From L-R:, originally uploaded by Torley.

Last friday, my friend Menno Ophelia was so kind to tell me about a panel that was going on about Avatar Identity at the Orange Island.

Torley Linden and Karl Herber also posted about it. The transcriptions of the panels here, in the Orange Island blog.

Some thoughts about that… one, Orange is using his island for something more that a empty merchandising space, at least they organize interesting activities… two, after the panel “Avatar as a personal brand” with Torley Linden, Celebrity Trollop and Saeya Nyanda as speakers and Haver Cole as moderator i was a bit scared.

Above, Torley Linden and Haver Cole during the panel. 

For the name of the panel you can imagine what was about, the avatars as branding in the sense that some avatars are the “image” of corporations or businesses in Second Life, Torley as a representative of Linden Lab, Saeya as the image of her own business and Celebrity as the image of fashion blog and magazine.

Some concepts of the panel were really interesting, specially for content creators, some advices from Torley about your avatar as your image (really good advices). Torley said that Lindens are a exemple for some people as models of avatars, Khamudy Mannonen and me had to disagree, specially about Philip (this man needs a hairdresser NOW!).

After some minutes someone started to talk about avatars as a “registered trademark”, well, were talking about the possibility of register an avatar as a trademark and that was the scary thing.

Right now you can have full rights over your creations, i mean shape, clothes, skin, animations, and attachments if you created all (i think that’s the right way) but you don’t have rights over your avatar in itself, just over the parts you created of it. It sounded to me really weird, like some person in Real Life asking for register his image. My avatar is a extension of myself, a representation of what i want to show and tell about me. Register that, for me, is like registering your way to wear a jacket, or the way you drink a Bloody Mary. So, for a moment, i felt all the “corporation concept of life” around: All can be sold, all can be registered, all is a business…

For me not all can be sold or registered, not all is business, i don’t think business is over ethics, i think ethics is over all. After listening all that, Kham and me decided to wear a group tag saying: “Not a brand myself”.

 All the images in this post are by Torley Linden, shared under a license Creative Commons 2.0