Linden Lab is pressured from all sides. They are being sued (along with ten Internet Service Providers) by French parent-teacher group Familles de France. Their Terms of Service have been found to be legally unenforceable by Judge Eduardo Robreno. German TV News Magazine Report Mainz has raised a scandal about Second Life and child pornography.

Linden Lab is on the back-foot, and struggling to find a place where it can meet these varied legal and media challenges. In positioning itself to meet these potential threats, fresh conflict has broken out on a new front, Second Life's own resident population.

About a month ago, I talked about the Bragg vs Linden Lab case, basically dissecting an interview with the legal counsel, Jason Archinaco. At the time, I promised to revisit this, and follow the case a little more closely.

Technically this case started on October 4, 2006, and we're going to look at the first filing, from Bragg and Archinaco. It's a bit of a doozy, so you might want to grab a coffee and some biscuits for this one. The whole document is linked, but I'll just be summarizing and explaining as we go.

Well, there's been a lot of talk about Marc Bragg and his lawsuit against Linden Lab. Urizenus Sklar, editor emeritus of the Second Life Herald had an excellent interview with Jason Archinaco, Bragg's attorney in this matter. I'll be referring to that, but really, if you're interested in this topic, you should go read it.

Marc Bragg, you may know, found a way to fool the system into letting him bid on property that was not available for auction in the usual way. With nobody to bid against him, he scored quite some amount of land for very little money, and then resold it. His account was banned and his Second Life assets dissolved, as Linden Lab considered this a violation of the Terms of Service -- an exploit.

Jason A. Archinaco, Esquire himself is a partner in the Commercial Litigation group of White & Williams, LLP. An avid gamer, he is also a technology law specialist, and wrote this very pertinent and interesting paper on the topic of virtual property. Having read it, I get the impression that Archinaco is very keen to see some of his ideas tried out in a court of law. However, having read both the paper and the interview -- even though I'm no lawyer or legal professional -- a number of other things seem to be going on here.