eBay Virtual World Delisting Skips Second Life

As a follow-up to last week's eBay delisting story, CNET has the word that Second Life content is exempt from this decision. Mr. Durzy, speaking with CNET, specifically cited Second Life content as exempt because of the uncertain role of the virtual world. As the company (and the rest of us) are uncertain whether to label Second Life as a game in the first place, player-created content is still sellable via eBay auction. A perfectly fine explanation, but GigaGamez takes things a step further, pointing out that eBay founder Pierre Omidyar became a major investor in Linden Labs in 2004. It's uncertain if this constitutes a conflict of interest, because confusion about what exactly Second Life is persists pretty much everywhere. Just the same, it's interesting to note. Their article on the subject also has a few words of commentary from Edward Castronova, the well-known commentator on all things RMT.

It's not a game....

[Lordfly]

...it's a thingie.

In all seriousness, I'm kinda glad they skipped SL. Yes, it's a program where many, many (many) people derive a ton of entertainment from, but it's also being used by an increasing amount of huge companies to do business and advertise their products. So it's not so much of a game as it's a platform, I guess.

Kinda like how some people derive tons of pleasure from compiling C++ programs. Doesn't make it a game to be placed next to Doom and WoW...

Disclaimer: I make a living designing spaces for those companies, so sure, I'm a smidge biased.

loophole?

[the dark hero]

its like the pachinko machines in japan. you're not actually gambling, but if you take the balls the pachinko machine gives you to the counter they give you a ticket which in turn gives you a voucher for more pachinko balls that the nice people conveniently located around the corner will "trade" for money.

whos going to stop people from doing the same thing through second life?

Re:The Big Difference...

[mwvdlee]

Another thing to note is that Linden Labs (Second Life producers) explicitly stated the users own copyright of their own in-game creations.

As for a description of Second Life; I think it's more of an operating system then anything else. A very limited and specialized OS perhaps, but in essence it provides the same basic functions. Technically, Second Life is probably closer to a game engine than an actual game.

Why? Pierre, of course.

[Anonymous Coward]

Second Life is created by Linden Labs.

Linden Labs is funded by Pierre Omidyar.

Many years ago, Pierre Omidyar founded Ebay.

This is business

[nooglide]

And while this is a conspiracy theory, Ebay is losing in the order of probably hundreds of thousands if not millions in commissions every year from these auctions. They're getting paid something for proactively removing the auctions.