Kent Quirk Part Of Massi Digi Institute Working Group

EDIT – Prokofy Neva has pointed out to me that Kent Quirk no longer works for Linden Lab and the information in this post regarding that information is therefore inaccurate, but I won’t ninja edit the post!

Gamasutra brings us news that Kent Quirk will be part of a working group that will help to promote academia and business opportunities for the Massachushetts Digital Games Inistitute. According to Gamasutra Kent Quirk will be joined on the working group by Vivox Inc. Co founder Monty Sharma and Sanrio Digitals VP of Publishing and business, Robert Ferrari. Vivox of course are the guys responsible for voice services in Second Life.

The Institute will teach students about game development and also create intellectual property that can be licensed to help bring in revenue.

Wait wait wait! Who the heck is Kent Quirk? He’s Linden Lab’s director of Software Engineering.

So this has something to do with Second Life? No, not from what I can see, but having a Linden Lab representative involved with this project could be useful, it’s decent networking although I have no idea if Kent Quirk is involved in this with Linden Lab’s blessing or doing it independently. Lots I could speculate on, but speculation leads to chinese whispers and before we know it, I’ll be in trouble!

However teaching students about intellectual property is important and it’s a good concept to do this along with game development, this should help develop some good ethics as well as making people aware of intellectual property pitfalls.

Intellectual property remains a thorny issue for Second Life and beyond and there is no quick fix on the horizon, we’re going to continue to see people having their content stolen and have to witness the pain of people trying to file DMCA’s, this is an unfortunate reality. However spreading awareness of the issues should help matters along, even if only very slightly.