Intellectual Property Law

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By Greg Lastowka

• The (virtual) law of nuisance and zoning may be entering into Second Life, according to Reuters. “Linden Lab has banned ‘ad farms,’ the small plots of land with gaudy advertisements that are designed to extort neighboring landowners.” I suppose this will be a new way that virtual “neighbors settle disputes“?
• The Naked Cowboy is suing Mars for trademark violations, says Reuters. Has anyone tracked down this Complaint yet? I’m curious to see the specifics. E.g., is there a publicity claim in there as well?
  • Update: Many thanks to my former student Kyle: Here it is. And yes, there are two counts. One is 43(a) and the other is the NY privacy/publicity statute.  Former student Candy points to cleaner copy on CNN’s servers here.
• Via the cyberprof list — Google Earth has been petitioned to remove some geo-tagged user-generated content. I’ve been waiting for more things like this to happen. With shared GPS tracking and ubicomp, it seems pretty clear we’re going to see more of these types of location/data disputes as cyberspace is more heavily integrated into geospace. (See also this and this.)

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Full post as published by Madisonian.net on February 14, 2008 (boomark / email).