Roxanne made the statement that she believed that there is no area of real world law which should not apply to virtual worlds. All this discussion we're having is really “a storm in a tea cup”. Fraud in Eve Online, for example, should be recognised as criminal behaviour.
Nick Abrahams, on the other hand, understands that actions in virtual worlds should be seen through a contextual prism, including the game rules. He noted that most of these things would depend on a voluntary assumption of risk. There is no more reason to criminalise fraud and deception in EVE than there is to criminalise bluffing in poker. There's a distinction between real fraud and actions which form part of the rules, althought he noted that it was sometimes difficult to see the line in the sand.
Interestingly, Nick from Deacons recognised that one thing that he expects to change in the future will be that companies will be required to draft contracts which were not so one-sided. Roxanne, on the other hand, said she was concerned about the Bragg case because the Judge went out of his way to keep the case - instead of removing it to arbitration. Roxanne acts for Blizzard, and she is very concerned about the future of click-wrap contracts generally.
Roxanne was also very concerned that the court found personal jurisdiction over Rosedale. Roxanne is worried about personal jurisdiction being found all over the place. Nick recognised that this is really the same arguments we had about Dow Jones v Gutnick. Really not as worrying as people once thought.
Scott Boone made some interesting reasoned points. He was concerned about rights of participants vis a vis the platform owner, and made some reasonable statements about limitations on the absolutist power of the game gods. He said that there were other interests which were pushing for recognition, and that eventually, the rules in these environments should be decided by public rights rather than private contracts.
Predictably, the panel in general had a very risk averse attitude. One of the worrying conclusions to come out of the session was that given different rules in international jurisdictions, the lawyers would generally advise that platform owners shard their worlds around geographical limits.