Discourse.net

Google Creates a Virtual World

Say hello to Lively.

Things are free now, but they’ve programmed in the idea of “prices”…

Virtual Worlds Legal Bibliography

Greg Lastowka has published a very welcome Virtual Law Bibliography — a first try at “a comprehensive list of published law review articles and student notes that focus on the intersection of law and virtual worlds.” This will be very useful the next time Caroline Bradley and I teach our seminar on massively multiplayer games and the law.

(Wish he hadn’t left my name off the article I co-authored, but you can’t have everything.)

Second Life Claims Another Vicitm

After a very engaging start to his/her blogging career, Lucky Jim, J.D. wrote on Dec. 15, 2007 that s/he’d started to explore Second Life,

I’ve recently begun to explore Second Life. My cover story is that I’m engaged in fieldwork for socio-legal research on law and informal regulation in virtual communities. There’s more than a grain of truth in that. I am in fact interested in that topic, am in fact working on research in that vein, and do in fact believe there’s plenty of interest along those lines in Second Life. There’s even a Second Life Bar Association and a Second Life Law School.

But, the pathetic truth is that I’ve also found my initial forays to be surprisingly enjoyable.

And the blog hasn’t been updated since.

Spore: First-Ever "Massively Online Singleplayer Game"

Interesting pre-review of the long-awaited Spore, due out in stores in September. bit-tech.net | Spore: Hands-on Preview - Pollinated Content.

Most interesting comment:

one of the coolest and most interesting things about the game on both a technical and casual level [is] the [Pollination] system by which Spore is creating a whole new genre — Massively Online Singleplayer.

Yeah, that seems like a contradiction. Bear with us and let us explain.

Every time a player starts a game in Spore they’re given a new planet. The planet is the same every time and serves as little more than a blank slate for the creatures to play on.

Except, it isn’t always the same and, although the landscape is always basically the same, the types of other animals and vegetation are actually sourced from other Spore players. Their content spills over into your game to keep things fun and perpetually new but, in order to accommodate to casual gamers and those who don’t actually want to play multiplayer, those players aren’t actually in control of their content.

Summarizing the Latest from Jack Thompson

For the convenience of readers who do not have the energy to read the latest pleading from Coral-Gables-based anti-video-game-zealot Jack Thompson, AKA John Thompson, in the ongoing proceedings as to whether he should be disbarred, I present the following graphical summary:

(For those who came in late, Wikipedia has a decent background article on Jack Thompson.)

Ethical Questions

Looking for some ethical questions? Look no further than Kaimipono Wenger, Reparations and Net Benefit which tries to deconstruct defenses based on claims (not always plausible) of accident benefit to the victim.

Or, for something superficially less grim, see James Grimmelmann, Is Gold Farming Mandatory? A Question in Applied Virtual World Ethics

Not Unreasonable

Via Blenderlaw, this classic:

Farm Club

OK, so there are More US Warcraft players than farmers. But are there more gold farmers or soybean farmers?

Farmers and Cowmen in Space

Nate Combs at Terra Nova has written a really interesting post about economic and other relationships in Eve Online. It’s at at My friend’s keeper, and it reinforces my suspicion that while World of Warcraft is the bigger social phenom, with the largest bleed-over into art and ordinary life, Eve Online is the most interesting major game, both legally and structurally.

I’m not even going to try to quote from this one — if you’re interested in Virtual Worlds (or political economy or political sociology) you should just go read it.

Update (12/8/07): And see the follow-up.

Second Life Simulation

Clever YouTubers have simulated the experience of being in Second Life in real life.

Google Patents Method to Do Real-Time Psych Profiling of Online Gamers

The Guardian reports Google may use games to analyse net users:

Internet giant Google has drawn up plans to compile psychological profiles of millions of web users by covertly monitoring the way they play online games.

The company thinks it can glean information about an individual’s preferences and personality type by tracking their online behaviour, which could then be sold to advertisers. Details such as whether a person is more likely to be aggressive, hostile or dishonest could be obtained and stored for future use, it says.

