While a legal battle will continue between a Second Life content “consultant” and a school teacher using the online virtual-world creating program as an educational tool, the Southern District of New York made one thing clear last week – user-generated Second Life content is copyrightable. In FireSabre Consulting LLC v.…
A weekly wrap up of interesting news about virtual worlds, virtual goods and other social media. Twitter Drops LinkedIn Partnership LinkedIn announced via a blog post on Friday that Twitter would no longer be partnering with the business-networking site to sync updates from one site to the other.…
A weekly wrap up of interesting news about virtual worlds, virtual goods and other social media. Social network LinkedIn reports stolen passwords Business social network LinkedIn said Wednesday that some of its users’ passwords have been stolen and leaked onto the Internet. LinkedIn Corp. did not say…
A weekly wrap up of interesting news about virtual worlds, virtual goods and other social media. Magid National Study Finds Social Networking Gaming Growth is Slowing The research, conducted as part of the Magid Media Futures 2012 study, found social network gaming user growth has slowed in the United States.…
A weekly wrap up of interesting news about virtual worlds, virtual goods and other social media. The Virtual Military While much of the international system remains mired in the economic doldrums, many global military powers continue to increase defense budgets focused upon the research and development of simulation technologies.…
A weekly wrap up of interesting news about virtual worlds, virtual goods and other social media. Will 2012 be the year of virtual worlds? What got me thinking about this was a blog post by Maria Korlova over at the HyperGrid Business Blog. In it, she maintains her firm…
A UK court entered a guilty plea against Ashley Mitchell, an IT guy who hacked into Zynga’s servers last year and stole 400 billion virtual poker chips. His efforts to resell them, which is against Zynga’s terms of service, netted him $86,000 and a yet to be determined jail sentence.…
Despite supposedly having millions of users (to Facebook’s 3/4 of a billion), social networking pioneer MySpace appears to be headed out to pasture. Last week, the company laid off 47 percent of its workforce, lopping off 500 employees from its nearly 1,100-person payroll. Rumors that MySpace’s parent company News Corp.…
In October, tech media sources, such as CNET, were reporting that Facebook had acquired part of Zenbe’s intellectual property portfolio, in addition to hiring some of Zenbe’s key engineers. While Zenbe will stay intact, Zenbe Mail has been shut down, and the associated intellectual property, has been acquired by Facebook. …
There has been much buzz about Zynga’s attempt to patent virtual currency. As is often the case with patents, there is much hype, many misconceptions and little focus on the actual facts. Here are the facts. 1. Zynga does not have a patent on virtual currency. It has applied for…