Category Archives: Blog

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Dune roleplayers in Second Life squelched by IP takedown notice

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The big brands may have all but abandoned Second Life, but the still-growing (yet still somewhat troubled) metaverse platform remains a haven for niche-interest communities… like roleplayers re-enacting locations and events from intellectual properties such as films and novels, for example.

Second Life Dune simulation (with sandworm)

One such small community is based around Frank Herbert’s famous Dune series, acting out conflicts between the Fremen and House Harkonnen, riding sandworms and so forth. Or at least they were until very recently, when the estate of Frank Herbert issued a legal notice for the group to discontinue their reappropriation of controlled intellectual property. [image by Wagner James Au, borrowed from linked article]

In his write-up, Wagner James Au makes the point that there are other unofficial RPG sims in Second Life that make use of controlled IP (from franchises like Star Wars and Star Trek, for example) but who have been allowed to continue by the legal types – whether that be because they consider it to be not worth the hassle to shut them down, or that they can see value in fans propagating their memes without being paid to do so, remains uncertain.

Au also claims the Dune take-down notice to be the first such official occurance in SL; I’m not so sure about that, as a friend of mine from The Wastelands claimed to have been stomped by Bethesda Software for selling Fallout-themed items from a shack to cover his land tier payments. It may have been an exaggeration, but his bitterness about it suggested otherwise.

But the question remains: how effective is this sort of take-down at preserving the image of a brand or property? Sure, you may prevent people from making a little pocket-money off the back of your copyrights, but the PR value of letting them be (or, heaven forfend, encouraging them) could be pretty significant… as could the inverse.

That Dune sim has been running for a good year and a half; I remember visiting it when it first opened. Now, if it’s taken Herbert’s estate that long to catch on to a genuinely tiny community of roleplayers, things are only going to get harder. After all, there’s only one Second Life at the moment, but in a decade or so there’ll be hundreds of them.

Will big brands hire researchers to trek through digital realities in search of reappropriated brands, characters and memes, like IP bountyhunters? Will kill-filed private sims harbour markets where you can buy cheap and unofficial avatars based on properties owned by Disney, Pixar and all the rest?

Who knows. One thing can said for certain, however: if the lawyers wanted to protect the sanctity of Dune as a much-loved brand, the first thing they should have done was kept Kevin J Anderson well away from it…

Blog

Religion as brand identity… and vice versa

cross and jet planesOK, this is a fairly short three minutes of video but it’s not available in an embeddable format, so please take a moment to watch a chap called Martin Lindstrom talking about his somewhat controversial research, in which he brainscans consumers while showing them images of religious iconography in between logos of the biggest  and most auspicious lifestyle brands.

Now, the comparison of brand loyalty and religion is far from being a new idea (didn’t Ballard write some stories around something like that?), but I’ve only ever encountered it as a literary metaphor; to see that the advertising industry is researching it in detail isn’t surprising so much as it is a little alarming. [image by laverrue]

The marketing business focusses on what actually works; if something doesn’t get a good ROI, it gets passed over in favour of something that does. Meanwhile, over the course of centuries, the major religions have evolved an astonishing ability to extract loyalty, unswerving devotion and financial contributions from their adherents… which must make them a fairly appealing business model to emulate, no?

Brand loyalty and conspicuous consumption are old news – you can see it on any street in any city in the world, with people wrapped in logo-blazoned clothing (be it genuine or fake). So is the notion that word-of-mouth is the best form of marketing there is. The “street team“, however, is comparatively new, as are social networks… but they can (and probably will) converge with the preceding phenomena very quickly indeed once the right brain-triggers have been unearthed.

Are we ready for brand evangelism? If you find the doorstop importunings of your local church an intrusion, how will you cope with people dropping by to ask “whether you’ve thought about Harley-Davidson today?” [via No Fear Of the Future]

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Legacy Locker – the new last will and testament?

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safe deposit boxHave you ever wondered how you’d let your family and/or loved ones get access to your online presences in the event of your untimely demise? [image by William Hook]

No, me neither… but the people behind the LegacyLocker service obviously have. Adam Pash of Lifehacker explains their offer:

Web site Legacy passes on your “digital property” to your friends or loved ones should you die. At first blush, the idea sounds admittedly kind of absurd. But think about the hassle for your loved ones involved in finding contacts that should be notified of your death (email or Facebook), or the money sitting in your PayPal account with nobody around to claim it. None of this poses an insurmountable obstacle for your loved ones, but it’d all be a lot easier if the appropriate usernames and passwords were automatically handed over at your demise.

