Practicing Law in a Virtual World

The SL Bar Association published two interesting videos from the last year Nov. 14's miniconference, "Practicing Law in a Virtual World".



Session 1: Practice Issues Unique to the Virtual World Setting

Daniel Perry – ‘DanielPerry Laa’
Virtual Law Teams

James Bryce Clark - ‘JamieBryce Infinity’
Privacy and Security

Stephen Davies – ‘Little Gray’
Dispute Resolution, Civil Rights




Session 2: Substantive Issues in a Virtual World

A. Craig Abrahamson – ‘Lexis Looming’ Contracts and Business Transactions

Steven Wu – ‘Legal Writer’ Intellectual Property Rights


Videos are licensed under Creative Commons license: Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States

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Digital Law Conference - September 23, San Jose (CA)

Digital Law Conference provides a detailed examination of the legal issues raised by games, social media, virtual goods and virtual worlds and offers key insight into where the industry is headed and what the associated legal implications are. 7 credit hours of CLE accreditation has been applied for in MCLE states.


Detailed schedule available here.


This is just a part of Engage! Expo which is taking place September 23-24 at the San Jose Convention Center and provides insight into the best practices, current trends, and effective strategies of social media and user engagement.

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Rights of virtual communities - presentation

Presentation - Leipzig GCO2009: Gods, Democracies, and Dictators: roles and rights of virtual communities



Available on Nic Suzor's blog


(I recommend *.odp format)

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Economy of Virtual Worlds by Edward Castronova

Edward Castronova (PhD, Economics, Wisconsin, 1991) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Telecommunications at Indiana University, Bloomington. He is the father of economic analysis of virtual worlds and has numerous publications on that topic, including Synthetic Worlds and Exodus to the Virtual World. He delivered the keynote address for the Washington and Lee School of Law symposium Protecting Virtual Playgrounds: Children, Law and Play Online.

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Gold Farming illegal in China?

According to the official news release of Ministry of Commerce the People's Republic of China:

China has unveiled the first official rule on the use of virtual currency in the trade of real goods and services to limit its possible impact on the real financial system.

The government also spelled out the definition of "virtual currency" for the first time, which includes prepaid cards of cyber-games, according to a joint circular from the Ministry of Culture and the Ministry of Commerce Friday.

"The virtual currency, which is converted into real money at a certain exchange rate, will only be allowed to trade in virtual goods and services provided by its issuer, not real goods and services." it said.

More references and comments:

InformationWeek

CNET

Virtual goods news

Law of the game

Terranova

CNN

Play no evil


and CNBC video:

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MacArthur Foundation enters the Metaverse

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Taser International, Inc. v Linden Research Inc.

On April 17, 2009 Taser International Inc. filed a lawsuit against Linden Research Inc. and others containing various trademark infringements. Taser claims unauthorized sell of virtual versions of its electric stun guns. The company seeks damages in excess of $75,000. The list of defendants is strictly related to Linden Lab and covers not only entities like Virtuatrade, LLC (the former owner of XStreet SL) but also individuals (generally Linden Lab's management).

The complaint alleges that Linden Lab and others are engaging in conduct which is damaging to Taser’s reputation and hurting its sales. Taser also claims that its brand will be damaged via association with virtual sex and virtual drug use occuring within Second Life. One of the businesses that makes Taser replicas (The Newman Group) does a trade in an urban role-play called The Crack Den.

The suit is entitled Taser International Inc. v. Linden Research Inc., 2:09-cv-00811, and is venued in the U.S. District Court, District of Arizona (Phoenix). The case will be heard by the federal judge Roslyn O. Silver.

It is the first time a major company has sued Linden Lab for infringement which occurred in Second Life.

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The feudal world of Second Life

It would be difficult to deny the claim that the closest real life analogy to the "land ownership system" in Second Life is the old-fashioned feudalism.

Second Life even sports a parallel to feudalism’s hierarchical chains of subinfeudation. Several large commercial operations purchase entire Regions from Linden, landscape and subdivide them, and then rent or sell plots to users. Like feudal lords, these “land barons” play a major role in dispensing justice related to landownership. Many of them impose “covenants” on their land, such as a prohibition against running businesses from virtual homes. Tellingly, users upset at a neighbor’s violation of the covenant must look to the land baron for recourse; Linden Labs has no involvement in these local disputes. Similarly, Linden stays out of seignorial disputes between these (land)lords and their tenants. Whereas offline landlords are expected to rely on the state when evicting recalcitrant tenants rather than self-help, Second Life land barons have no recourse but self-help.

Written by: James Grimmelmann, Virtual World Feudalism, 118 Yale L.J. Pocket Part 126 (2009),
http://thepocketpart.org/2009/01/19/grimmelmann.html.

Image by Torley

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Panopticon

A few words on issues of privacy in the context of virtual worlds with an excellent comparison to the prison.

