There’s something really odd about the idea of Pontiac donating the proceeds from sales of its virtual Solstice in Second Life to the Electronic Frontier Foundation as reported in Pontiac’s new Motorati Life blog (Link). I mean, Second Life’s economy functions almost entirely because of the integrated Digital Rights Management (DRM) tools. Circumvention methods (e.g. CopyBot) have made that sufficiently clear. Meanwhile, many EFF supporters usually take the position that all DRM – not just some of it – is bad.
So what exactly is Pontiac doing? Is GM seeing the error of their conservative, profiteering ways? Not likely. My guess is that this is an intellectual property embrace akin to Cronenberg’s metal-n-flesh moments in “Crash“: it doesn’t make any sense, but at the moment of impact someone got excited.
Dude, it’s just a post-release-attention-span ploy. First they opened the island, and got a bit of press, but I bet not as much as they wanted. Then they were thinking of ways to generate more press for a second wind–the kind of thing Slashdot might write about this time around. Ding! Proceeds to EFF. Let’s rally those geek troops around the Pontiac brand! Rah! Rah!
Oh, I know what it is {that’s a rheteorical question in my post}. Originally the last line was “it doesn’t make any sense, but at the moment of impact someone (probably in marketing) had an orgasm.” I just figured that wasn’t necessary since this is such an obvious and nonsensical marketing ploy. And I didn’t want to attract pron spam for using the “o” word.
Oops, I failed to see the obvious there, sorry man :)
Well, I could have done a better job wording this post, especially since I’m also thinking about what I consider a rather large disconnect between the basic idea (which I like: building a “car culture” community inside SL) and this silly effort to grab mindshare. It’s as if they believe SL residents really care about EFF. I doubt most residents know what EFF is. On the other hand, Mothers Against Drunk Driving, for example, would seem to be a great fit and one with which many people are familiar.