3pointD.com

Graphic novelist (now there’s a double entendre) Warren Ellis launched his column for Reuters’ Second Life bureau today. Ellis’s take on the recent griefing of Second Life land baron Anshe Chung is refreshingly honest. Ellis writes of Anshe’s “desperation to drop the incident down an Orwellian memory hole” with the DMCA-like notices Anshe’s typists have been sending around. This is exactly correct; there’s no rights violation in a media outlet publishing a shot of an incident that took place in public, even if copyrighted material is contained in the image. Of course, most of the media outlets that did publish those shots (of Anshe being assaulted by a flock of flying penises during an interview with CNet) are hardly concerned.

Still, I was hoping for a more Ellisian take on Second Life from Ellis. I’ve recently been reading Desolation Jones and Fell (excellent news: #7 on its way), and both of them, as well as many of Ellis’s other books (check out Transmetropolitan), show off an excellently dark and skeptical style that is evident in some of the SL-related posts on Ellis’s blog, but which takes a back seat in his Reuters column. This is probably to be expected in writing for a huge and venerable news organization. But here’s hoping Ellis can manage to push Reuters that much further into the 21st century as his column progresses. 3pointD looks forward to more.