The essential irony of virtual worlds is that populations seeking to build new lives away from the public eye are moving into an environment that is subject to constant surveillance. Virtual worlds currently operate like Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon prison. The Panopticon permitted a single guard in the center of the prison to monitor all of the prisoners. The same degree of surveillance exists in virtual worlds. The denizens of virtual worlds are constantly under surveillance by “game gods,” the private companies that design, maintain, and administer virtual worlds. The game gods then must comply with government requests for call details, wiretaps, stored chatlogs, and other business records. The result: game gods’ cameras are on all the time and the footage reaches law enforcement and the intelligence community.

Written by Joshua Fairfield, Escape into the Panopticon: Virtual Worlds and the Surveillance Society, 118 Yale L.J. Pocket Part 131 (2009), http://thepocketpart.org/2009/01/19/fairfield.html

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Real banking coming to virtual worlds

The Swedish Financial Supervisory Authority (Finansinspektionen) has granted a license to conduct banking activities to Entropia Universe developer MindArk PE AB's wholly owned subsidiary Mind Bank AB.

According to the company's official statement:

Mind Bank AB will be the first bank that fully incorporates real money transactions with activities in a virtual world. Milions of transactions can be processed by the bank for further transer to MindArk and the virtual universe. Mind Bank will also offer selected bank services to customers on the conventional market

More info: link here

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The rule of law

Participation in virtual communities is said to be governed by the contractual documents written by the proprietors and 'agreed' to by the participants. In a system where governance is controlled by contract, then the limits of contract are essentially constitutional principles. Where, then, can we find the limits that we will impose on contractual governance?

Very interesting analysis by Nic Suzor.


Full post: link here

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Cross-world IP rights infringements

Two interesting articles was published recently:



1. Trust Revisited: Content Creation Theft and Open Source Grids:

Very detailed story of legal issues related to transfering work form Second Life grid to Openlife grid.



2. IMVU Avatars “stole” my eyes (textures):

Vint Falken's story of Creative Commons licensed pictures published on Flickr and used in IMVU.

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The Rocky Legal Landscape of Virtual Worlds

Three short articles with some basic IP information regarding:


1. Trademarks

2. Patents

3. Copyrights


all by Ross Dannenberg the editor-in-chief of the Patent Arcade blog, and an adjunct professor at George Mason Law School in Arlington, Va.

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What if someone patented the whole metaverse?

It looks like american software patents system threaten virtual worlds too.

General Patent Corporation and World's.com announced yesterday:

We are pleased to have the expertise and IP experience of General Patent and Lerner David to enforce Worlds’ patent portfolio,” stated Thom Kidrin, Worlds’ CEO. “As the number of virtual worlds and MMORG’s continues to grow, Worlds has seen the space we pioneered in 1995 validated in techniques and methodologies we believe are defined in our patents.

The two patents in question are 6,219,045 and 7,181,690. Firts one is titled: "Scalable virtual world client-server chat system" second: "System and method for enabling users to interact in a virtual space".


from Virtual Judgment post:

Therefore, it would seem that General Patent Corporation and Worlds.com are taking the position that the above-referenced patents cover the idea of the computer architecture for a three-dimensional graphical multi-user interactive virtual world systems. If so, this announcement is arguably a very thinly veiled notice to the virtual world industry that infringement suits are forthcoming for those companies who do not enter into a licensing deal with General Patent Corporation and Worlds.com.

Undoubtedly determining enforeability of these two patents could have serious impact on the future of virtual worlds.

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Virtual Worlds Timeline

Virtual Worlds on Dipity.

Isn't interesting?

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Obama in Second Life

by Draxtor Despres

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Four Years of Virtual Democracy

Four years on the CDS is in a fairly healthy state but, as ever in a democracy, there is stuff still to do. There are unravelled threads, incomplete projects and outstanding issues. It is messy, ragged and never complete - just like in RL.

from: Patroklus Murakami's blog

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Digital constitutionalism

The main problem with the governance of virtual communities is that our legal system operates in such a way as to vest overwhelming power in the hands of those who create and maintain the platforms. These people, whom we call 'proprietors', for they own the code that defines the platform and servers upon which the code runs, exercise almost complete discretion as to who may access and who may continue to access 'their' community. The law, by giving primacy to these property rights, marginalises the interests of participants in these communities. Further, by casting any disputes or tensions which arise as belonging wholly in the 'private' sphere, we deligitimise any to the current allocation of entitlements.

from Nic Suzor's blog

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A practical example of DMCA notifications in Linden Lab

How Linden Lab handle with DMCA notices on user generated content in their virtual environment?

Very informative post by Tateru Nino from Massively.

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The Polish Republic

About one month ago Polska Republika (The Polish Republic) was born in Second Life. It looks like it is the first Polish self-governance attempt in the metaverse.
There is preamble and Small Constitusion so far. Final Constitusion still under construction. The owner of the island is a Queen (yes Republic with a Queen :)) but the plan is to establish government elected democratically by the community.




Some informations available on two great blogs run by: Ayumi Cassini and Gwyneth Llwelyn.

The Queen, Uzi Boa has her own blog too.


More details here or in-world.

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