GIKII returns triumphant!

Rather belatedly, this is a report on the GIKII conference that I attended at University College London on 19 September 2007. GIKII is a one-day conference about law, technology and culture, and where the 3 meet, and this is the second such conference to date.

Having been to a fair few law conferences, I have to say that GIKII is probably the most fun one on the block by a long way, with audience banter by the bucketload and some great presentations by the speakers.

Whilst the 30 - 60 minute format of sessions at a traditional law conference might have lead to a greater insight into one or two aspects of law, you can't compete with the sheer diversity of the legal information thrown at you during the 18 or so presentations given in one day at GIKII.

All of the presentations were interesting, and here are some personal highlights:

• Andres Guadamuz (Technollama) on economies in virtual worlds, and how the adding of an economy to the City of Heroes has contributed to the development of that world. Aside from investigating whether IMPACT should have a Second Life presence, I haven't much experience of virtual worlds so it was good to learn from someone who has clearly devoted quite a bit of time to the subject!
• Abbe Brown's entertaining analysis of the competition law and human rights implications of social media services/virtual worlds.
• Faith Lawrence's account of the controversy and upset caused by Livejournal's sudden deletion of huge rafts of user content from the service to "protect children". Whilst the talk raised interesting points about contract vs community - the conflict between community standards and what the ts & cs of such a service dictate about user standards (Livejournal has been around for over a decade and many users regard it as their "community") - my own perception is that Livejournal caused the problems by poorly implementing its policies and bad management of the situation.
• Lilian Edwards on privacy issues with social media sites such as FaceBook, asking whether there should be a legal code in place to impose minimal privacy levels for these sites.
• Rebecca Wong's overview of the varying applications of Article 3(2) of the Data Protection Directive by EU member states.
• Jordan Hatcher on the copyright issues raised by tattoos.
• Fernando Barrio's talk about the implications of patent trolls for virtual worlds.
• Richard Jones on the incompatibility of Creative Commons with folk music.
• Ray Corrigan's talk about a court case in 6th century Ireland which raises many of the same sort of access to information/copying of information issues that I had previously assumed to be very modern.

You can view most of the presentations on the GIKII programe page.

Other reports on GIKII can be found at the blogs of various attendees and participants: Open Rights Group, Electro Mate, Pangloss, Technollama.