Digital Interactive Symposium

So without further ado, the day begins...

Professor Peter Yu: Moral and Personality Rights and the Digital Dilemma

discussing the moral rights implications of digital alteration of images, Peter asks about user modification of in-world images/content, would this be a distortion of the creator's intentions/ moral rights?

Peter identifies 5 issues: semiotic democracy and creative reuse (Fisher, Lessig) and their role in digital literacy; moral rights and liberative reuse, free speech and communications issues; moral rights, deletion of digital content (Mayer-Schoenberger) relevant to right of withdrawal of work eg restoration of works of Kafka that he had ordered to be burned; obsolescence: are moral rights based on a tradition that is obsolete in a digital age?; and no easy solutions, given inalienability of moral rights and overlapping contractual rights including CC.

Personality rights: what can you do in the virtual world, not the same as RL?

Secondary liability eg City of Heroes case, what sort of liability do you want the game provider to have when they are providing the building blocks?

Andres Guadamuz: Avatar Rights Re-visited: Real ID and Augmented Reality:

questions regarding personality rights of avatars, is the avatar owned by the operator or the platform provider? most EULAs make it clear that the platform provider owns all characters etc except for other end of spectrum eg SL therefore avatars are locked in virtual worlds but this may be about to change.

Real money value of virtual transactions is increasing exponentially, assets held by avatars have commercial value. Andres discussed the coming phenomenon of augmented reality (a la William Gibson, Spook Country) meaning that avatars will no longer be trapped in-world.

And then he discussed RealID, linking identity of person and avatar, problems that can be created by access to user info. Apparently someone has conducted research on emotes in vws.

At some point we need to identify what is virtual identity is, character name, appearance and gender will change along the way, but the inventory/ account remains the same. This may be the obvious defining point for identification of rights.

More will follow after the break (and after my paper)...