The service comes with several tiered accounts, from the free account—which will store and hand over 3 “assets” (logins) to one “beneficiary” and send out one “legacy letter” (a farewell message to your loved one) to the $30 annual account, which gives you unlimited everything.

Right now, LegacyLocker just looks like a kook project for folk who like their web2.0 a bit too much… but I think it’ll look a lot less odd in just a few years. A few decades down the line, it’ll probably be a huge business.

Think of all the digital media you will own, for a start: all the stills and movies and audio you’ve bought and made over the years, stashed on your own rented slice of cloud server somewhere where energy is comparitively cheap (and ambient temperatures low), waiting to be passed on to your kids and fed through legacy codec converters, like the future equivalent of the copyshops who work on restoring Victorian-era photographs for your grandparents; an archive of all the buildings you ever made in your favourite metaverse; a few virtualbox instances of your old autonomous software agents, their tiny but quirky personalities too surrounded by sentiment and nostalgia to simply erase…

And what about different forms of legal death? If legal existence becomes increasingly tied to citizenship of a nation-state (or corporation, if there’s any remaining difference by this point), what happens when you’re legally dead (or at least non-living) by that entity’s reckoning – be it sacked, excommunicated, expelled or AWOL? Your name drops off a database somewhere, and your LegacyLocker equivalent (quite possibly supplied by – or even made compulsory by – the afore-mentioned legal entity) blindly releases the passcodes and biometric keys for all your financial and governmental records to some predefined recipient, the contact details for which have (you hope) not been hacked, phished or foxed by digital pickpockets who like the easy pickings of a morgue foyer…

… so now I have about three new story ideas sat in my head, and no time to write them. Business as usual, eh?

Blog

Lasers vs. police helicopters

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lasercockpitFollowing on from the news of blinding-laser “friendly fire” incidents in Iraq is this article on the growing problem of green lasers being used against police helicopters in the UK:

An “attack” can come from any of the darkened streets over which the force’s state of the art helicopter India 99 flies at night.

“You can’t miss it. A sharp green beam of light shoots up from the ground, flashing around the helicopter, dazzling anyone on whom it scores a ‘direct hit’,” said Mr Briggs.

The police have had to learn to deal with the attacks — about half of those reported are aimed at their helicopters. In 2003 just three incidents were recorded. Last year there were 207. So far this year, the tally is 76.

The culprits are usually bored youths, who have got hold of a laser pointer and amuse themselves by playing its beam over passing aircraft.

One of those “we are living in the 21st century” moments – idlers attacking police helicopters with lasers…

[image and article from the BBC]

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Ruth Nestvold interview at Nebula Awards site

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We try our best to keep an eye on the careers of the authors we publish at Futurismic; thankfully it’s usually made easy by them swiftly moving on to selling stories to bigger and better markets, getting a book contract, or accruing award nominations… or sometimes all three!

One such author is Ruth Nestvold, who is a Nebula Award nominee this year for her story “Mars: A Traveller’s Guide”. As such, the Nebula Awards site has an new interview with her, of which the following is a snippet:

Between the short story and the novel, which form do you prefer and why?

I enjoy both, and at the moment I miss writing short stories, I have to admit. It’s nice to have the whole overview in my head, to complete something in a short space of time. With an epic novel like Yseult or my current project, Shadow of Stone, I can’t keep all the elements in my head at once, and I have to keep jumping backward and forward to figure what I’ve done and what I have planned. But the advantage of a novel is that you can immerse yourself in the world, both as reader and as writer. Short stories are better at delivering a punch, a quick, strong impression. I also find them better for experimenting, again both as reader and writer. The database entries I use to tell “Mars: A Traveler’s Guide” would get pretty old if they were used for a whole novel.

To get a feel for Ruth Nestvold’s short story style, go revisit her two Futurismic solo contributions – “The Other Side of Silence” and “Exit Without Saving” – and the story she co-authored with Jay Lake, “The Rivers of Eden“.