BC Law IPTF Blog

Great post from marathonpacks (via fluxblog) on the demise of OiNK:

Yet what these people don’t understand, or at least won’t admit to understanding publicly, is that OiNK was a symbolic subcultural mirror of exactly everything they profess to hate about their vision of mainstream culture. You can’t deny that OiNK was itself a culture: it was private and elite, it had clearly elaborated and lengthy rules for membership that included an annoyingly audiophilic standard for musical “quality” and sanctions for not tithing as much as you took. It had forums where people discussed meta-level issues about its functionality. OiNK clearly had its own set of ideologies, and they were far from liberatory. While it’s only a symbolic gesture, I’m glad to see OiNK disappear for the same reasons I’m so glad to not be part of a music “scene” anymore; I don’t miss blue-blooded conservativism masquerading as originality and protest.

Also, included for free, support of the much-needed criticism of “Sasha Frere-Jones’ New Yorker article discussing race and indie rock.”

Fittingly, the most popular forms of “indie” music today—formerly accessible on OiNK by sorting in order of popularity—reflect its generic status as not one decided by instrumentation or miscegenation as much as social position. And, sad as it might be, that will probably (hopefully) be OiNK’s legacy 20 years from now: a cultural snapshot of music fandom and/of 00s indie rock as the express domain of the parochial and privileged.

Maybe places like this should take notice of the dangerousness of closed, elite communities.

This might be a no-brainer, but since my last comparison of Facebook status and Twitter with .project and .plan, I’ve been trying to use both of the former more often because I think it actually *is* useful for other people to know what you’re up to.

But it’s not just for what class you’re in, emotional states, or latest trysts, but also as a passive way to implore for help, advice, or to hear from others on similar matters.

For example, let’s say that instead of Twittering “waiting for Jim to fall back in love with me” you Twitter “working on methods of contesting temporary restraining orders.” Then, any of your friends who have also contested TROs could contact you with their related experiences.

Or think of Facebook and Twitter as “away” messages when you can’t or don’t use IM. (”Oh, he’s working on TROs, so I better not bother him.”)

Especially if you’re dedicated to using Twitter you can then create a network of friends in your industry or academic field, and when you’re all Twittering about your work, it really does become a community of experts helping experts, and not just a fun distraction on the Internets.

The biggest problem I see so far is that it takes widespread adoption of a certain application. Right now, in my world circles, Facebook is probably the most adopted, followed by IM, then Twitter. If IM were allowed at more workplaces (which I think it should be since voice-mail is getting so passe, and I think voice-mail to text is so cool), then I would think IM would replace this idea, but until then, Twitter-ing your status works pretty well.

(Since I’m not doing any work, my current status is: “Paul is twittering: watching 28 Days later instead of studying, the former being more worthwhile.“)

(Update 10/24/07: Here’s a better status: “Paul is twittering: finding whether admin agencies use the mailbox rule or time of filing to toll appeals limitations periods - and rocking to the Black Keys!”)

Let’s not make this a trend, but here’s another sex-related IPTF story. Yes, the infamous WTS (”Willing to Sell”) Epic Mount story.

Now, in the MMORPG World of Warcraft players of a certain level can earn “mounts” or animals they can ride so they look cool and move faster in the virtual world. Problem is, they’re hard to come by–they’re extremely expensive. So a presumably female WOW player posted on Cragslist, offering to sell her “services” for an hour for 5000 gold. (Today, 5000 gold could cost around US $685.) An epic mount for an “epic” mount, get it? Haha. Hahaha.

So the next obvious question after “Isn’t this illegal?” is “Is this a taxable transaction?” Here’s a Howstuffworks article about taxation of virtual assets.

I was just thinking that if there was a wishing well where everyone had one shot to get what they wished, then inflation would go out of control. Everyone who asked for $1 M would drive prices up; then people would ask for $100 M, then $1 B, and so on. Global economies would collapse. And if everyone asked for true love, then would true love lose its meaning? World peace? Teddy bears?

Just two quick comments that have very little, substantively, to do with either topic:

1. I’m going to start podcasting. It’s about time. I don’t know if the podcasting will be hosted on this blog, but it will have to do with topics on legal aid cases I’m working on. I always wish there were more “legal topics” podcasts out there, or just more and more resources on specific problems, that are searchable and accessible. It’s time to put my money where my mouth is, and start adding to the legal aid content out there.
2. I just got a new laptop. Pretty robust. Good graphics card, 1 GB RAM, etc. But Second Life still runs so slowly on it. Second Life didn’t run on my old PC, and my Powerbook doesn’t quite cut it either. This is a problem with user acquisition that they’re going to have to solve. Until then, I’m going to look around for another community as a backup.
3. Did you ever notice how whenever you say you have two things to say, it always ends up being at least three?

Maybe it has to do with the fact that I was hyperactive child. (Is that what they used to call ADD?) But today I stopped for a burrito and decided to take a look at my paper on privacy and electronic communications. I’ve been editing this paper that I finished last semester, and updating some of the law, cleaning it up, and adding some stuff on MMORPGs. It’s been slow, what with all the classes and clinic and such.

But at the burrito joint, I cruised through 10 pages and wrote about a page extra in about half an hour. There’s something about me where it’s hard for me to just sit down and work. I need to be doing something else.

