Julian Dibbell will discuss real-world legal issues rooted in virtual-world
economies. In the last five years, virtual worlds like the massively
multiplayer role-playing games EverQuest and Ultima Online have become
sources of genuine wealth for their inhabitants. Scarce in-game items and
well-developed player accounts sell on eBay for hundreds of dollars, with
assets accruing to players at a rate that dwarfs the GNP per capita of major
economies like India's and China's. But who actually owns this wealth? The
companies that create the virtual worlds, or the players who generate the
virtual economies? At least one lawsuit has sought to resolve this question,
and others are sure to follow. Dibbell will lay out the facts, the issues,
and the case for rethinking the status of virtual property within existing
intellectual property regimes.
Monday, December 2, 2002
12:15 - 1:30 pm
1:30- Booksigning
Moot Court Room
Stanford University Law School:
Directions: http://www.law.stanford.edu/directions.shtml
Lunch provided
Julian Dibbell, author and journalist, has been writing about digital
networks and their cultural fallout for over a decade. His articles and
essays -- on subjects ranging from hacker subcultures to blogger aesthetics
to the politics of virtual rape -- have appeared in The Village Voice, Time,
Feed, Wired, and many other publications, both online and off, and have been
reprinted in Best American Science Writing 2002 (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2002),
Reading Digital Culture (Blackwell, 2001), Flame Wars: The Discourse of
Cyberculture (Duke University Press, 1994), and other anthologies. He is the
author of My Tiny Life: Crime and Passion in a Virtual World (Henry Holt,
1998), about the text-based online role-playing game LambdaMOO, and is
currently researching a book on the next generation of massively multiplayer
online games. In spring 2003, he and Lawrence Lessig will coteach a course
at the Law School on the social structures of virtual worlds.