Author Archives: Michael Froomkin

Later today – probably shortly after 12 noon – I’ll be part of a panel that will be debating the role of (terrestrial) law in virtual spaces. On side will be the enthusiasts who will argue that mundane law has little or no useful role to play in regulating behaviors in massively multiplayer online role-playing games. What rules are needed, I would argue in their shoes, will be provided by the game designers, the End User License Agreements (EULAs), and most importantly via emergent behavior as between the users. If I were on the other side I would say, when it’s just a game, we play by its rules, but as we get to things which involve exchange of valuable commodiities, even virtual ones, when we are talking tort, trademark violations, stalking, and so on, then the fact that you happened to use a fancy graphics card to help perpetrate it should make no difference.

Here’s the line-up:

Richard Bartle, Creator of MUD
Dan Hunter, Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania (Moderator)
David Johnson, New York Law School
David Post, New York Law School
Viktor Mayer-Schoenberger, Harvard University – School of Public Policy
Joel R. Reidenberg, Fordham University – Law
Tim Wu, Columbia – Law

My role, foisted upon me, is to sit like a potted plant for most of the debate and then sum up. The official title is “Judge, Jury and Executioner”. The problem, though, is that I have good friends on both sides of the panel. And executioner sounds sooo tacky. So for days I have been looking for a baby in hopes of being able to cut it. No luck.

The good news, however, is that I have found a very state-of-play kind of way to weasel out of the ugly part of this job: I’ve set up a virtual jury room, and the people in the audience with laptops (and those of you at home following along on the webcast can vote on who you think s winning (won) the debate

Caroline is giving her talk at State of Play as I type this.

It’s being webcast.

Caroline and I will be speaking at the State of Play III conference that begins tomorrow, so we — and the boys too — are off to New York until Sunday. Caroline is talking about financial markets in virtual worlds. My role is more in the entertainment line, as I’ve been asked to play the role of judge in “The Great Debate” — a mock trial format concerning the role of terrestrial law in virtual worlds. (Since I have rather violent views on that subject, it’s at once flattering and frustrating to be trusted to do a neutral summing up and to rule on who made better arguments. Worse, I have good friends on both sides of the debate.)

State of Play I was one of the best conferences I’ve ever attended; I had to miss SoP II, so I’m looking forward to this very much. [I blogged an amusing incident from SoP I under the title How Not to Pick Up Women Online. One unanticipated consequence was an absolute horde of visitors to the site who had googled for that phrase minus the “not”.]

For State of Play I, Caroline and I wrote our first joint paper, Virtual Worlds, Real Rules (background and more background). In it we argued that Virtual Worlds would make excellent environments for subjecting various classes of proposed legal rules to near-real-world testing. It was intriguing therefore to hear on NPR this afternoon that sociologists and epidemiologists may run simulations of plague-induced behavior using games such as World of Warcraft (avian flu anyone?) — an idea that alas they do not seem to have gotten from our paper but rather from an actual virtual-life incident.

It will be the first conference in years that Caroline and I have tried to attend together, and just to make it more exciting we are taking the boys with us, also a first since when they were very very small. We have lined up a very small amount of child care, but mostly we’re going to be relying on our own, and the boys’, resources.

Trendy as all get out, State of Play III will be podcast as well as webcast.

Meanwhile, blogging may be sparse…