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American Bar Assc. forms virtual worlds committee

September 10th, 2007 (Visited 2429 times) Tags:

Looks like Virtually Blind is stepping up a bit, as Benjamin Duranske, the author of the blog, is now co-chair of the new Virtual Worlds and Multiuser Online Games committee.

Presumably this means that some of the stuff that Greg Boyd had as open questions in his session at AGDC will start getting ABA opinions put into the mix.

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Virtually Blind - Virtual Law | Legal Issues That Impact Virtual Worlds » Blog Archive » Second Life Child Pornography Allegations Draw International Press Attention wrote on September 10th, 2007 at 3:00 pm:

[...] Website: American Bar Assc. forms virtual worlds committee: “Looks like Virtually Blind is stepping up a bit, as Benjamin Duranske, the author of the blog, is [...]

Second Life Herald: Big Blog Dramha Roundup wrote on September 23rd, 2007 at 5:13 pm:

[...] and here’s another good one: http://www.raphkoster.com/2007/09/10/american-bar-assc-forms-virtual-worlds-committee/#comments [...]

Raph’s Website » American Bar Assc. forms virtual worlds committee « Lawspot Online wrote on September 26th, 2007 at 8:54 am:

[...] Raph’s Website » American Bar Assc. forms virtual worlds committee Raph’s Website » American Bar Assc. forms virtual worlds committee [...]

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Prokofy Neva said on September 11th, 2007 at 10:59 am:
I view this as a vanity gambit, and frankly troubling, with grave implications for SL and the Metaverse. Duranske has taken the lead in exhibiting an unseemly prosecutorial zeal about Ginko’s, which he alleges is a pyramid scheme. It may well be; but he has no evidence, no discovery motion — he is not practicing as a lawyer now currently in the state of California, is not serving any client, and is just blogging and spouting to the media. He was demonstrably responsible for a run on the bank in SL, panicking people into withdrawals. Given that Ginko’s had survived 3 years, and its owner has *not* cut and run but remains in SL and available trying to sort out the mess, you have to raise questions about whether something like this is more complicated than some mere pyramid scheme.

By sharp contrast, Duranske is all caution and silence and “allegeds” on other legal issues in SL that fit his agenda, such as the Bragg case, where there actually *is* a case and plenty of documents that *have* come out and been published on discovery, and he can’t seem to muster a comment about the obvious fraud that was used to scam this sim off the Linden auction.

And then there’s the awful position taken by the SLBA’s board member Jessica Holyoke, with silence from Duranske and others, saying that Linden Lab *should* turn over the names of Chinese dissidents criticizing the government if the Chinese government asks for their identities from Second Life because that’s “complying with the law” (!) — even though there is no demonstrable reason on earth why LL should be doing this.

The ABA has been controversial in the past on various issues involving oppressive governments, and I’m not surprised this particular bunch from SL has gotten on the ABA bandwagon. It bears careful watching. Our freedoms are at stake.

I absolutely *do not buy* the idea that if we don’t accept the dubious legal opinion of Duranske and others in the SLBA and do as they say, we risk unwanted regulation from real life. Frankly, real-life regulation with its standards for due process, rule of law, and protection of civil rights, is looking a lot better than a wannabe prosecutor who causes a run on a virtual bank just so he can gloat and prove himself “right”.
Benjamin Duranske said on September 12th, 2007 at 10:35 am:
This above comment is a good example of one of the difficulties lawyers face in establishing a presence in virtual worlds. There is a certain sector of the population, typically residents who view it as “their world” that just doesn’t believe lawyers have anything to offer the virtual world. Some of them can be pretty loud. In the long run, I think it will become clear that attorneys in virtual spaces do more good than harm, just as in real life. Between now than and then, though, my advice to attorneys who are establishing a virtual world presence is to have fairly thick skin.

As for the ABA committee which Raph originally posted about, I’m really excited to co-chair it — along with with Sean Kane, of Drakeford & Kane, and Cristina Burbach, of Fried Frank.

Greg Boyd’s questions are exactly the sort of questions we’ll be addressing. One of our early projects is setting programs for ABA meetings that focus on issues in virtual law, and those actually provide a very good great starting point. Thanks for the link, Raph.
Matt Mihaly said on September 12th, 2007 at 11:03 pm:
I think this is an awesome development. Congrats Benjamin. A small but truly legitimate step forward in understanding what it is going to mean to use a virtual world within the context of law and social structure.

