In a case that’s getting weirder and weirder, it has emerged that “Victor Vezina” the Second Life avatar who is being sued over alleged trademark infringements is none other than Victor Keegan from The Guardian newspaper’s technology team.

Keegan (as he admits on The Guardian’s gamesblog) as Vezina asked a Second Life neighbour to build him an art gallery. They called this space “SLart”. But Richard Minsky, an artist who also has a Second Life avatar, trademarked the phrase “SLart” in the US in March 2008. And had launched another Second Life art gallery in early 2007 called SLart. Now Minsky is suing Keegan/Vezina and Linden Labs, makers of Second Life, over trademark infringement.

The 25-page US District of New York statement from Minsky says that his attorney (using, of course a Second Life avatar called Juris Amat) served Vezina a “cease and desist” notice on March 16 which Keegan ignored, and also wrote to Linden Labs asking them to force Vezina to stop using SLart.

Since the lawsuit was filed, Linden Labs have removed the SLart sign from Keegan’s space, and told him that “‘SL’ was Linden’s trademark and I was allowed to use it only when followed by a space and two generic nouns, such as ‘SL Art Garden’.”

Keegan believes he is a “pawn caught in the crossfire between Linden, which claims the right to the letters SL unless followed by a space, and Minsky, who has registered SLART as a trademark and isn’t budging. This raises key questions, not least does the writ of the US courts rule in virtual worlds?”

Of course, it’s typical that one of The Guardian’s cerebral videogame bloggers would be caught up in a Second Life altercation – a virtual world that isn’t really a “game” – rather than say, a dispute of using swearwords in Gears Of War 2 online.