This one has to warm the cockles of your heart. Linden Lab, in conjunction with other entities including Stanford, and the Rochester Institute of Technology, will be working on an initiative called the Preserving Virtual Worlds project.

The article has all the details, including all the headaches revolving around intellectual property, copyrights, and the best way to preserve digital media that's contained in a variety of rapidly obsolescent formats. Suffice it to say that it's a huge job, and part of the problem is figuring out just how to go about preservation in the first place.

Regardless, this is a huge step for the Library of Congress to take in its admission that videogames are worthy of being preserved as cultural artifacts, and LL will be fighting the good fight right alongside.

(Via Kotaku)

Vastpark is an up-and-coming virtual content platform that purports to enable users to easily and quickly create their own worlds that will link to the content of other Vastpark users. Clearly, this would be SL's closest competition, with user-development tools and the ability to update content from a single location.

While still in its infancy, the beta is approaching and questions abound: Will the tools and interface be easier to use than SL's? Is it smart for them to price according to storage space and bandwidth usage? What will their physics engine be like? Will creators be allowed to manage their own content free of restrictions? It's too early to tell, but surely the people behind Vastpark have been studying SL and examining how and where it falls short. Keep an eye on this, and we welcome any further information our audience might possess.

(Via Kotaku)

According to this article, South Korea, that bastion of online gaming, is now the first nation to tax income derived from sales in virtual worlds. From the stated policy of the Korean National Tax Service: "Sellers who do more than 12 million won/half year in business will need a business license and will pay the tax by themselves."

Aside from the points the article makes on the issue, a consideration is how exactly this new policy will be applied. Will tax agents be sent in to all applicable virtual worlds to collect taxes by hand? Will the companies who run the servers that power these virtual worlds be forced to give up the confidential information of its users to comply? Where does South Korea's influence begin and end? Given that LL has already shown a willingness to cooperate with the German authorities regarding the infraction of German law, what will their response be?

(Via kotaku.com)