First it was Grey Goo, now SecondLife creators Linden Labs are contending with with a new piece of software that makes it easy to copy in-game artifacts.

I’ve often wondered about the stuff people create in SL, from dance moves to body parts to music. Back in the day when I was building VRML models for SGI and IBM, I often wondered about the Meta-verse style interwebs and how that would co-exist with the regular www. It seems the time has come to have serious conversations about ownership and openness in virtual spaces.

There is a large part of me that wishes Linden Lab would release SecondLife as a W3C specification, and we could use the tools and services much like we use HTML and javascript to build websites, blogs and web apps today.

Via BoingBoing.