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Linden Labs could certainly conceivably face criminal charges, but as long as they co-operate I'd guess they won't have to.
Even in the US, where greater protections tend to exist for ISPs, Linden is very unlikely to have that same protection extended to them. Common carrier provisions apply to ISPs, not MMOs. Even if virtual worlds were ruled common carriers in principle, Linden's pro-active policing of content in Second Life would seem to rule SL out. (Linden actively seeks out and bans things like swastikas, for instance.)
Analogy: If you own a bar and know people are trading child porn in the back room, then you are almost certainly going to face criminal charges along with the people doing the child porn trading. You're aiding and abetting in that case, and since you (in this hypothetical example) already stop people from using the back room to play checkers, you can't claim that the back room is an unregulated place where you can't/don't patrol what goes on there.
MUDs/MMOs are not like ISPs. ISPs got protection from the FCC because they are truly neutral carriers (and if they start discriminating on content in a way that the network neutrality proponents dislike, then I think they should also lose that common carrier protection, but that's another issue). Almost every MUD/MMO engages in censoring of user content, whether it's banning inappropriate names, enforcing RP on some channels, banning or regulating foul language and so on.
Besides all that, the FCC didn't actually extend common carrier protection (I believe) to broadband providers until they first decided that they weren't going to look at broadband providers as a network running on top of the telecommunications backbone (which already had common carrier provisions). Once they decided to treat the cable/dsl providers as a single service (rather than a network layered on top of the telecomm backbone), it became logical to grant common carrier status to them.
I can't really see that ever happening for virtual worlds though.
--matt
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