Justice League Unlimited

Summary

The Justice League Unlimited (JLU), also known as the League of Heroes s a group in Second Life founded by Second Life residents "Kalel Venkman" and "Kara Timtam" on April 4th, 2006. The group was made with the intent to be a peace keeping organization, but with its successes in this, branched out into general public service and fundraising for prominent charities. The group is notable for their use of comic book hero appearances such as Superman, Batman, and Green Lantern and for being the only peace keeping group publicly known to operate a members-only information wiki.

The Justice League is currently headquartered in the JLU-members-only sims: Justice Island and Hero Island but have sites open to the public in various other locations, most noteably its "Adventurers Club" in Steelhead Port Harbor and the League of Heroes Joseph Button Memorial Community Center in Taber across from the main entrance to the Ivory Tower of Prims It has also been resident of the sims: Explorers Rangeland, Isere, Verbier, Asimov Island and Kismat before moving to its current home.

The League owns and operates Krypton Radio, a combination news site and internet radio station.

The Justice League Unlimited group logo was designed for the group by resident and ex-JLU member Netwonder Widget as a tribute to the official Justice League of America logo[1]

Activities

The Justice League Unlimited primarily patrols Second Life sandboxes and other public areas searching for violations of the Second Life Terms of Service to file Abuse Reports to Linden Lab for. In addition to this, the Justice League Unlimited has been known to assist new Second Life residents, host estate manager security seminars, operate as security for resident-run events, and assist charity in Second Life through events such as Relay for Life (the American Cancer Society), Earth Week, Peace Week, Imagine Fest, and the Spina Bifida Awareness Foundation.

Brainiac and the BrainiacWiki

The Justice League Unlimited is unique among the peace keeping groups in SL largely due to their extensive use of a vast information storage and retrieval system called "Brainiac", named after the Superman villain by the same name, and for its equally extensive "BrainiacWiki". Brainiac and the BrainaicWiki are only accessible by Justice League Unlimited members, and are used for the purpose of storing information on suspected griefers, griefer groups, friendly contacts,friendly groups, chat logs, meeting logs, and people and groups of interest to the League. Use of these tools by the League are the usual focus of the League's detractors, and they are decried as a violation of the griefers' privacy, despite the fact that virtually all the information said wiki merely records information gathered online within the Second Life game service.

Controversies

The Justice League Unlimited has been subject to a number of controversies since its founding in 2006, largely centered around the JLU's information gathering for use in the members-only BrainiacWiki, and its interactive Brainiac database. Claims of Linden favoritism continue to swirl around the organization, some of it seemingly confirmed by information gleaned from the pages of the leaked BrainiacWiki on two noteworthy occasions:

• In 2007, a person or persons unknown exploited a bug in IE6 which allowed them to view pages from the BrainiacWiki. Approximately 170 pages were copied, comprising a small amount of the total wiki. The information thus obtained was leaked to a Second Life news blog called the Alphaville Herald (formally Second Life Herald). Some Residents believed that the Justice League Unlimited's wiki was being used to spy on residents and could be considered an invasion of privacy. This was compounded when it was discovered that the Justice League Unlimited had been keeping real life information as well as Second Life information on some suspected griefers.

• In 2010, the group known as "The Wrong Hands" with strong ties to the "Woodbury University" group infiltrated the Justice League Unlimited using the account Haruhi Thespian, with the sole aim to steal as much of the Brainiacwiki as possible. Accordiing to the League, something around 30% of the copyrighted document was stolen and posted to various file sharing sites and to the torrent search engine Pirate Bay (the exact percentage is disputed). Justice League Unlimited leader Kalel Venkman responded by filing DMCA take down to the file sharing sites, and for the most part the copies were taken down. By this time it had already been distributed to numerous other sources. The Alphaville Herald covered the wiki leak extensively, using portions of the wiki in a series of stories, sometimes publishing articles comprised entirely of stolen material. This resulted in a DMCA take down request being sent to TypePad.com, their blog host at the time. The offending material was removed. The Herald filed a counter-claim, questioning the validity of the JLU's copyright to public Second Life resident information and chat logs as well as calling it "fair use" for the sake of journalism. The materials were restored three weeks later. The question of the legality of both the League's action regarding the use of the DMCA and the Herald's response was never resolved by the courts, and no further action was taken against the Herald despite successful takedowns elsewhere. The Herald, shortly thereafter, moved from their primary URL of http://secondlifeherald.com to http://alphavilleherald.com, and moved to an ISP hosted in Canada, out of reach of United States copyright law. Other copies of the stolen materials have since surfaced, but there is no way to know exactly how much of the material has been modified from the original. As many as six separate versions of the materials have been repackaged, reformatted, edited to suit the agendas of various griefer groups, and redistributed since January of 2010 and hosted on a variety of web sites. One of these sites even included a database of avatar names and IP addresses claimed to have been stolen from the League's server. This was later proven to be a hoax. The database was real enough, but it did not originate with the League, but was constructed in an attempt to fool the public into believing that it had.
• In 2011, a website called TheListSL posted a large list of IPs and Avatar names claiming to be from Phantom Zone[2], the League's anti-griefer banning device. The League quickly stated the list was a forgery[3]. Soon after, TheListSL leaked portions of the BrainiacWiki and inworld group notices. A group officer claimed the leaks were real, despite another officer warning to not confirm their legitimacy in a later leaked group notice[4]. The League's tactics were brought into question by SLUniverse.com. Some of the allegations included members knowingly sending false Abuse Reports against other residents[5], ARing residents for criticizing the League [6][7] and considering to use a resident's full perm prim they discovered for "black ops attempts"[8]. They also collected Real Life information on suspected griefers, some including real life photos, possible locations[9], medical information [10] and how many children they might have [11]. The League quickly claimed the information was publicly on google and only used if law enforcement asked for it[12][13], but in some cases they tried contacting these individual's schools [14][15] and places of work to possibly get them expelled or to "ruin their career" as one member put it[16] . A few members resigned due to the leaks[17][18]. Another leak shows the League received orders from Linden Lab, one of them being they were "not allowed to use their databases for inworld investigations anymore" [19]. The rest of the orders were never leaked, the League itself never published them and didn't acknowledge the fact they received them[20]. Shortly there after, the League claimed all real life info had been removed, residents were sceptical. One of the officers claiming all real life info was gone, disclosed he didn't have access to the BrainiacWiki at the time and he was "told it's gone and I believe it"[21].

The League has also been targeted by several griefer organizations once in operation in Second Life, presumably due to repeated successful operations against these groups, most notably Woodbury University.

The Justice League Unlimited has also been criticized for it's use of copyrighted and trademarked DC and Marvel Comic Book characters and names without authorization. However, the respective owners of the intellectual property used by the Justice League Unlimited have made no comments or requests to cease and desist on this usage, and their Krypton Radio web site steers carefully clear of potential trademark and copyright issues.