Creating Collaboratively: Virtual Worlds, Legos and Ownership

Kevin Braddock posted Lego: thinking outside the box last Sunday, and it gave me pause. Legos have been important in my life; back in the 1970s they were my chief mode of entertainment - and for a while, in the mid 1990s, they resurfaced again as LEGO Mindstorms - allowing me to connect a computer to Legos in fun and interesting ways. So, with Kevin Braddock's article in mind, I re-explored Second Life for a bit of comparison.

Second Life allows one to build things as Legos would - except you don't have to buy prims (the building blocks of Second Life), and you can twist and texture the pieces until they scream. Like Legos, you can 'play with them by yourself' or 'collaboratively', but there are some differences.

With Legos, a collaborative work requires people to be in the same area - a novelty these days - which means direct interaction between human beings, as scary as that may be for some. It requires an understanding of who owns the Lego set(s) being used, as the parts belong to the owner. At the end of the day, the derivative work of the Lego set belongs to the person who owns the set; I suppose that if 2 or more people had sets involved they would both own the work but it is hardly practical to try to separate the pieces of two sets after they are used together unless you have Law Enforcement in riot gear nearby. Few people, if anyone, sell creations made of Legos.

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