Curious Raven

Apparently Linden Labs, the creators of Second Life, have gone out and filed a trademark on the word GRID. For you virtual world folks, the word implies a lot of things and is usually interchangable with a number of other cyberspace related words. Anyway, I don’t have a problem with LL getting a trademark on “Second Life Grid” which is usually how it is presented but to try to trademark the word grid by itself is pretty damned cheeky. Personally I find it offensive, insulting, and unfair. They might as well try to trademark cyberspace, web, network, polygon, avatar, pixel, link, and a few other generic terms that are common words, terms, and phrases used in the virtual worlds sector (which includes your standard virtual worlds, mmorpgs, and simulations).

I’m pretty disgusted with this.

I’m beginning to sense a bit of desperation from Linden Labs these days. Their CTO left recently, and their CEO has decided to “step down” in the near future. The media backlash against their unrelenting PR in late 2006 through 2007 (studded with misleading and disingenuous stats about their active users and subscribers) is continuing, and SL is handicapped by many problems that don’t seem to be going away anytime soon.

I think that Second Life would have died a long time ago, but for the fact that there is no clear competitor. Sure, there are places like there.com or whatever, but Second Life has bent over backwards to wrangle a lot of big name corporate sponsorships and virtual presences, and catered to the explorer and tinkerer types. Of course, there are a lot of virtual world experts, luminaries, entrepreneurs, and researchers that have found a home in Second Life. To be sure, SL has been valuable to a lot of people, and to some degree has validated virtual worlds in business, research, education, and online collaboration.

But I still think that the Emperor has no clothes, and the SL house is a house of cards that is very shakey. The first company that comes along with a better offering…more functionality, streamlined performance, better features, etc. will marginalize SL and dominate it, much in the way that World of Warcraft came out of no where and smacked down most of the MMORPG industry (not to worry, that gorilla is getting old and someone will knock them off their throne soon enough).

Anyway, I don’t want to get too far into an anti-SL rant here (at least not without doing it comprehensively and backing up my opinions), but their desire to trademark grid is crossing the line and just one more straw on the camel’s back.