Late last year, we described the
complicated case of a lawyer suing Linden Lab for kicking him out of Second Life and "reclaiming" some property he had purchased within the world. The case was quite complex for a variety of reasons. The guy was clearly exploiting a bug in Second Life that allowed him to buy the virtual land at below market values. However, Second Life touts the fact that you own whatever it is that you buy or build in their world, so simply taking it away could be questionable. Even more importantly, since Second Life is a fairly free form world. there's an interesting legal argument that anything that
can be done in the world should be allowed, even if it wasn't what Linden Lab intended. Well, we may get to hear some of those arguments as the court hearing the case has
turned down Linden Lab's request to have the case dismissed. There are lots of questions raised by this case that could clearly apply to other legal issues within virtual worlds, so it should be worth paying attention to the arguments both sides make, as well as the eventual decisions (and appeals).