (a pair of fake Nike’s goes for 300 Linden-$, that’s about 1 US-$), but rather due to the fact that there is no real loss involved (no one would buy a virtual shirt instead of a real one, right? 
).
however, the latter argument is quickly becoming obsolete, as American Apparel just has opened a virtual store in Second Life (screenshot below), selling virtual counterparts of their popular clothing. the polygon-showcases are cleverly linked with AA’s webshop, encouraging customers to buy both virtual and real items. the store was designed by grid-superstar Aimee Weber, who herself created a popular (virtual!) collection under the label *PREEN*.
the AA-store demonstrates how-to migrate reallife-business to Second Life, and could turn out to be an example for other brands, not only in fashion. however, it remains open, if Linden Labs, the company running the virtual world, will be able to ensure the legal conditions for sustainable trade – companies willing to-do business will demand enforcement of both their trademark- and copyright-claims, something that is hardly implemented yet.
visit American Apparel in Second Life at Lerappa (114, 121, 24)!
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3 Responses to “second life: paradise for counterfeiters?”
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June 20th, 2006 @ 12:36 am
I love American Apparel and will therefore quickly check out this cool shit. cant believe ive never heard of this 2003 project…thanks
June 20th, 2006 @ 9:22 am
hehe Second Life rocks
, such a weird place… if you sign-up, watch out for me, my online-nick is ‘Mickey Curtis’.
ps: I’m doing a full-feature on SecondLife for thegap in august…watch out!
August 23rd, 2006 @ 10:28 pm
[...] however, since the SLLA seems not to be of the patient kind ; they started in-world military action only 10 days after proclaiming their initial manifesto. in a first run, they stopped commerce at the American Apparel store by griefing away potential customers – see coverage from SLAA and Aimee Weber, the designer of the store. while it’s pretty clear that the involved parties are not too dead-serious about the strike (rumours claim that the assault even earned AA some badly needed PR and traffic), the underlying issue remains: how and when will Linden Labs be able to transform SL from a ‘friendly dictatorship’ to a truly democratic system? [...]