As reported on Reuters, Stroker Serpentine is taking legal action against Volkov Catteneo, whose physical world identity is unknown at the present time. The complaint, filed by Serpentine's legal representative, Alfred Villoch III of Buchanan Ingersoll & Rooney PC, leaves some doubt as to whether Cattaneo is selling knock-off items or digital duplicates of Serpentine's products.

The dispute revolves around Serpentine's sophisticated and popular Sex Gen product line, the Sex Gen bed. Cattaneo admits to having sold fifty of the items, claiming that the proceeds all went to an unnamed third party, and defying anyone to locate him.

The terms of the suit seem relatively reasonable, with Serpentine only asking for three times the damages (or three times the proceeds) - quite modest compared to many copyright lawsuits you may have seen reported in the news in recent years.

Some of you may be wondering "What the hell? How do RL courts apply to a virtual world?" - well, they do.

At the end of the day this is a dispute between real people, over registered copyrights and trademarks. Why should the communications medium make RL law any less applicable to these people than it would normally be?

Serpentine has duly submitted copyright registration for his products, and trademarked his brand identifiers. Assuming that the incidents are as represented (and Cattaneo has not contradicted them to our knowledge) then the fact that this is based in a virtual world has no bearing.

It will be interesting to see if Cattaneo can be located and identified. Judging by previous John Doe lawsuits against Internet identities, the likelyhood that he will be is very high - it's really quite rare for the person to not be located in cases like this.