Practicing law in Second Life

This week the law school hosted a lecture by Connie Mableson, an intellectual property attorney with the Phoenix law firm Dodge Anderson. Ms. Mableson was rated "the best IP attorney in Arizona in 2005" - and she is the first lawyer to have an IP practice inside Second Life.

Her lecture was called "Legal Issues in Virtual Worlds" and it was fascinating! She mostly spoke about Second Life and how, given the nature of the site, there are a number of very real-world lawsuits arising from these virtual interactions.

Did you know that millions of dollars change hands in Second Life? You can buy and sell lots of things - from the mundane (clothes, drinks) to the taboo (slave labor). As pointed out in this blog, Second Life can provide a way to commit crimes against other users (theft, fraud, copyright infringement) and because real money is changing hands, there are real-life implications to these "virtual" exchanges. How the law will be applied, used, and possibly adapted to these lawsuits are open questions. For example, can a user who lives in California sue a user in Japan? They both met in the Second Life platform, but they were physically in different areas of the world when the dispute arose.

Another example: say you meet a virtual partner in Second Life and you decide to buy some land together. You decide to have a baby together, an avatar baby (seriously, check it out). Then one day you and your partner have a fight and want to split up. How is the property split? Who "owns" the baby? Would you "share custody" of the avatar?

Because Linden Labs allows users to retain the copyright to the items they create "in-world," the result is that the user owns the items they create and can protect that ownership in the real world (for example, you can register the copyright to these virtual items). Ms. Mableson said there is no "in-world" forum for settling legal disputes but people are talking about it and trying to figure out how to set one up.

The law school's Lodestar Dispute Resolution Program plans to collaborate with the Center for Law, Science and Technology to open up a mediation/arbitration clinic in Second Life. Not sure when that might happen but I hope to learn more about it soon! (By the way, a "clinic" is like a law office but it offers free services to the community and is run by students who are supervised by attorneys.)

Her lecture definitely got me more excited about working in the area of copyright and the web... lots of interesting things are on the horizon, which I hope will lead to lots of interesting job opportunities!