Linden Lab® has decided to start some policies for the protection of their trademarks and registered names. Well, actually I think that is something they had to do a lot of time ago because they were almost losing control over their brands.
In a post in the Official Linden Blog they explained their new Second Life® Brand Center, where you can find the rules, guidelines, and all that stuff about the use of the Linden Lab® trademarks and registered names.
For what i read I think they want to control the use of their registered names as something that some people is trying to register already (as the infamous case of the “SLart” trademark) and, at the same time have some control about the use of their logos.
For what I understood that only affects to the businesses, web-pages, blogs and all that operating about SL® but outside SL® itself. Anyway, from now you can’t register brands including SL®, Second Life®, Linden®, or any Linden Lab® registered brand.
For the moment all the information is quite confusing, but will be good you take a look at the blog post I mentioned above. More interesting thoughts about this in a post in Vint Falken’s blog and in this other in Looker Lumet’s blog.
Anyway, just in case, I asked Linden Lab® permission for the use of the inSL™ logo.
Well, another one of those “LL should have done that ages ago”, isnt it? Its a tad obvious that they mostly react unannouned and out of the blue when the kid has been falling in the milkpot already:)
And you even kept enough white space around it and placed it against a white background! Woot!
Ha ha ha, Vint, if you do something, do it right
Calixus, for me one of the problems of this new policy is that they went “from zero to bitch in 1.2 seconds”. I agree that they need to protect their brands, but the 90 days “ultimatum” and the lack of definition of the new policy is something, at least, confussing.
I asked Torley Linden to make a VideoTutorial about all this (no joking, lol, i really did it).
Raul, Gwyneth Llewelyn posted an open letter to Linden Lab© at her blog (http://gwynethllewelyn.net/) asking for clarification on the new trademark policy. Maybe we can get some answers soon… although we know how they sometimes just don’t listen to us, in spite of all the publicity and brand awareness we made for free all this time.