One of the cases that keeps coming up at State of Play is the Bragg case. Bragg was a Second Life user who, as Linden Labs keeps suggesting people do, invested somewhat substantially in property in Second Life. It seems, though, that Bragg had found a way to get at Linden’s auctions of abandoned land before anyone else and buy it up very cheaply, intending then to flip the land at a profit nearer market rates.

Linden figured out what he was doing and confiscated the properties and banned him from SL. He is a lawyer. He sued in small claims court. The case has since escalated to include all sorts of damages and costs.

Reuters, which has a significant presence in SL, has been following the story. The case has been working up through the Pennsylvania courts (that’;s where Bragg lives and practices law). The Judge ruled Linden’s TOS illegal, and has refused to remove CEO Philip Rosedale personally from the case (a significant thing for company CEOs).

This case is of serious interest to the many lawyers here - it may set a precedent for how the law views virtual property. Professor Yee Fen Lim argues that property isn’t what people think it is: that *legally* property is really the rights of access and control. In that sense, virtual property is certainly property. Linden defines the property it “sells” as rental of the processor to run the sim. “As computer science that’s acceptable,” she said, “but in the legal view that means property is mere illusion.”

For Bragg, of course, the point is that he invested quite a bit of real money which has now been confiscated. In later panels, a number of commentators thought that Linden’s actions were not reasonable. Abrahams said that under Australian law Bragg would win. Today’s law workshop talked about how unfair and one-sided EULAs and TOSs are, and argued that Linden’s more rational response would have been to say, yeah, loophole in our system, we fix, we refund your money, maybe you can keep one property. But at the moment all virtual worlds are owned by companies who create all the laws, some by contract (TOS), some in code, some by emerging community standards.

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