The major attractiveness to Second Life is indeed the freedom to explore your creative energies and explore your dreams and fantasies with the only limitation being the boundaries of your imagination. Now not taking into consideration the current limitations within the virtual worlds, this does enable many individuals to explore and experience life in many ways that would otherwise be impossible, which in turn can and often does enrich their journey through real life. The imposition of a set of rules and regulations will greatly impair that.

However, there does need to be a few guidelines to prevent others from hampering the experiences of the community in general and prevent personal injury or financial losses like those that you mentioned. If things start to go beyond this, then Second Life will just become a mirror of the first life, instead of mirroring the creative imaginations of the residents.

How can you defame an avatar, anyway? We already live in an overly litigious society, do we really want to extend the right to assert a cause of action for defamation, et cetera to non-entities like
avatars? How can one “sexually assault” an avatar?

You made some good suggestions on how to minimize problems and distractions for events that are either public or private. People do need to learn to take into consideration the possibilities of a grief attack or other disruption occurring and use common sense and any sim tools to reduce the possibility of these things occurring successfully. Even though this extra precautionary planning may be a bit of an inconvenience, it is necessary because unfortunately there shall always be those among us who derive some form of perverted pleasure out of creating misfortune for others.

I located the following comment on the C|Net article mentioned in my post:

Guntram Graef Lied Again

Reader post by: PeteySA
Posted on: January 16, 2007, 4:39 PM PST
Story: Behind the Anshe Chung DMCA complaint

As the person who published the video in question, as well as the pictures that were the cause of all this consternation (still and forevermore available here: http://www.somethingawful.com/index.php?a=4336) I would like to say that Guntram lied when he said this:

“What got lost in the whole coverage of the issue was that initially I had contacted all parties involved and tried to engage them in a dialogue about the inappropriateness of the graphical material they distributed.”

Because he never contacted me. Never made the effort. And from what I hear from other people, his original messages to them were brusque demands, not engagements.

No matter. I can see why Anshe Chung Studios would be concerned with burnishing the public image of their figurehead, who, if I may remind everyone, started out in Second Life as a virtual *****.

So things do appear as you stated; “Anshe holding the giant penis were shops of her real-life photo, not that of her avatar” is indeed true. Since it is very obvious that this is a manipulated image, the defamatory claims still imply that members of the Chinese community could not distinguish this image as just being a parody, in bad taste perhaps, but still a parody. I’m sorry, but I do not buy that as the Asians that I know are highly intelligent people and quite capable of seeing right through this.

Any way that you look at this, the whole incident and the following actions by the Graef’s was handled improperly. If there was any defamation caused by all of this, it appears to me that it was that which the Graef’s brought upon themselves with the web of lies and deception that they wove.

As to answer the following question you posed, jvastine: “So who should dictate the standards and acceptable behavior inside a virtual world”

One of the things that attracted me to SL was the freedom. If there are too many “rules” from any entity, whether it be Linden Lab or the community as a whole, it could damage that freedom. We already have too many laws in society and laws in virtual worlds should be limited to things which impair the experience for the greater number of residents. For example, griefing attacks which take down the entire grid and objects that steal L$ from lots of people.

My opinion is that the main grid is already an adult area and there are ways to prevent people from distracting public events including having people act as bouncers for the event or limiting the invite list to invite-only, just as there are at many clubs, bars, dance clubs, etc. Those tools need to be employed to make sure distractions like this one with Anshe Chung don’t happen as often.

We have a meeting every Friday live in SL and how many times have we had a disruption? Maybe once or twice, from what I can remember.

The reason Anshe drew the griefers is because of her celebrity inside SL. As for whether or not what happened to her was defamatory? That’s up to courts to decide if Anshe really wants to go that far. Personally, I think she would have been a lot better off just laughing the incident off then getting all humiliated by it and trying to make it a DMCA takedown and then backing off to it being defamatory (now?).

The pro and anti Anshe camps are both too extreme, IMO. The moderate, middle position (which is where I’d put myself) seems to accept that what happened to Anshe was unfortunate, but also seemed to take it a bit tongue-in-cheek. Most reasonable people would like to know they can schedule events inside Second Life and have ways to limit the amount of third party disruption. These tools do exist and next time CNET wants to do an interview, they should use them.