The move is intended to customise adverts shown to players of online video games by tailoring them to specific tastes and interests. But it has worried privacy campaigners, who said the implications of compiling and storing such detailed information were “alarming”.

…

The plans are detailed in a patent filed by Google in Europe and the US last month. It says people playing online role playing games such as Second Life and World of Warcraft would be particularly good to target, because they interact with other players and make decisions that probably reflect their behaviour in real life.

The patent says: “User dialogue (eg from role playing games, simulation games, etc) may be used to characterise the user (eg literate, profane, blunt or polite, quiet etc). Also, user play may be used to characterise the user (eg cautious, risk-taker, aggressive, non-confrontational, stealthy, honest, cooperative, uncooperative, etc).”

The information could be used to make adverts that appear inside the game more “relevant to the user”, Google says.

Players who spend a lot of time exploring “may be interested in vacations, so the system may show ads for vacations”. And those who spend more time talking to other characters will see adverts for mobile phones.

The article doesn’t really explain, however, exactly how Google plans to collect the information. Is it real-time, via the toolbar? Would the info be provided by the game or by the desktop?

Meanwhile, however, Google assures us that it’s all theoretical.

When contacted by the Guardian, Google said it did not have any plans to roll out the technology in the near future, and that it was just one of a large number of patents that it has filed in recent months. A spokesman said: “Google registers different patents irrespective of whether we actually intend to use them.”

Sure, sure, nothing to worry about…

Virtual Conversion (in NY)

In a decision issued Thursday, Thyroff v. Nationwide Mut. Ins. Co., — N.E.2d —-, 2007 WL 844860 (N.Y.), 2007 N.Y. Slip Op. 02442, the NY Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court, responded to a question certified by the Second Circuit: “whether the common-law cause of action of conversion applies to certain electronic computer records and data.” And, 7-0, it says the answer is “yes” — expanding the tort to intangible property. (Not all courts agree.)

So next time you take those virtual gold pieces from some newbie avatar — New York says that’s conversion.

More seriously, what remains to be determined about virtual item theft is whether the communal agreement to the game license and rules amounts to license or waiver. But I can see some game EULA’s being re-written to make this clearer.

Key parts of the decision below:

As history reveals, the common law has evolved to broaden the remedies available for the misappropriation of personal property. As the concept of summary execution and wager of battle became incompatible with emerging societal values, the law changed. Similarly, the courts became willing to consider new species of personal property eligible for conversion actions. Conversion and its common-law antecedents were directed against interferences with or misappropriation of “goods” that were tangible, personal property. This was consistent with the original notions associated with the appeals of robbery and larceny, trespass and trover because tangible property could be lost or stolen ( see Prosser & Keeton, Torts § 15, at 90). By contrast, real property and all manner of intangible rights could not be “lost or found” in the eyes of the law and were not therefore subject to an action for trover or conversion ( see id. at 91).

Under this traditional construct, conversion was viewed as “the ‘unauthorized assumption and exercise of the right of ownership over goods belonging to another to the exclusion of the owner’s rights’ “ ( State of N.Y. v. Seventh Regiment Fund, 98 N.Y.2d 249, 259 [2002], quoting Vigilant Ins. Co. of Am. v. Housing Auth. of City of El Paso, Tex., 87 N.Y.2d 36, 43 [1995]; see e.g. Colavito v. New York Organ Donor Network Inc., 8 NY3d 43, 49-50 [2006]; Industrial & Gen. Trust Ltd. v. Tod, 170 N.Y. 233, 245 [1902] ). Thus, the general rule was that “an action for conversion will not normally lie, when it involves intangible property” because there is no physical item that can be misappropriated ( Sporn v. MCA Records, 58 N.Y.2d 482, 489 [1983] ).

Despite this long-standing reluctance to expand conversion beyond the realm of tangible property, some courts determined that there was “no good reason for keeping up a distinction that arose wholly from that original peculiarity of the action” of trover (that an item had to be capable of being lost and found) and substituted a theory of conversion that covered “things represented by valuable papers, such as certificates of stock, promissory notes, and other papers of value” ( Ayres v. French, 41 Conn 142 [1874] ). This, in turn, led to the recognition that an intangible property right can be united with a tangible object for conversion purposes ( see Agar v. Orda, 264 N.Y. 248, 251 [1934]; Iglesias v. United States, 848 F.2d 362, 364 [2d Cir1988] ).

