Virtual Worlds @ GikII Workshop - Edingburgh

This week I'm in Edinburgh, attending the VI Computer Law World Conference, and, importantly, the associated GikII workshop which was held on Monday and Tuesday. GikII was a lot of fun - about 30 participants, and a really good discussion.

Predictably, I was speaking about the governance of Virtual Environments; particularly, introducing the hypothesis that the degree of legitimacy of a platform owner will be a very good starting point to knowing whether courts should interfere with their rules and the way they enforce their rules.

Interestingly, Lilian Edwards suggested that European Law would be ready now to look at these sorts of disputes on the basis of EU consumer law (legislated unconscionability). Procedural fairness and transparency is apparently taken into account under this legislation. The problem is, Lilian notes, that such a claim is not likely to be brought in the EU.

I'm not sure that common law unconscionability would be ready to deal with oppressive EULAs, or more importantly, with arbitrary decisions made by platform owners, unless you can frame it in terms of property rights. The discussion of importance and value just hasn't happened yet - particularly, we can't evaluate the importance of social networks to individuals within virtual environments.

My slides are here in OpenOffice ODP or (MS PPT formats; also notes available on the wiki. As always, notes are very poorly formatted, but feedback is appreciated.