Copyright holder of "Attack on Titan" stops fan game mod in SL

Rest in peace, Attack on Titans in SL. It was good as long as it lasted but the copyright holders of the manga series closed it down. Well not entirely: those people who bought the gear can continue playing. The battle arena is still up and running. But it is not possible for new players to buy it. Luckily I got my gear before the vendor was closed.

At least the battle arena is still up and running

I really hope that the developers will now create a new gear that is different from the manga series but with the same/similar game mechanics. It would be too bad if other people couldn't join the fun!

The development of fan art based articles has become a minefield in our digital times and a lot of items that have been tolerated or even supported in the past are now banned. Second Life user Nathan Adored explains in a blog post comment how a vendor of Star Trek fan art got into troubles (full comment here):

In the 80s and into the 90s, I used to buy all sorts of Star Trek and general sci-fi things at conventions and through mail order. Most of it was books filled with diagrams and technical descriptions of how this stuff was supposed to work, or blue prints and comparison charts of spacecraft. I’m pretty sure most if not all of these were Not Officially Licensed… but the fans were specifically ALLOWED to make and sell these things, they just weren’t allowed to be sold through regular book stores and the like. This WAS the standard we went by for decades. So far as I understand it, this sort of gentleman’s agreement came about when in the 1970s or so (before I got involved in organized fandom), Paramount had gone out stomping hard on those making Star Trek stuff without going through them first… and it had blown up in their face, since they were going after fans making, say, tear-off notepads with Spock’s pictor on the corner and selling them to other fans, where the one doing it was making them mostly to show their love of Star Trek… and Paramount discovered that their stomping on these things were actually harming fandom in general, were turning large numbers of fans against them, and even causing some of them to leave overall Star Trek fandom in discust… so they backed off, and reached an agreement that remained in place after that for decades.
And then one day… BAM!!! Suddenly one of the more prominent and respected makers of Trek stuff (but also of lots and lots of other genre stuff) gets an out of the blue DMCA on some of the Trek items he makes, and SECONDS after the DMCA he gets his account disabled, apparently because he didn’t instantaneously act on the DMCA and take those handful of Trek things off the Marketplace.
Thing is, yes they have to protect their copyright and trademark and stuff, under the theory that if you don’t protect your owned copyrights and trademarks, you might lose your rights to them… but there’s better ways to handle it than the totally binary way they’re suddenly treating it now. That, and it is VERY clear they’re forgetting decades of tradition and decades of how Trek fandom HAD been allowed with Paramount’s blessing to handle things.

In the spirit of these lines I do think that the SL version of Attack on Titan was a great promotion of the manga series. I hadn't heard about it before and I was really curious to get to know it. Now I have a somewhat bitter feeling towards the AoT show and I think I wouldn't enjoy watching it anymore.