–matt
Prokofy Neva said on September 23rd, 2007 at 2:16 am:
Once again, Duranske extrapolates from the legitimate criticism I make of his very troublesome actions in Second Life to some notion of “the difficulties lawyers face in establishing presences in virtual worlds” and implies that I have some blanket hatred of attorneys or their presence in SL.

Bollocks. This is merely an example of about six violations of all those laws of rhetoric which create false impressions of generic problems out of specifics. Hundreds of lawyers have set up shop in Second Life. Many of them use SL as augmentationists, as a kind of website. Others become involved in the issues of virtuality and SL itself. Some of them have made very important contributions already by defending clients intellectual property, for example.

None of them commented with the zeal and ferocity of Duranske to the SL and RL media about Ginko’s and other issues (in fact, most attorneys in SL actually practicing law now, unlike Duranske, who has “taken a year off to write a novel) don’t get involved in controversies no make rash comments as it would reflect on their own and their firm’s reputations.

(Duranske even runs an entire page with extensive links denouncing me, which he hopes to use as a Google-bombing exercise ROFL).

Lawyers have plenty to offer virtual worlds. I’ve always listened with enormous respect to figures like James Grimmelman at State of Play, for example. I’ve always felt State of Play, with its menu of lawyers, game and world executives etc was among the most interesting of conferences in our metaverse.

But…which lawyers are we supposed to listen to on which laws, where? They come from different countries; they span the political spectrum from extreme leftist to extreme rightist; they vary in temperment and personal ambition — some are out to make a buck and want to show corporate clients, present and future, that they are very aggressive and can-do; others are extremely ideological and zealous about future legal utopias they imagine only themselves designing, without restraint.

My advice to residents in virtual worlds is to thoroughly question anyone setting themselves up as “governing authorities” by waving around their law degrees and licenses. What authority can they possibly have? They need to be taken with an enormous grain of salt because their applicability to virtuality isn’t at all established, and they can really only speak with authority (and not even always then) about law in the state where they are licensed to practice, on matters that really demonstratively apply (for example, on the casino law that led Linden Lab to ban gambling). In these cross-border worlds, there’s a lot still to work out. So far, Linden Lab, its counsel, real-life authorities, and other legal commentators haven’t said a thing against the banks, stock markets, and loan companies in Second Life. They may. But so far, they are keeping a distance from it.

What have litigators brought to Second Life, for example? Let’s think truly hard on this one. Um….all they’ve done, really, is put the fear of God into people by threatening them with libel suits (speciously and frivolously). Or by merely *starting* a well-publicized suit about a bed that has many copies inworld, they’ve put a chill on the market of anything similar in appearance. And most pointedly, they’ve forced LL to remove some of the promises of creativity and virtual ownership that they once placed on their website, not as a shill, but as an encouragement. That’s not good. That’s not progress. If that’s all lawyers do — damage virtual worlds and their makers and not protect them — than what has been achieved?

The governance and law of virtual worlds are so important that they definitely cannot be left to real-world lawyers. Everyone who has a stake in them must take part. But some of them are coming in and swaggering about, with little restraint or oversight. In real life, there are state bar associations, oversight bodies — and then, of course, all the institutions of real life like executive authority, Congress or parliament, the judicial branch, the media, to provide checks and balances on would-be “leaders” like this.

I frankly find one of the most horrific facets of virtuality these days to be one where self-appointed legal experts are fashioning law and governments in a complete void where there is absolutely no executive, judicial, or legislative authority restraining them. I don’t see that the results are good at all — there’s a lot of vanity, sectarianism, and just plain craziness about.

An ABA committee is not the place where matters of governance and policy in virtual worlds should be established, anymore than Ted Castronova’s Ludium workshop in Indiana should be the entity that houses the “self-governance of the Metaverse”. These people aren’t elected; they aren’t even appointed by any council of elders — they are *self* appointed and therefore have no legitimacy.

There is a mad and aggressive rush to position “law” and “governance” in virtual worlds precisely because there’s a sense that a lot of money is about to be made from them in 2008, as all kinds of them get started and many of them will be competing. I’ve had quite a few journalists ask me if they think the lawsuits against Second Life now in fact were prompted or secretly supported by competitors.

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