State of Play comments, day 4
You will see a lot of coverage of State of Play on other blogs, like the Terra Nova blog. However, I’ll be posting some of my thoughts and observations over the next few days. My thoughts will be brief, just noting some of the things that stood out to me, and paraphrasing. I apologize in advance if I misinterpret anyone’s comments here. Here are some thoughts from day 4, Wednesday, August 22, 2007.
Wednesday was the optional workshop day, and in the morning I attended a session titled “Law and regulation in virtual worlds”. The panelists were an Australian law professor (based in Singapore), a Singaporean law professor, a practicing Singaporean lawyer, and a computer science professor based in Singapore. The most interesting thing about this session was the comparison between Singapore law and law in other countries like Australia, the US, the UK and South Korea. Many recurring themes were also discussed, such as the lack of clarity about jurisdiction for virtual world cases, common carrier defense, trademark and copyright protections in virtual worlds. Also, the computer science professor gave an interesting overview of Creative Commons. It was interesting to hear an in-world attempted implementation of Creative Commons, but somewhat discouraging to hear how in the real world, most Creative Commons disputes fall back onto the basic applicable copyright laws. As I see it, Creative Commons is designed to give creators much more freedom than the basic copyright framework, but unfortunately, there is not legal recognition of the “gray” areas of Creative Commons. Hopefully that will work out over time.
The afternoon on Wednesday for me was the session that I led on “Commercial applications of virtual worlds”. I will have a small post about that shortly.
