[MUD-Dev] Second Life's customers own the IP of their creatio ns

[Ren Reynolds]

Christer Enfors wrote

> In the online world, we don't sign anything - we click "I
> agree". I've heard that it takes nothing less than a signed
> contract to give away copyright on something.

I feel that the clicking "I agree" and continuing to play would be
accepted as sufficient proof of agreement to the contract
re-assignment (given a whole set of other assumptions e.g. that
copyright does subsist, that the scope of the EULA adequately covers
player created content and that there are not other policy reasons
for limit of scope arguments).

There is indeed a lot of legal debate about the enforceability of so
called 'click wrap' licenses so one could look to apply these
argument here, I just don't think that these apply so strongly in
this case (but I have not reviewed the text of the cases recently
but when I did I don't remember feeling this was a strong line of
argument). I don't however think that these arguments are based on
one having to actually sign a piece of paper - a contract is just an
agreement between two parties in general it does not even have to be
written down, but of course is if one party wants to enforce it,
it's a jolly good reason to write it down. I think that the click
wrap cases are more about access to information before purchasing
the product, which does apply here, but I guess you could take the
box back, if however you keep playing and generate what you take to
be your IPR then I think the argument would be hard to run.

Ren
www.renreynolds.com
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