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I love the Second Life.  And yet, I am very aware of the rules it plays by. Are you?  Take for example its Terms of Use, sometimes called Terms of Service. Do you know what they mean?
The Second Life (“SL”) has been a defendant in several lawsuits over the past few years. In the coming years, we’ll likely see many more suits dealing with the virtual worlds in general, and SL in particular. One issue that is sure to arise is the question of who really owns your content, and what can other SL users do with your content. By way of illustration, let’s look at the SL
Terms of Use / Terms of Service. In part, Section 7.3 reads as follows:

7.3 You grant certain Content licenses to users of Second Life by submitting your Content to publicly accessible areas of the Service.

You agree that by uploading, publishing, or submitting any Content to any publicly accessible areas of the Service, you hereby grant each user of Second Life a non-exclusive license to access the User Content through the Service, and to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, and perform the Content In-World or otherwise on the Service solely as permitted by you through your interactions with the Service under these Terms of Service. This license is referred to as the “User Content License,” and the Content being licensed is referred to as “User Content.”
Do you know what this says? Means? Warning: You may not like what I’m about to say!  This statement arguably says, once you upload, publish, or submit any content to a publicly accessible space within the SL, you give up a lot of rights.  In particular, not only do you give SL permission to do anything it wants to do with your content (e.g., reproduce it, share it with others, and repurpose your work), you also give other SL users permission to do the same thing.  No published case has addressed this issues, as of yet, but once users really understand what they have done, it is sure to happen.  Just think about it, one defense to copyright infringement is permission, so it would be hard for someone to say their content is being infringed if they in fact granted permission through the SL Terms of Use..
What are your thoughts about this?

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