A guide to Anshe Chung

Why is Anshe Chung in the news? Only because the avatar's creators, Ailin Graef and her husband, are rather clumsily attempting to counteract their first bout of bad publicity. Anshe Chung was subjected to a parade of flying penises while giving a press interview in Second Life. The Graefs are hunting down video and screenshot records of the incident in the virtual world.

But, since it was a press event, what right do they have to curtail coverage? Guntram Graef, in emails to Boing Boing and an Australian newspaper group, both of which carried screenshots from the press conference, gave three reasons: that the screenshots represented a personal attack, depicted graphical rape porn and infringed copyright. Pah. Without the personal attack, there would be no media; if Ailin Graef was upset by flying penises in the proximity of her avatar, she's really taking a play world way too seriously; however, the intellectual property claim, that the Graef's Second Life avatar was copyrighted artwork, ludicrously, seems to have persuaded Youtube to take down a clip.

Why should anyone care? The problematic press conference was held after Anshe Chung's makers claimed their assets, such as islands, would now be worth more than $1m, if traded in. I confess a prejudice against the Graefs ever since their avatar appeared on the front cover of Business Week magazine last May. Anshe Chung, as "land baroness" of Linden Lab's Second Life, is the ultimate symbol of the bubble: a crude 3D representation of a geek's Asian fantasy, generating money only by the sale of worthless assets to greater fools; the poster girl of a company, Linden Lab, that prospers only as long as the press remains credulous and marketers clueless.

Why does Valleywag sound so glad Anshe Chung's been humiliated? Because the Graefs rode the press coverage, when it was fawning. And, now that commentators are starting to question Second Life's appeal, the Graefs can't handle any criticism. They should learn about press karma: any unwarranted coverage always carries a later price.

But Second Life is just a hobby for geeks, hippies and perverts. What's the harm in that? It's more than that. Linden Lab, which made the Second Life environment, is backed by Benchmark Capital, the venture capital partnership that invested in companies such as eBay. And marketing consultants, in their constant search for empty novelty, and easy press coverage, have talked their more credulous clients into substantial expenditure on in-world campaigns. Anshe Chung is crudely pixellated artefact, in an over-hyped world lacking any sort of substance, wrapped lovingly in a tech environment equally divorced from reality.

And the copyright implications? Usually I'm bored by the utopian campaign against copyright law. A debate over intellectual property in virtual worlds seems doubly tedious. But Youtube's kneejerk deletion of the press conference video is a classic example of the deadening effect of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Let's get this straight: if, in a virtual world, artwork can be copyrighted, and avatars count as artwork, then the characters themselves cannot be depicted without their owners' permission. Which is idiotic.

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