Second Life struggles with copying

Cory Doctorow poses a question that gets at the heart of many of our DRM, licensing-versus-ownership, intellectual property rights discussions. Duping in a virtual environment is similar to stealing; even if you're not taking the object or medium from someone else when you duplicate it, you're still diminishing the value of a commodity that someone else has purposefully invested in, thus undermining and decreasing its value. In fact all rights-related issues stem from Cory's question, so I'll rephrase it to make it more general: at what point do our rights as customers end when rightfully paying for access to a medium or service? Is a company morally obligated to not only protect its intellectual property but also to protect the customers who have already paid real money for it?

The virtual world Second Life is having to contend with a new piece of software that makes it easy to copy in-game artifacts. Most virtual worlds claim total ownership and control of anything created in the game, but Second Life allows players to claim a copyright in their creations. Players can sell (or refuse to sell) their in-game tchotchkes, or give them away under Creative Commons licenses. Second Life has a thriving economy based on the trading of user-created objects.

An open-source tool called CopyBot allows players to cruise around copying the objects sported by other players. Many SL players are upset by this, and demanding action. Second Life's proprietors, Linden Labs, are trying to figure out what to do. They've ruled out eliminating third-party programs from Second Life, and they are on record as refusing to become copyright enforcers for their community. They are offering to temporarily adjudicate questions of infringement to see if they violate the Second Life terms of service, but they're seeking better solutions, including reputation systems.

Second Life's management is doing an exemplary job of coping with this, but benevolent dictatorships aren't the same thing as democracies. If a game is going to declare that its players are citizens who own property, can the company go on "owning" the game?