The Metaverse Journal posted a podcast on legal issues in virtual worlds today. It features an interview with Dr. Melissa de Zwart, Law Faculty Senior Lecturer at Australia’s Monash University.
This is a great podcast covering a wide range of topics, and it is particularly nice to get an international perspective on these issues.

I am happy to announce that next month I am moderating a teleconference on “Why Virtual Worlds Matter for Lawyers” sponsored by the American Bar Association’s Section of Science & Technology Law and Section of Intellectual Property Law. The teleconference, scheduled for June 24 from 10:00 AM to 12:00 noon Pacific time, will be [...]

Earlier this month, Mike Dillon, Executive VP, General Counsel and Corporate Secretary of Sun Microsystems, visited Sun’s Second Life campus for an internal conference and posted about it. It wasn’t terribly big news, particularly since it wasn’t a public event, but Dillon’s post seems to really get both the current reality (”the overall visual [...]

Last year Linden Lab, the company that runs the virtual world of Second Life, banned sexual ageplay in its world. The policy specifically prohibited “depictions of or engagement in sexualized conduct with avatars that resemble children,” and clarified an earlier statement that was widely seen as overbroad. This hit VB’s radar screen because although [...]

This is a little off topic, but I’ve found that the hardest thing to get across when you start talking about virtual worlds with people who aren’t familar with them (both lawyers and non-lawyers) is why they matter beyond their value as play spaces. My usual line is something like this: “The web is going [...]

Plaintiff Antonio Hernandez yesterday filed a motion seeking class certification in his suit against against virtual property dealer Internet Gaming Entertainment for its activities in World of Warcraft. This is a critical filing, as the judge’s decision will determine whether the case includes millions of World of Warcraft users, or just Mr. Hernandez.
Documents follow:

Motion [...]

Blizzard and MDY have filed their “replies” (the last round of briefing to the court) in the lawsuit over MDY’s popular World of Warcraft automation program, MMO Glider. Perhaps sparked by the recent amicus brief filed by Public Knowledge, the replies focus largely on the copyright claims in this case.
Here are the documents:

Blizzard’s Reply Supporting [...]

The Second Life Herald recently reported that the IRS issued a ruling that the Electric Sheep Company’s Second Life greeters for its CSI:NY promotion were “employees” rather than contractors, implicating greater tax withholding and reporting requirements and raising questions for other virtual world businesses.
Giff Constable, Electric Sheep Company’s VP of Operations and Strategy, commented for [...]

VB is pleased to bring readers a new, notable paper in virtual law, Alan Turing and the Matrix: Intelligent Systems for Law Enforcement in Virtual Worlds (.pdf) by Bart Schermer, a partner at consultancy firm Considerati and an assistent professor at the University of Leiden (Faculty of Law) in the Netherlands.
Schermer has written his [...]

New World Notes is running an item expanding on CNN iReports coverage of an ongoing investigation by Playboy into trademark infringement in Second Life. The original report isn’t sourced, outside from identifying a couple of Playboy representatives visiting a potentially infringing display in the virtual world, but New World Notes tracked down Playboy Island [...]