Getting around advertising blocks for casinos

Ever since Linden Lab issued the advertising policy change, due to the friendly neighborhood visit by the FBI, there has been a lot of muttering on the grapevine by a lot of casino owners. Especially with the fact that the simulated casino activity was restricted to local laws, this was a purely defensive move on the part of Linden Lab.

So casinos started changing their names, to gaming clubs and what not. Many of the sold out their property and called it quits. But what about the remaining few? The usual advertising bits still applied. Hiring someone to go around and dropping off landmarks and notecards. Anything to get people to come, some even went through the trouble to gain access to the more established casino group channels to throw out some landmarks and what not. But it seems that people have been getting more and more innovative.

Take for example the search window. The search policy says that it won’t show places anymore that advertise gambling right? So it seems that some people got around that by creating some avatars that promoted the gambling areas for them. Just do a search for the word “Casino“. Go figure, that you can use the “Picks” tab to actually send teleports to your favorite place. As of this post, there are fifty-eight people named “Casino”.

Unfortunately, there’s not much you can do as Linden. Ban words? What happens when you start taking into account different languages? From a legal perspective, I’d imagine that they’re protected as well as they could be without incurring the wrath of the government here where online gambling has been deemed illegal. The fine line here is that in Second Life, the game monies can be used for everything from gambling, to buying flowers. So it’s difficult to determine if the proceeds of winnings are being cashed out and thereby fulfilling “online gambling”requirements instead of the determination of a game that you pay for but get nothing but the enjoyment and satisfaction out of. Very much of a gray area when it comes to legality if you ask my opinion, although I’m not an attorney.

It just goes to show that even with the current state of things, there are always people out there trying to maintain the status quo. This was just an interesting catch of people still marketing their gaming areas by bypassing the policy. Now, if this breaks the terms of service, or advertising policy, then there’s another legal issue to deal with. But for now, I just found it amusing to actually happen upon this little quirky workaround.