Practicing Law Institute Offers CLE on Virtual Worlds
October 22nd, 2007 by Benjamin Duranske
Practicing Law Institute is offering a Continuing Legal Education (CLE) course on virtual law entitled “Virtual Worlds – The New Legal Frontier” next month. The course will be conducted via live audio on November 8, 2007, from 1:00 to 2:00 PM Eastern and will be presented by Stephen J. Davidson, of Leonard, Street and Deinard in Minneapolis, and Stephen Mortinger, Vice President and Associate General Counsel of IBM’s Systems & Technology Group.
It looks like a good introduction to the key issues. The cost is $299, and the program qualifies for one hour of CLE credit in most states.
From the course description:
With literally millions of active participants from around the globe, virtual worlds are emerging as an important and increasingly valuable venue for social and commercial activity. They are also raising questions about what laws govern conduct in this new space, who has jurisdiction over behavior there, and which courts have the power to control behavior and resolve disputes that arise in the virtual realm.
Do we really need an entirely new legal regime (e.g., new intellectual property laws) and “in world” courts as some commentators suggest, or are the laws, regulations and legal precedents developed over the past ten years for other Internet venues applicable to this new paradigm as well?
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One Response to “Practicing Law Institute Offers CLE on Virtual Worlds”
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Personally, I feel that many of the IP laws which already exist can and will find their way towards enforcement or at least applicablity in-world. Why re-invent the wheel?
Copyright law has notably answered the call of the internet age. There is still, admittedly, much room to debate about whether the answer was correct and how we can make it less wrong or more right, depending on which side of the argument one sits. Trademark law is being dragged kicking and screaming in what appears to be the right direction, and thats much better than say… ahemm..the patent system (particularly internationally, though recent events have shown promise).
My question is “How would we dare to go about building an entirely new system of intellectual property in virtual worlds when we still seem to have so much work to do on adapting the system of IP laws that already exist in RL?”.