Can you trademark your Second Life avatar? Yes, you can. The legal website law.com reports that entrepreneurs in Second Life have been applying for trademark protection for their avatars and that the US Trademark Office has now issued trademark #3531683 to Alyssa LaRoche for her Second Life avatar, Aimee Weber, for "computer programming services, namely, content creation for virtual worlds and three dimensional platforms."

This picture shows the interior of the Bellevue Bar, one of Aimee Weber’s creations in Second Life. Second Life members can visit it at slurl.com/secondlife/Hawthorne/198/221/23. You can also visit a church next door that she has converted into a club.

It’s not only the rapidly growing volume of trade in virtual worlds such as Second Life that is leading entrepreneurs to trademark their avatars, though the numbers themselves are staggering. In August 2009, 1,244 Second Life users made US$1,000 or more in world (source) and user in world transactions are expected to total about a half billion dollars in 2009 (source). One feature that makes Second Life particularly attractive to entrepreneurs and creative people – and what primarily attracted me to Second Life when I joined in 2004 – is that unlike most other virtual worlds, Second Life explicitly grants all intellectual property ownership rights to the creators.

Lately a new reason has emerged: the potential for moving avatars between worlds. Currently, virtual worlds are totally self contained. The technology is different for each world, and in most worlds other than Second Life, an avatar created in the world remain the property of the owners of the world. However in 2008 Linden Lab, owner and creator of Second Life, working with IBM teleported an avatar from Second Life to Open Sim. As this becomes more commonplace, the value of an avatar will increase for business and creative people. Your avatar is your identity in a virtual world, just as your name is in this world, and anyone with a stake in the reputation of their avatar will need to be able to control imitations by others.

You can read the full law.com article here.

Does your avatar‘s appearance influence your real life appearance? The August 2009 issue of Journal of Virtual Worlds Research contains an article titled, Does this Avatar Make Me Look Fat? that suggests it might.

Using a technique called "In-Avatar Interviewing," the interviewers’ avatars interviewed other avatars in-world. This allows interviewers to completely control not only the interview environment, but their own appearances, to minimize unintended influences on their subjects. It’s also considerably less expensive to conduct interviews in a virtual world rather than face-to-face.

The surveys are ongoing and the results reported in this article are preliminary, but it does raise the tantalizing possibility that changing your avatar appearance may lead you to make corresponding changes in your physical appearance.

There are of course limits. Having a furry avatar won’t lead to a person’s physical body growing a tail and furry coat, and building up those massive muscles favored by many male avatars will still take a just as much real world hard work as it will for anyone else. And so far, this research is too preliminary to draw any conclusions.

In the early days of Second Life, a common criticism was that its avatars were ugly. This Japanese machinima demonstrates that it’s not true today, and shows some of the possibilities for designing your Second Life avatar, both male and female. Even if you’re not Japanese, you may get some ideas for improving your Second Life style.