Tony Walsh at Clickable Culture can always be relied upon to update us on Second Life's goings-on (albeit sometimes with a pretty cynical bent!), and his latest post rounds up a Linden Lab town hall meeting regarding the hypetastic virtual world.

The 'CopyBot controversy' comes up, since people are starting to clone each other's items, and apparently: "Rosedale said that Linden Lab has "no connection" to the LibSL project that spawned CopyBot, adding that the company neither endorses or rejects the project. "The idea of preventing reverse engineering is absurd," he said. "It’s been easily done, and legal restrictions across national boundaries don’t work.""

Also notable: "Rosedale said that Second Life's "central architecture" is having trouble scaling to meet the virtual world's population increase. "There are 75k people in Second Life each day, and 100 Lindens," he said (concurrent usage oscillates between about 6k and 15k at this time)."

[Apart from all the hype, it's the tech in Second Life I have the biggest problem with (my few stints in the world have mainly involved sitting around waiting for textures and meshes to load), so I'm imagining that a good close look is being given to it - maybe coming from a game background, I'm spoiled, though, and I do understand that the freedom given in the game makes it difficult to cache or otherwise optimize the world.]