Fair use is often cited in defense of the Cobybot, but I often wonder if the people who are making that claim really know what they are talking about. Granted, the fair use provision is a gray area when it comes to intellectual property, so I have spent some time thinking of legitimate uses for Copybot and have discussed this issue with peers. However, the only way to arrive at a sound answer is to decipher our existing laws.

Fair use has been around for a while, but in no other time has this term been so battered and abused. We are in a mess today, with well-intentioned institutions including many universities, making materials available for the agreed upon 21 days or less, via services such as e-reserve (a reserve desk or library will often scan in text, pictures, etc. and place these on a server for a limited time to a select group for the purpose of education) only to find that they can be found online via search engines long past the date they were taken down. There are several pending cases against search engine giant Google related to this phenomenon.

In Second Life, we exist in a world created by members of the community. That is the truly great thing about this metaverse. While there are several proponents for open source, it is ultimately up to the creator. We all maintain the rights to our work, but without making it official and copyrighting it, we have no protections should we need to take legal action.

That is the warning that need be heeded by every content creator. One should be aware that