…

We have not previously had occasion to consider whether the common law should permit conversion for intangible property interests that do not strictly satisfy the merger test. Although some courts have adhered to the traditional rules of conversion ( see e.g. Allied Inv. Corp. v. Jasen, 354 Md 547, 562, 731 A.2d 957, 965 [1999] [interests in partnership and corporation]; Northeast Coating Tech. Inc. v. Vacuum Metallurgical Co., 684 A.2d 1322, 1324 [Me 1996] [interest in information contained in prospectus]; Montecalvo v. Mandarelli, 682 A.2d 918, 929 [RI 1996] [partnership interest] ), others have taken a more flexible view of conversion and held that the cause of action can embrace intangible property ( see e.g. Kremen v. Cohen, 337 F3d 1024, 1033-1034 [9th Cir2003] [internet domain name; applying California law]; Shmueli v. Cocoran Group, 9 Misc.3d 589, 594 [Sup Ct, N.Y. County, 2005] [computerized client/investor list]; see generally Town & Country Props. Inc. v. Riggins, 249 Va 387, 396-397, 457 S.E.2d 356, 363-364 [1995] [person’s name] ).

…

A variety of arguments have been made in support of expanding the scope of conversion. Some courts have decided that a theft of intangible property is a violation of the criminal law and should be civilly remediable ( see National Sur. Corp. v. Applied Syst. Inc., 418 So.2d at 850); that virtual documents can be made tangible “by the mere expedient of a printing key function” ( Shmueli v. Corcoran Group, 9 Misc.3d at 592); that a writing is a document whether it is read on the computer or printed on paper ( see Kremen v. Cohen, 325 F3d 1035, 1048 [9th Cir2003] [Kozinski, J., dissenting from certification] ); and that the expense of creating intangible, computerized information should be counterbalanced by the protection of an effective civil action ( see National Sur. Corp. v. Applied Sys. Inc., 418 So.2d at 850).

On the other hand, the primary argument for retaining the traditional boundaries of the tort is that it “seem[s] preferable to fashion other remedies, such as unfair competition, to protect people from having intangible values used and appropriated in unfair ways” (Prosser & Keeton, Torts § 15, at 92) …

“[I]t is the strength of the common law to respond, albeit cautiously and intelligently, to the demands of commonsense justice in an evolving society” ( Madden v. Creative Servs. Inc., 84 N.Y.2d 738, 744 [1995]; see Hymowitz v. Lilly & Co., 73 N.Y.2d 487, 507 [1989], cert denied 493 U.S. 944 [1989] ). That time has arrived. The reasons for creating the merger doctrine and departing from the strict common-law limitation of conversion inform our analysis. The expansion of conversion to encompass a different class of property, such as shares of stock, was motivated by “society’s growing dependence on intangibles” (Franks, Analyzing the Urge to Merge: Conversion of Intangible Property and the Merger Doctrine in the Wake of Kremen v. Cohen, 42 Hous L Rev at 498). It cannot be seriously disputed that society’s reliance on computers and electronic data is substantial, if not essential. Computers and digital information are ubiquitous and pervade all aspects of business, financial and personal communication activities. Indeed, this Opinion was drafted in electronic form, stored in a computer’s memory and disseminated to the Judges of this Court via email. We cannot conceive of any reason in law or logic why this process of virtual creation should be treated any differently from production by pen on paper or quill on parchment. A document stored on a computer hard drive has the same value as a paper document kept in a file cabinet.

