Seconds Life

Information may be 3D, but it still wants to be free:

Groups of Second Life content creators were gathering digitally Tuesday to protest the dissemination of a program they worry could badly damage the virtual world's nascent economy.

The controversy gathered steam Monday when Linden Lab, which publishes Second Life, posted a blog alerting residents of the virtual world to the existence of a program or bot called CopyBot, which allows someone to copy any object in Second Life. That includes goods such as clothing that people purchase for their in-world avatars, and even the virtual PCs that computer giant Dell announced Tuesday it is going to sell in the digital world.

Virtual worlds may look somewhat more like our "real" world than the flat UIs of the familiar web, but that virtual clay looks set to slip through our virtual fingers just like all the other ones and zeros...

[via Eric Schonfeld]

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