INTERVIEW:Amazon’S Jeff Barr On Future Of Shopping

INTERVIEW:Amazon’s Jeff Barr on future of shopping Mon Oct 23, 2006 3:10am PDT

By Adam Reuters

SECOND LIFE, Oct 23 (Reuters) - Jeff Barr (right) has the futuristic title of Web Services Evangelist at online retailing giant Amazon.com; as Jeffrey Batra in Second Life he is working hard on projects that bridge the virtual world and the real one.Will his employer follow suit?

Although Amazon founder and Chief Executive Jeff Bezos was an early investor in Linden Labs, the company has been tight-lipped about its plans.

“Amazon.com, the retail business, does not speculate on what it may or may not be doing in the future as it relates to Second Life,” said Amazon spokesman Andrew Herdener in an email.

That hasn’t stopped third-party developers and others from working on their own solutions. Earlier this year, 3pointD.com reported that a group of Amazon engineers were working to bridge Second Life and Amazon.com, outside of the formal auspices of the company. Amazon Chief Technology Officer Werner Vogels described the initiative as a “completely grassroots effort” to 3pointD’s Mark Wallace.

“Amazon’s Web Services is pleased to see developers innovating in SL using Amazon.com shopping technology and data,” Herdener said. Barr spokes with Reuters in a telephone conversation earlier this month. The following is an edited excerpt.

Reuters: Jeff, can you tell us a bit about your job and how it relates to Second Life?

Jeff Barr: My job is to be the Web services evangelist… to communicate with developers all over the world, encourage them to look at Amazon’s collection of Web services, and encourage them to build great applications on top of those services. When I saw Second Life it really struck me as a developer platform. It was the place to go for folks … who think creatively, think about the future — I’ve just been really impressed so far.

Reuters: Which Web services do you see people using most commonly in Second Life?

Jeff Barr: We’ve so far seen some ecommerce from Second411, Life2Life, and Jnana.

Second411 is a heads-up-display, as you’re browing thorugh the world it gives you search capabilities — you can do an integrated search through their product catalog of vendors selling objects in the world, and also the Amazon catalog. You get a nice integration of the real and the virtual.

The second one is called Life2Life. It’s an Amazon store — or actually a set of technologies used to build stores — and this is very, very similar to the Amazon associates program coupled with the e-commerce service. With that service we encourage developers to pull the data from our site to get product information, descriptions, cover art, and so forth.

In this case their site is essentially real-life objects inside of Second Life. They’ve coupled it with the Amazon shopping cart, so you can do searches within the store, put objects into your cart, and initiate the checkout process, all remaining in character with your avatar.

Jnana is different, and is very much in line with how people could shop in the future. They’ve decided to attack the long tail of shopping — it’s really easy for people to find the top 10, 15 or 100 things in a catalog, but what do you do when you have a very complex space?”

Reuters: So how does it work?

Jeff Barr: They’ve built shopping experts — you walk into a little (virtual) kitchen, you click on a wok, and it then interviews you. Do you need to cook for yourself, a family, a restaurant? It narrows down the products that might meet your needs

Reuters: It seems like going to shop on Amazon.com is still easier at this point than shopping in Second Life.

Jeff Barr: Ease of use is only one way you’d look at it, integration is a really important thing. You can imagine a Second Life build where you have a concert or a musician that’s just done a live performance, or maybe an author who has done a book reading. Just as you’d walk out of a venue in real life and buy a book or a T-shirt or a CD, now you have the same ability in the virtual world — it’s contextual commerce.

People love to do things that stay within the metaphor. So if you can say in character and if you’re essentially doing your shopping in avatar scale, that seems to maintain the quality of the experience.

Reuters: Are there still constraints in Second Life you find frustrating?

Jeff Barr: If you think back to the Web browsers of five or six years ago, we had all the capabilities to do AJAX and it was just a matter of time before people got clever enough and had enough experience. It just took developers a long time, and being absolute masters of the existing technology before they pushed it to the next level.

If you look at Second Life and the scripting language, you realise we’re just at the very very beginning of how people can use this. Merchants decry Second Life copyright chaos Wed Nov 7, 2007 3:11pm PST

By Eric Reuters SECOND LIFE, Nov 7 (Reuters) - When virtual adult products mogul Kevin Alderman discovered exact copies of his products circulating in Second Life earlier this year, he contacted Linden Lab, desperately searching for a remedy.

“We begged them, please do something about this,” said Alderman (Second Life: Stroker Serpentine), who is now at the center of two real-world copyright infringement lawsuits. “We filed abuse reports. We filed DMCA’s. And nothing’s been done.”

As Second Life grows larger and the number of entrepreneurs selling virtual goods expands, copyright infringement and trademark protection have emerged as one of the most pressing problems affecting in-world businesses. But Second Life businesspeople say they are frustrated at the unclear rules and remedies from Linden Lab, which merchants say has ignored DMCA filings, forcing them to take several recent cases to court

Linden has a detailed page with instructions on how to file a complaint under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which provides a mechanism for copyright-holders to seek relief if their designs are copied online.

The act specifically protects Internet service providers with a “safe harbor” clause, shielding them from liability if their networks or services are used by copyright infringers, provided that they remove pirated content upon receiving a complaint.

But virtual worlds like Second Life represent something lawmakers couldn’t have conceived of when the DMCA was drafted in 1996, said Sean Kane, a lawyer specializing in virtual worlds. “The reason the DMCA was enacted was for companies like AOL,” Kane said. “I don’t think courts will look at it and say Linden Lab is an Internet service provider.”

Whether the DMCA applies to new Internet companies like Linden Lab or YouTube is unclear, Kane said.

To be protected from liability, a company cannot make judgments about the content on its site, and cannot directly benefit from it, Kane said. Courts could rule that freely available copies contribute to Second Life’s overall usage. “It’s hard for Linden Lab to argue they don’t benefit financially,” Kane said.

In addition, the company has moved to selectively remove specific content related to gambling and depictions of underage sex, which may put its status as an ISP in question.

Even as the applicability of the DMCA to Second Life is in doubt, residents complain DMCA complaints they’ve filed with Linden Lab have been ignored.

Alderman said when he first discovered avatar Volkov Catteneo was selling duplicates of his product, he filed a complaint under the DMCA with Linden. “We got nothing back,” Alderman said.

Alderman’s co-plaintiffs in his second copyright infringement suit, against Thomas Simon (Second Life: Rase Kenzo), filed DMCA complaints before resorting to litigation. Linda Baca, known in Second Life as Rebel Hope, is one of the merchants who accuses Simon of copying her designs. She had no success with Linden on a DMCA in a previous, unrelated incident, but her business partner filed a complaint against Simon anyway.

Baca called Linden Lab asking what the status of her filing was. “I was told they would be handled in the order they were received and to be patient,” Baca said.

Baca said she never received a response from Linden to either DMCA notification.

Simon, the target of the complaint, said there was no investigation. “I never heard from Linden Lab, ever,” Simon said. He called the allegations against him a “publicity stunt” but declined to comment further on his case until he secures legal counsel.

Despite numerous complaints of inaction, Linden Lab insisted that it complies with DMCA filings.

“We respond to clear notices of alleged infringement, and when a notice is difficult to understand, or does not provide information required by the DMCA, we take steps to notify the claimant of these issues and request supplemental information as appropriate,” said a spokeswoman for Linden Lab in a written statement. The confusing legal landscape for copyright protection in Second Life means that ultimately, victims of piracy will have to rely on lawyers, and not count on the protection of the DMCA, said Kane.

“It’s one more thing to show the virtual world has the same problems as the real one,” he said.