Panel number 2, and we have Eddan Katz chairing and Peter Ludlow, Jack Balkin, and Fred Schauer chatting about rights-related issues, and specifically the movement across the boundaries between the real and the virtual.
Peter kicked off the session, recalling his misadventures with Electronic Arts which have been reported elsewhere. He did a nice job of recounting the level of censorship that he and others have been subjected to in TSO and in the boards that support the games (Stratics, etc).
Fred Schauer was interested in discussing the structure of governance and the role of speech within the governance structure. As a virtual world outsider he questioned the novelty of virtual worlds regulation, reminding us of the early claims that cyberspace was a separate jurisdiction (I'm going to be talking about this later today, so I'll post more then on this topic). And of course his argument is (partly) that virtual worlds are nothing new, move along, nothing to see here. I've seen this type of rhetorical argument before--Frank Easterbrook's Law of the Horse being the most obvious example--and it troubled me then and it troubles me now. Yeah, yeah, I agree that the claims for total novelty of social relationships in VWs are overblown, and need to be reigned in. But it seems to me to be wilfully blind to claim that there are no new forms of community being developed here, no new problems that might emerge from trans-jurisdictional communities, and so on.
But in fact, once you parse out this aspect of his talk his argument isn't really about "there's nothing new here" but a criticism of assumptions that free speech must apply in virtual worlds. This is a variant of the "First Amendment is a local ordinance" claim and I happen to agree with him. Why should it be that we assume that the American experience--which is unique and not followed by any other democracy in the world--is one that naturally should apply to a virtual world?
Jack Balkin then summarized his "Virtual Liberties" article, which readers can find here. His focus was on the private censorship aspect of his paper, which is mostly found at Part V (I think). He added to the paper by picking up Ted C's idea that games/VWs should establish charters ("interation statutes") that define the nature of the speech (and privacy) rights that the worlds provide for. The upside for the devs is that they get held-harmless by the RW law if they comply with their interation statutes.
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