(more…)

I was thinking about this brilliant post of mine, where I pretty much said nothing of value, and wondered what virtulegal issues actually arise on Second Life, and whether other MMORPGs like World of Warcraft would have similar issues.

I mean, one major difference is that Second Life, well, has “people,” whereas WoW has, well, gnomes. In Second Life, people live in houses and have jobs and sit around and drink coffee and have sex. WoW–well, has gnomes. And they kill monsters. And go on quests for magic weapons.

So, where there is no specific object for “life” in Second Life–no quests, no XP, no magic weapons to find–maybe there’s more room and time for free minds to start thinking about their rights. (The “quest,” if any, in Second Life is to make money, buy cool things, and have lots of sex. Just like IRL, right?) It’s like Second Lifers are bourgeoisie, and the WoWers are serfs locked into meaningless toil, unable to afford the luxury to think about rights.

WoW is more of a game, where arbitrary rules are accepted. (Think if football was controlled by common law, and not by code.) You either follow the rules, or you don’t succeed in the game. What “rights” beyond that could you need?

I suppose there is the process, IRL, of “support”–bug fixes, code improvements, server uptime, game tweaks. And this is basically what the SLLA is asking for–an IRL improvement, external to the VR game life. This is what spawned the old-time protests on EverQuest and Ultima Online (though the Ultima Online protest about inflation was actually quite an interesting one, deserving a New Yorker article).

But last year, there was a WoW protest where a bunch of warriors gathered en masse to protest deficiencies in how the warrior classification was configured. By virtue of the numbers of characters on-line, in a single location, the servers had trouble handling the load. WoW ended up suspending the accounts of those who participated. Talk about protest and suppression!

I should really get back to reading Evidence… So I’ll finish this later, and try to wrap up my wandering thoughts.

(For full disclosure, I have a character on WoW, and, yes, he is a gnome. But a damn fine one. With lots of magic weapons.)

From the web site of the Second Life Liberation Army :

The Second Life Liberation Army (SLLA) was formed as the ‘in-world’ military wing of a national liberation movement within Second Life. The movement contends that univeral suffrage is a right that should be established within Second Life immediately. As Linden Labs is functioning as an authoritarian government the only appropriate response is to fight. To this end the political movement has dissolved itself and handed over interim power to the SLLA Army council headed by it Chief of Staff. When the SLLA succeeds in its aims it will disband and hand power back to the political wing of the movement. For the time being all military decisions will be taken by the SLLA Chief of Staff and implemented by SLLA fighters.

The SLLA has been exploding “push guns” or virtual bomb blasts that temporarily cloud over the screen so that you can’t see your avatars or anything around them.

From a story on this from the AFP, one of their major demands is for Second Life’s developer, Linden Labs, to go public and allow users to buy shares of stock–claiming this as a “basic right” of Second Lifers.

Is rebellion the same as terrorism? How about on Second Life, where violence has been technologically curbed? In the absence of courts, in a virtual world controlled by a private company, how can virtual citizens demand their rights, especially if they’re in a minority?

Apparently, there was an attempt to establish courts–the Second Life Superior Court–but I haven’t been following this enough to see if there has been anything established.  The blog post linked above is over a year old, and it’s the only mention of it from a Google search, so maybe it’s defunct.

Virtual Worlds, Real Profits has a blog entry on the rush of older players on MMORPGs and their impact on their virtual “economies.”

Older players, who have less time than younger ones, “power level” or buy time from services who will play their characters to increase their character levels:

The process typically involves two players from the power-leveling service working together, with one player using an existing high-level character while the other one uses the client account. As the C/Net story notes, power-leveling is controversial because it violates the terms of service of many games (which prohibit the sharing of account logins) and is frowned upon by many gamers.

These type of violations usually are ferreted out by other players–some of them dedicated vigilantes on personal quests to find these “farmers.” (”Farmers” also refers to players who only play to find special items and gold, which they then sell for real dollars IRL (”in the real world.”)

There are no rules on these behaviors. The rule that power-levelers are violating is that they give their usernames and passwords to third-parties for them to level their characters.

So there is no law governing this behavior, but there is community and culture which derides it. Where there is no written law, this sounds like law to me. And with a statutory mechanism (violation by giving away a username and a password) of prosecuting this behavior, users and their characters can be “deported” by their credit card numbers, names, and addresses.

In researching a paper/presentation for my comparative law class, I ran across a journal article that compares development of rule of law in post-conflict situations to those in online, virtual worlds:

Jonathan E. Hendrix, Law Without State: The Collapsed State Challenge to Traditional International Enforcement, 24 Wis. Int’l L. J. 587 (2006).

The article, in part, compares the situation in Somalia to that in virtual worlds. In a largely unmanageable legal system, economies and polity flourish, but are unregulated from a “top-down” sense. The individual actors within the chaotic state set the stage for what rule of law needs to be developed.

Hendrix then posits that this creates a situation where international law can step in and set the foundation for domestic law and policies, in the vacuum of the latter.

I plan to use this to support my hypothesis that rule of law cannot completely supersede the “will of economy”–that rule of law reform in post-conflict situations should be more “thumbs in the dam” than brutally building a brand-new dam. Rule of law reform should fix things that need to be fixed rather than prospectively apply carte blanche “developed” legal systems on top of effectively disparate legal and cultural systems.