You know, sometimes Lidnen amaze me. The fact that the viral one page website for a product alled “First Life” (www.getafirstlife.com had me chuckling over the weekend as every site and it’s spin-off decided to post about it. I was honestly not going to bother till I got a bigger chuckle on seeing Linden Lab’s response. To quote Darren Barefoot (for it was his idea):
Yesterday I launched this one-page Second Life satire site. Today I awoke from my nap to a letter (via the comments on the announcement) from Linden Labs, the creators of Second Life. ‘Ah, well’, I though, ‘here come the lawyers’. But no. To their enormous credit, they sent me what I can only describe as a ‘proceed and permitted’ (instead of ‘cease and desist’) letter. Here’s an excerpt:
We do not believe that reasonable people would argue as to whether the website located at http://www.getafirstlife.com/ constitutes parody – it clearly is. Linden Lab is well known among its customers and in the general business community as a company with enlightened and well-informed views regarding intellectual property rights, including the fair use doctrine, open source licensing, and other principles that support creativity and self-expression. We know parody when we see it.
Maybe that explains the lag over the weekend? Were all the Linden having an ROTFL as the servers were squeezed? And was the concurrency in excess of 27,000 due in part to people wondering what the Second Life was that First Life parodied?