The merger rule reflected the concept that intangible property interests could be converted only by exercising dominion over the paper document that represented that interest ( see Pierpoint v. Hoyt, 260 N.Y. at 29). Now, however, it is customary that stock ownership exclusively exists in electronic format. Because shares of stock can be transferred by mere computer entries, a thief can use a computer to access a person’s financial accounts and transfer the shares to an account controlled by the thief. Similarly, electronic documents and records stored on a computer can also be converted by simply pressing the delete button ( cf. Kremen v. Cohen, 337 F3d at 1034 [“It would be a curious jurisprudence that turned on the existence of a paper document rather than an electronic one. Torching a company’s file room would then be conversion while hacking into its mainframe and deleting its data would not”] [emphasis omitted] ).

Furthermore, it generally is not the physical nature of a document that determines its worth, it is the information memorialized in the document that has intrinsic value. A manuscript of a novel has the same value whether it is saved in a computer’s memory or printed on paper. So too, the information that Thyroff allegedly stored on his leased computers in the form of electronic records of customer contacts and related data has value to him regardless of whether the format in which the information was stored was tangible or intangible. In the absence of a significant difference in the value of the information, the protections of the law should apply equally to both forms-physical and virtual.

In light of these considerations, we believe that the tort of conversion must keep pace with the contemporary realities of widespread computer use. We therefore answer the certified question in the affirmative and hold that the type of data that Nationwide allegedly took possession of-electronic records that were stored on a computer and were indistinguishable from printed documents-are subject to a claim of conversion in New York. Because this is the only type of intangible property at issue in this case, we do not consider whether any of the myriad other forms of virtual information should be protected by the tort.

Accordingly, the certified question should be answered in the affirmative.

It's Getting Hard to Tell

Real life or Second Life? It’s getting hard to tell. Consider this video advertising the personal blimp.

Six! Yes, Six New Lightbulb Jokes

I'm sorry, but I love lightbulb jokes. And it's a rare day indeed that I find SIX new ones. But thanks to Games * Design * Art * Culture, I learn how Game Developers Change Light Bulbs.

Sample:

Q: How many art directors does it take to change a light bulb?
A: Does it have to be a light bulb?

Dumb Move

Dan Hunter posts on (confused) threats he's received from the proprietor of an online game whose press releases Dan had the temerity to suggest might be slightly inflated.

As one of the commentators to his post noted, sending this sort of threat to a tenured law professor and/or his Dean, is "like playing chicken with a freight train."

(Incidentally, guys, oral defamation is slander, written defamation is libel. Get your threats right.)

Not Quite Fit For Class Time

People who know me will attest that when the occasion warrants, and alas perhaps even when it does not, I am not notably squeamish about offending people. It may surprise them, therefore, to learn that there is one place where I am actually very squeamish about giving offense if it can be avoided: in the classroom. My feeling is that I have a somewhat captive audience, and that therefore I should be as careful as I can be to discuss potentially disturbing issues -- e.g. the control of pornography on the Internet -- in a somewhat clinical and even euphemistic manner. We may talk about the issues, but, for example, I certainly don't think we need in-class demos of how porn sites might trick people into going there with deceptively named URLs.

All of which is preface to why I suppose I probably won't be playing The Internet is for porn, a funny bit of World of Warcraft machinima, to my Internet Law class next year. (Warning: contains no nudity and only one offensive image.) And probably not even to the Virtual Worlds seminar (if in fact we get it organized). Which is maybe a pity.

Meta-blogging State of Play III

There was a lot less on the blogs about the conference than I expected. The Terra Novans, for example, were (like me) too busy attending to write about it. Perhaps that is the sign of a really good conference.

Urs Gasser had thorough pre-conference thoughts. James Taylor Lewis Grimmelmann, The State of Play is Strong, best captures the flavor of the event, although Community Mobilization, hightlights another important aspect. Torill Mortsen reports on the debate I participated in,

And the audience like this debate. This is the topic that has this audience rocking, to the point that they actually line up in front of the microphone in order to ask questions or participate in the discussion. This is, if nothing else, good academic/intellectual theatre!

Summing Up 'The Great Debate' at State of Play III

The so-called 'Great Debate' at State of Play III asked two stellar teams to debate the following proposition:

A legal system based on geography, territory and physical force is inappropriate for Virtual Worlds

I had the uncomfortable task of summing and declaring a winner.

