As a big fan of Second Life I have been reading with some interest about Weblo (due to launch Monday). Weblo is a new online game/community where anything that exists in the real world will be ‘duplicated’ and can be bought and sold ~ from cities to websites to celebrities. This is done with real money (USD) and according to the Weblo bumf many people are expecting to make their fortune off of it.
I was poking around, and although the game doesn’t appear to be much fun, or too catchy, I was wondering what the result would be of registering some properties, websites & blogs of celebrities as is suggested. What if a person was to register Matt Cutts as a celebrity, register mattcutts.com as a website, and even purchase Matts house, and then make him run around performing Blackhat SEO? Could this be fun? I think so!
It seems that Weblo.com will allow any player to register any domain (including trademarked domains such as Google.com, Amazon.com etc) and use these in game domains for any purpose including redirects to pages outside of Weblo, indeed there are plans to monetize these pages even within Weblo itself.
The first thing that springs to mind is how legal is all this? It is (apparantly) perfectly possible to register google.com or any other domain within the game, and use this to redirect to your own website (amongst other things). Surely trademarks must apply within games (especially ones that involve hard cash) as they do in the real world?
October 4th, 2006 at 9:02 pm
[...] From Monday it will be possible to log on to a new domain registration service and snap up Google.com, Amazon.com and Buy.com. Can it be legal to use these trademarked domains to redirect traffic to your website?read more | digg story [...]
October 10th, 2006 at 8:15 pm
Hi, My name is Ryan Bastien and I am the new Community Manager at Weblo.
That information is actually a little out of date, you can’t register trademarked domains like google, yahoo etc. While that would be fun, it would also be as you pointed out, a legal nightmare.
December 8th, 2006 at 10:45 pm
I wonder if it is part of a publicly traded company.
December 21st, 2006 at 6:56 pm
Nope, we’re privately owned.
July 2nd, 2007 at 3:56 pm
Weblo is growing steadily since its launch and I have been the member almost from the start of weblo. I so far have enjoyed being member of weblo community and have made some money as well.
August 1st, 2007 at 9:10 pm
New to weblo! I see this growing more memberes everyday!
August 12th, 2007 at 1:33 pm
I just joined to weblo and I think biggest problem with site is the layout and web design. It’s not attractive at all.
If you except people to make attractive pages for their assets, you should give them proper tools for doing it.
January 13th, 2008 at 3:49 pm
very interesting! — I have not heard anything previously about Weblo.com – necessarily examine all related! — thanks to the author
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