I still hate “There” more than any other piece of software I’ve ever used to interact with other people (and I’ve used Groupwise, so that’s saying something) but enough lectures and panels on virtual law are scheduled at the State of Play Academy over the next few months that readers who can stomach There’s counterintuitive interface, limited tools, and general inanity may want to consider grimacing along with me in order to attend what look to be some pretty good events.

In the next week alone, there are lectures on local cultures in the global media space (tomorrow), the Fourth Amendment and voluntary information collection (next Monday), the trade secret doctrine of “inevitable disclosure,” (next Tuesday) and “indirect enforcement” of intellectual property law (also next Tuesday). Here’s a link to the 2007 SOPA calendar for more information.

If you go to any of these, look for me. My avatar in There is ‘BenjaminNoble’ (spaces aren’t allowed) and I’ll be wearing an ugly yellow shirt, board shorts, and leather mandals (this outfit appears to be an everlasting punishment for my unwillingness to give Makena Technologies any money). You thought Sisyphus had it bad.

Virtually Blind periodically runs “quicklinks” — items that are not long enough for a full story, but are worth a click. Here’s today’s batch, slightly less “quick” than usual, all on the theme of what-comes-next:

• The Law Librarian Blog has a short piece discussing the fact that the Alliance Second Life Library was named “Library of the Future.” Good call, in my opinion — they do really good work. It also gives me the opportunity to toss out my short analysis of why Virtual Worlds matter: in essence, interfaces will inevitably converge toward reality. As computers got faster, we quickly changed from text input to clicking pictures of garbage cans and file folders. As they get faster still, we’ll “grab” 3D representations of these objects to use them (e.g. take a dictionary off a shelf to look something up in a dictionary). Life has a steep learning curve, but we’ve already climbed it, so developers will always be motivated to use tools that mimic real life as closely as possible. In other words, today’s virtual worlds are the beginning of the last major interface shift — it’s how the web of the future, Microsoft Word 2015, and Final Fantasy 23 are all going to look. And yes, my geeky friends, Roddenberry was right: your desktop will eventually be a holodeck.

• CNNMoney’s Business 2.0 is running a piece on professions in virtual worlds featuring an attorney named Stevan Lieberman (no avatar name given) who supposedly “took in $7,000 in fees in the first two weeks after hanging up his virtual shingle” because he “has taken a hybrid approach, using Second Life as a meet-and-greet area for new clients, who then take their real-world legal needs offline.” I’d love this to be true, and I’m sure there’s something to it, but I don’t really buy the implication of Business 2.0′s number. You don’t generate $7k in new, walk-in business within two weeks of opening a real office. My guess is that some Second Life-based business hired Lieberman through traditional channels, and Lieberman then set up a virtual presence in order to serve that client and find others. I’m also not sure I buy the article’s assertion that the biggest client base in Second Life is “programmers looking to patent their code” either — I think that long term, enforcing trademarks in virtual worlds has a lot more potential. In any case, VB is attempting to contact Lieberman and hopes to bring readers more information on what is clearly a Second Life success story, even if it isn’t quite what Business 2.0 makes it out to be.

• Second Life News Network has a somewhat myopic post up about Second Life job bidding sites. The article mentions My SL Project (which has about 15 listings right now) and SLBounty (which has none at the moment, though SLNN focuses most of the article on it and refers to its owner as “a keen coder,”) but it fails to mention SL Work Exchange (which has 11 listings). [Editor's note: after running this piece, I learned that SL Work Exchange has been the subject of some controversy itself. For what it's worth, an article about this, and a ton of comments, are linked here.] Though there’s no clear favorite yet, the SLNN article gives me a chance to point something out I’ve been thinking of for a while: these sites are perfect for legal projects. Current listings include scripting, event hosting, architecture, and sometimes, significant content creation projects (e.g. linked ATM networks, SL/RL video camera integration, etc.). Though I don’t see anything up for lawyers at the moment, attorneys with Second Life presences should keep an eye on these services, because writing EULAs and contracts for in-world companies seems a natural fit.

Harvard Law School recently wrapped up a Second Life-based mock trial of the Josh Wolf case, attended by the real life Josh Wolf.

Wolf, a video journalist and blogger, had been imprisoned for refusing to turn over video footage of an anti-G8 anarchist protest in San Francisco that he recorded in 2005. A federal judge ordered him released earlier this month after 226 days in federal “coercive custody.”

The mock trial, which was scheduled before Wolf’s release, was designed at least partly to help generate support for his cause. One student writes: “From the first pre-trial conferences it quickly became clear that this case had been chosen because of a desire to ‘do something for Josh Wolf,’ [and] ‘do something’ meant to present the case in a light favorable to Wolf and obtain a verdict for his release.”

Wolf, however, was back on the mean streets of San Francisco televising the revolution by the time the mock trial was scheduled to begin, so he decided to participate. (He logged in as ‘Jwolf Writer’ — apparently doing seven and a half months in prison in defense of journalistic principles doesn’t get you a custom Second Life avatar name, though singing “Tom’s Diner” a capella on the grid does.) One assumes that the presence of the real-life defendant, who just last fall had watched his real-life lawyers lose on the same arguments the HLS students were making — sending him to real-life prison — added measurable tension to the virtual proceedings.

Lots of data and analysis from the mock trial including a video, the transcript, and analysis by the prosecutors is now available, linked below.

Read the rest of the post »

In the not-so-serious virtual crime department, Wired recently covered a theft at kid-based virtual world “Club Penguin.”
Sure, it’s not as big a deal to you as having your Second Life vendor account hacked, but to an eight year old… it’s devastating. Especially if your little brother is the perp.

One of the highlights from the article:

“All my money is gone, and there’s a fireplace in my igloo,” Ariel screamed when she logged back on.

Poor kid. And it just gets worse from there; her little brother’s a recidivist.

Somewhat oddly, I was actually looking into Club Penguin before I stumbled across this piece because the subject came up in an interview I did last week for a subscription-based financial news site. The analyst I was talking to puts more stock in the longevity of kid-based virtual worlds like Club Penguin than I do, but I have to admit that the numbers are astounding — Club Penguin is reported to have had 4.5 million unique users in December 2006 alone.

So I logged in. Why not? They say right on the website that it’s for “kids of all ages.” You’re laughing, but you really want to know what it’s like, don’t you?

To the immense credit of Club Penguin, safety is a high priority. I had to click a box saying I was “Really Old” (the other demographics offered were “8 and Under,” “9-12,” and “13-17″), an automated system told me to “please be a good example for the younger players,” I could have reported a player to a moderator with two clicks, and though I didn’t test it (these are kids, remember) their filtering is supposedly excellent, blocking curses, come-ons, and violent chat phonetically as well as by keyword and format (e.g., phone numbers).

In addition, they’ve built in self-policing. After an account is 30 days old, the penguin can become a “Secret Agent” and report other players’ misdeeds to the moderators. I assume most kids opt-in to this, since it sounds cool.

Overall, I’m impressed with both the world (which is frankly pretty fun), and with the safety and moderation tools.

Best of all, the kids are learning how to behave in a virtual world-based MMO game, and us old folks get to help. After I got my newbie ass handed to me in an inner tube race down a snowy mountain, a penguin named ‘Imnasim’ told me, “I won u.”

“No, little dude,” I told him, “u own3d me.”