[This is the second of three posts on State of Play III conference. The first was my notes from the ‘The Great Debate’ at State of Play III, with an outline of what the panelists said. The third post will be about the conference more generally.]

Here's more or less what I said:

Introduction

When Beth Novak asked me to be "judge, jury and executioner" for this event, I understood the assignment to mean that I was supposed be a potted plant for the bulk of the debate, then sum up and award prizes to winners. I agreed because I don't like to say no to Beth, but the trouble is, I am friendly with and indeed admire the people on both sides of this debate, and if I have to pick winners, it means I also have to pick...losers. And I don't like the sound of that. So you can imagine how cheerful I was feeling yesterday when I mentioned this problem to Beth, and she said that, yes, I 'was a fool to agree to do this'.

My initial idea to get out of it was to try to find a baby and cut it in half, but instead I decided to outsource the task of selecting the victors, leaving me with just the task of summing up. So I have put up a page at http://poll.umlaw.net in which I invite the audience here and online to act as a virtual jury and vote as to their views in this debate. You are asked to vote only once....and if you think there is a legitimacy issue with this decision method, well, that's something to consider when voting.

This has been a very rich debate. It seems to me that there have been four emergent themes.

I. Law is about violence

The first theme is that law is about violence, in two senses. The first is the commonplace that law is how we control both lawful and unlawful violence. The second is, as the late Rober Cover taught us, that law is 'juripathic', that law is also about the destruction or delegitimation of world views that are not recognized as belonging within society.[1]

II. Different visions of the autonomy issue.

The debate revealed three different visions of the possible legal autonomy of Virtual Worlds. Much of the confusion in the discussion seemed to me to be due to confusion between these three things people meant when they spoke of this possible legal autonomy.

In one view, whatever 'autonomy' enjoyed by Virtual Worlds come about because the Virtual World has been, in effect, ceded a degree of self rule (contractual or otherwise) BY A SOVEREIGN as regards those persons subject to that sovereign. You might describe this as the autonomy being 'granted' or 'recognized' or 'sub-delegated',

A second more, normative, view argues that the temporal authorities have no right to impose their will on Virtual Worlds.

A third, more positive vision, states that national sovereigns cannot impose their will on Virtual Worlds, even if they might wish to.

The differences between these visions matter. A consequence of the first vision is that whatever autonomy is granted is easy to revoke. It also accepts the role of law in the background, characterizing bargains within a Virtual World as ultimately taking place in the shadow of the law. The second vision makes a strong legitimacy claim; conversely, the third--although not leading there inevitably--lends itself to results which are illegitimate.

III. Choice of Law

Another thing that emerges is that questions about what law applies to Virtual Worlds are often a special species of the arcane legal genre known as choice of law. Traditionally, courts resolve choice of law problems with particular attention to location, but there are also many other relevant factors. Another aspect of the Virtual World choice of law question is the extent to which allowing a different answer for a Virtual World than one might have 'elsewhere' is the possible distributional consequences – are we going to have a different law for the people who have the money to run a computer with an expensive graphic card.

Finally, choice of law is sufficiently arcane that it is often obscure to the end user, not just to regular folks but also even to large corporations who sometimes discover in litigation that the court takes a different view of what law applies than their lawyers had advised them would be the answer. (This is even more the case for P2P applications, which do not even have a central and persistent location to which the law can latch on.) This obscurity leads to...

IV. Legitimacy

Here the debate is easy to caricature. On one hand we have those who characterize their opponents as saying, "government...brought to you by SONY" or, more positively, who assert that, as Victor put it, "democracy is better than the shopping mall". On the other hand we have those who see a rich, bottom-up, user-determined social and legal structures. And then we have the audience here reminding us that EULAs are not consent, that they are contracts of adhesion, that no one reads them anyway, and that they are thin reeds on which to base a theory of legitimacy.

Lurking alongside all this is a parallel idea that games are about play, that there is a purity to play that is only sullied when the law intrudes into a game.

