I’ve been waiting for this lawsuit. I cannot conceive of a Constitutional theory that lets pro-Bush demonstrators near the President and restricts anti-Bush demonstrators to far, far away. That’s called “viewpoint discrimination” and it’s almost always illegal when the government does it (but almost always legal when private citizens do it).
OK. I can conceive of arguments the government might make, including something about relative chances of riots or whatever. I just can’t conceive of those arguments standing up in court. What’s that? The anti-Bush demonstrators are more likely to be violent or dangerous? You never saw a terrorist pretend to support something?
And calling the waaaay off-site zones to which protestors are relegated a “free speech zone” or a “protest zone” just adds insult to injury.
It was only a matter of time. Although U.Miami law school does not, as of yet, provide hosting for student bloggers, we have our first student blogger. (At least, the first I know of.) What a joy to find, via the referrer function, schteino.com.
I suppose some professors might find the idea of students commenting about them online to be a little threatening. I’m of the other view: I’m always curious to know what it looks like from the other side of the desk, and while I much prefer bouquets to brickbats, if the only choice is being criticized behind my back or to my face, I’ll take it straight on please (as long as it doesn’t seem likely to become physical anyway).
None of this is to suggest that Mr. Schteino is complaining or even being particularly personal about anyone. It’s early days, as Mr. Schteino is a 1L, but so far—and despite his claim to be a “Cynical 1L Hoping and Dreaming”—he seems like a fairly happy camper.
The Miami Herald reports that in Miami-Dade it is illegal to own a “dyed or artificially colored rabbit or other animal, baby chicken, duckling or other fowl.” It also tells us that the South Florida building code includes a “structural specifications for rubber contraceptives” that someone “slipped in as a joke” just after the “Methods for deep, quasi-static, cone and friction-cone penetration test of soil.” The mind boggles.
Lots happening on the Virtual Worlds front. Our paper on Virtutal Worlds, Real Rules has generated some interesting comments. Over at Crooked Timber, Henry Farrell suggests in More Broadswords, Less Crime? that the experiment we propose has already been run once, with an ugly result:
My tuppence worth: one theory has already been ‘tested’ in this way; the argument that easing restrictions on weapons and their use will lead to a drop in violent crime. If you grant the assumption that MMORPGs are analogous to everyday life (a whopping assumption to be granting, I’ll admit), then the evidence is unequivocal. A society where each can use weapons against each without restriction is likely to deteriorate into Hobbesian anarchy. People will positively beg for a Leviathan to come in and put an end to the Warre of All against All.
I think this is intuitively plausible (although very sensitive to the counter-argument that people choose to play violent games precisely to do things they would never do in real life—an argument of unreality that might not damn experiements based on more realistic representations of ordinary life), although I have to admit that a lot of work is done by the word “and” in the phrase “easing restrictions on weapons and their use”.
Over at Yale’s Law Meme James Grimmelmann offers a fascinating account of the popular tax revolt in the game Second Life . I was particularly intrigued by this story because some of the most thoughtful commentators on our Virtual Worlds paper have asked whether this online environment is one that could be used to empower participants instead of using them as glorified lab rats. Is there some way the participants could be empowered to self-organized, create new governance structures, meet to plan new modes of production, or collaborate in ways? These are all tantalizing thoughts, but my cautious reaction has been that that’s for version 2.0—we need to start with slightly less grand ambitions. Reading the Second Life saga makes me wonder whether I’m being too tame.
And, at TerraNova , Greg Lastowka suggests in The Author as Autarch that there is an even greater obstacle to using Virtual Worlds to experiment with Intellectual Property (IP) rules than the one we contemplated:
…a bigger problem with using virtual worlds as testbeds for experimental intellectual property rules is that virtual worlds are intellectual property. Putting aside trademarks, patents, and other relevant forms of intellectual property, software is protected by copyright. The copyright is not just limited to a game’s source code and object code, but also extends (to an unclear extent) to other salient aspects of the program.
Here, I think I disagree. While it’s certainly right that there are some IP obstacles to using existing games as research tools, if one is setting up a set of parallel games to serve as testbeds for legal rules then rather than be subject to IP constraints one is actually aided by them. Our suggestion is not that experimenters should colonize existing versions of Ultima Online or something and run trials on them. The idea is to purchase the rights to an existing game engine, customize it, and then run parallel versions of the game, or perhaps to license some shards/facets of a game and customize them. Any serious attempt to use Virtual Worlds to test legal rules will require careful design, and a control group. The IP issues will get sorted as part of the design process.
Meanwhile, New York Law School’s Institute for Information Law and Policy & Yale Law School’s Information Society Project are planning a conference on “The State of Play: Law, Games and Virtual Worlds” to be held in New York city, Nov. 13-15. They’ve now posted their tantalizing conference program .