V. A Verdict?

Before going to the verdict, let me offer a recharacterization of the underlying elements. One could characterize the division between these two panels as "optimism v. pessimism," or "Austinians v. radical 'bottom up' democrats," or perhaps as "Muggles v. the Ministry for Magic".

On the one hand there is the optimism of those would claim the Virtual Worlds as virgin jurisdictions. In this view, these new breakaways create an opening for new flowerings of the human spirit. For example, David Johnson argued that as normative matter Virtual Worlds should be deferred to, if only by sovereigns using their powers, even if not positively required. Indeed, David argued that Virtual Worlds could become more democratic than regular democracy. The hope is that law making in these new spaces will be decentralized in its creation, and yet also constrained by other decentralized forces including the ability to vote with one's feet or with one's mouse.

Contrast this view with the worldly pessimism that defines where the other side begins. Unhampered by naive optimism, there seems no escape from crime and fraud, and even if there were a way to escape the rules we have painfully built up over decades, rules designed to control Holmes’s "bad man," that escape would only lead us to worlds of greater pain. This legal world we have now is, the pessimists tell us, more or less as good as it gets. Any improvements will be hard won and at best incremental.

[At this point we checked the vote and found the jury more or less deadlocked, although in fact the "nos" had a small edge.]

[I therefore took on the task of choosing the winner.]

I take on this task of picking the victors as a pessimist who wishes he were an optimist; a believer in bottom up democracy who is not an Austinian; a Muggle who would love to cast spells.

As such, I will award the prize to the affirmative -- even though I don't agree with them -- because without them there would be no debate.

And yes, at last I have managed to find a baby to split.

[1] Robert Cover, The Supreme Court, 1982 Term--Foreword: Nomos and Narrative, 97 Harv. L. Rev. 1 (1983)

My notes from the ‘The Great Debate’ at State of Play III

As the "judge, jury, and executioner" for the ‘Great Debate' at State of Play III, I was required to sum up the debate. This required me to take extensive notes during the discussions.

The panel was set up as a debate on the following proposition:

Resolved: A legal system based on geography, territory and physical force is inappropriate for Virtual Worlds

My notes as to what the other speakers said are below. Alternately, watch the 'Great Debate' from the online archive.

[This will be the first of three posts on State of Play III conference. The next will be what I said as a summation of the debate. The third will be about the conference more generally.]

What follows is an only very slightly cleaned up copy of my real-time notes. "VW" means "Virtual Worlds".

Please note well: Comments in [brackets] are my notes to myself of my ideas or my reactions to the speakers, NOT what the speakers actually said.

Dan Hunter (moderator): VW's are much more immersive today than in the day of Lambda Moo.

David Post: The proposition is almost self evident
  A.   [Making a positive claim that to my ear sounds like Lon Fuller] To be 'law' or a 'legal system' the rules must be ex ante comprehensible and one must have notice about which rules apply; but this is hard in VWs (esp. ex ante) Hence any application of an arbitrary nation’s rules to a VW is 'not law'
  B.  [normative] Why should territorially based law apply to sale of VW asets? And what would give Sovereign X the right to apply its law? In principle only consent could do this [Even if we do it to the non-consenting all the time? Policing?]
  C.  Individuals and not states are sovereigns [sounds like the common law courts movements. Does he mean to sound like those nuts?]

II. Joel Reidenberg. Post is ridiculous. [i.e Reality bytes.]
  A.  There is an inescapable nexus between VW & physical world
    1.  Users are people
      a.  They exist in a location
      b.  There is an infrastructure which they are embedded in
      c.  There are commercial/social exchanges that blur the border
    2.  The above facts implicate state interests
    3.  Investments of time, energy & money have physical aspects
  B.  State public policy deserves to be vindicated
    1.  Germany can ban Nazi games;
    2.  US can ban kiddi porn

III. Richard Bartle
  A.  Real world rules constrain ... but these constraints are based ultimately on force
  B.  When you play a game you agree to play by the rules [implicit: contract out of other laws/rules?] ...
  C.  Game rules apply based on consent..
    1.  Hence game rules are MORE legitimate than rules made governments based on force- don't rely on force, rely on consent
  D.  Virtual property - is it like real property? Well, virtual worlds look like a world, why can't it be property held in a different world?

IV. Viktor Mayer-Schoenberger: issue is who makes the rules?
  A.  Origin of copyright is fear of control by publishers
    1.  Beware media monopoly
    2.  What is legitimate, who makes the rules?
  B.  Democracy is hard - things are they way there are as the result of a long evolution

V. David Johnson
  A.  Our essay was entitled Law AND BORDERS
    1.  Geographic borders are a lousy way to organize choice of law
    2.  What about our right to travel?
  B.  Digital force is more effective than physical force in VWs
    1.  Also allows people to avoid contact when they don't want it.
  C.  'Law is a story that we tell each other'
    1.  [Law is made by the volk, we grow it]
  D.  VWs can become more democratic in a way than reg. democracy
    1.  VW democracy has a form of decentralized action
    2.  Easier to vote with feet / mouse

VI. Tim Wu
  A.  RE physical force: there is a demand for law based on physical force
    1.  Cf. E-bay. Wanted online-only dispute resolution
      a.  Works for large % of cases
      b.  But there are some bad actors who don't care, want to steal
      c.  No remedy for them within the e-bay world; must resort to traditional force-based rules
  B.  VWs are like any community
    1.  Most of the time we don't want the law in there
    2.  But the background law underlies their existence & makes them possible
      a.  Need stable rules underneath to protect the servers and the players, to prevent fraud and acts of "the bad man"

[There were also a number of excellent questions from the audience, including one pointing out the EULAs are an odd form of 'consent']

How Others See One

It's always a bit of a shock to find out how others see one. Take, for example, this World of Warcraft avatar that Dan Hunter picked to represent me to the audience at State of Play:

[Update:] It seems that I'm a Tauren, and maybe that's not so bad:

The Tauren are huge, bestial creatures who live in the grassy, open barrens of central Kalimdor. They live to serve nature and maintain the balance between the wild things of the land and the restless spirit of the elements. Despite their enormous size and brute strength, the remarkably peaceful Tauren cultivate a quiet, tribal society. However, when roused by conflict, Tauren are implacable enemies who will use every ounce of their strength to smash their enemies under hoof. Under the leadership of their ancient chief, Cairne Bloodhoof, the Tauren allied themselves with the Orcs during the invasion of the Burning Legion. The two races have remained steadfast allies ever since. Like the Orcs, the Tauren struggle to retain their sense of tradition and noble identity.

'Virtual Worlds, Real Rules' Published

The papers from the State of Play I symposium on law and virtual worlds are now online and also available in a dead tree version. Among them is is Virtual Worlds, Real Rules, a paper I co-authored with Caroline Bradley, my colleague and spouse.

The origins of this paper are amusing. We were in the car one afternoon, driving to pick up the kids from school, and I mentioned to Caroline that I’d come across some interesting facts about Virtual Worlds — that they seemed to be evolving market regulations uncannily like the Uniform Commercial Code (perhaps because the people who wrote the rules mimicked the world they knew). “I know there’s a paper in there somewhere,” I told her, “I’m not just sure what it is.”

And, without missing a beat, Caroline told me what the paper was. Which is why she’s the lead author.

I Should Start Selling Virtual Swampland

The BBC reports

A 22-year-old gamer has spent $26,500 (£13,700) on an island that exists only in a computer role-playing game (RPG). The Australian gamer, known only by his gaming moniker Deathifier, bought the island in an online auction. The land exists within the game Project Entropia, an RPG which allows thousands of players to interact with each other.

Eighty years ago when people sold land in Florida that didn’t exist, we put them in jail. Now we give them venture capital. This is progress!

(Kidding aside, it is either lunacy or a graphic demonstration that Dan Hunter is right about the coming value of virtual property.)

Edward Castronova to Indiana

The Telecommunications Department at Indiana University has just made a a very smart hire.

Congratulations to Edward, and especially to his new colleagues for their discernment.

PS. You may wish to check out his departing rant.

Virtual Worlds Talk Moves at Warp Speed

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 .