Virtual World Law Blog

On September 15 & 16, join industry titans such as Sony, SalesForce, Zappos, and Adobe at the GSummit in New York City. GSummit NYC will show attendees how to use the power of games to create breakthrough engagement with their customers and employees. Companies like Gilt Groupe, Google, NBC/Universal, MTV, Recyclebank and Aetna have leveraged gamification to transform their businesses, and will share startling insights, statistics and hands-on workshops at GSummit NYC. Check out some of the amazing content and speakers. Register now before GSummit sells out.

Jim Gatto, Leader of Pillsbury's Virtual Worlds & Video Game team and Social Media, Entertainment & Technology team will be speaking from 1:30 - 2:15 PM on September 15 about gamification law and a formula for success.

Earlier this year, Jim spoke at the Gamification Summit held in San Francisco. His presentation on managing legal risk in gamification can be viewed below:

A weekly wrap up of interesting news about virtual worlds, virtual goods and other social media.

Judge Says Warrant Required for Cell Phone Location Data

In recent years, the courts have struggled to decide whether the government needs a warrant to access historical records about a cell phone user's location. Some courts have found that when users turn on their cell phones, they "voluntarily" transmit their location to their cell phone providers and thereby waive any expectation of privacy.

Social Media Could Render Covert Policing 'Impossible'

Facebook has proven to be one of the biggest dangers in keeping undercover police officers safe due to applications such as facial recognition and photo tagging, according to a adjunct professor at ANU and Charles Sturt University.

Building With Someone Else's Blocks: Going Open Source With Games

Giving players access to source code has been a part of gaming's history for years, from the earliest MUDs to Tim Sweeney's ZZT. As console gaming's proprietary hardware and its closely guarded development tools slowly squeezed PC play from its central place in the industry the idea of open source play declined.

Wirklich? Germany Declares Facebook 'Like' Button Illegal

The German government on Friday declared the Facebook "Like" button, which appears on countless websites accessible all over the world, in violation of the country's strict privacy rights -- and thus illegal.

U.K. Pulls Back From Threat to Control Social Networks

The British government stepped back from threats to shut down social networks during future disturbances and instead is seeking to work with the networks on how best to use them to help. A high-profile political meeting today between the government, police and the networks was described as "honest and refreshing" after police admitted they struggled to understand social media.

Al Qaeda In Azeroth? Terrorism Recruiting and Training in Virtual Worlds

In their pursuit of terrorists, government intelligence agencies leave no digital rock unturned: telephone calls, emails, text messages, blogs, news sites - they monitor them all. Sometimes, as with social networks like Facebook, the companies behind these services gladly hand over data to governments to assist in this hunt. Yet there is still one place where terrorists can go, one place where they can talk to each other openly without fear of being detected: online video games.

Given the great interest in "the cloud" from a business perspective, as well as Microsoft's popularization of the concept with its "To the Cloud!" advertising campaign, it's no wonder that many game providers are looking to the cloud as the next viable and profitable gaming platform. The cloud movement not only provides economic incentives through various subscription and pay-to-play models, but also helps defeat piracy by locking down game code and other intellectual property from potential thieves.

Cloud game providers have a lot to gain from virtualization, but moving to a cloud-based framework raises potential legal issues that should be considered.

Latency

The first big issue for gaming providers considering moving to the cloud is both a practical one and a legal one - latency. Unlike digital downloads, streaming games require both down and upstream communications. Further, gaming often demands instant, real-time action, so any material latency will be noticed, especially for multi-player, FPS-type or other real-time games. Currently, some game providers have tried to satisfy gamers' demand for real-time, low-latency play by operating in data centers that are physically close to the gamer. From a technical perspective, cloud gaming may present an issue because it could involve moving the game servers much farther away from the gamer, thus having the potential to lead to increased, or even significant latency. Another technical fix may be to use "tricks" similar to those used in non-cloud gaming to compensate for latency issues.

From a legal perspective, however, the move to the cloud could bring such "tricks" into the realm of patents held by the gaming company OnLive--patents which cover "twitch gameplay" over a cloud-based system. When porting a game from client-server or mobile-based platforms to a cloud-based platform, game providers should be sure to investigate whether the conversion will expose them to potential infringement liability, including the OnLive patent portfolio. This is especially important because most game providers are not the actual game developer, so game providers should also review their agreements with the game developer to understand whether indemnification or re-development are options. Further, if the agreement is with a small game developer, the developer may not have the financial resources to indemnify the game provider, and thus the game provider should be aware of the potential risks before embarking on a cloud-based venture.

To read this publication in its entirety, click here.

A weekly wrap up of interesting news about virtual worlds, virtual goods and other social media.

Enter at Your Own Rift: How gold farming really hurts the economy

Recently, Trion Worlds CCO and RIFT Executive Producer Scott Hartsman talked to Gamasutra about how gold farming is a much bigger threat than we assume, particularly because of the large amount of credit card fraud. Those who played RIFT at launch probably recall the large wave of hacked accounts early on. According to Hartsman, the hacking attempts were so quick and so intense that the game could have been "denial-of-serviced off the internet" when it launched.

Want To Be a Gamification Expert? Get Certified

Gamification, that buzz word panned as hype by some, has increasingly won over companies, investors and even research firms like Gartner, which now predicts half of all companies will use gamification by 2015. So what's next? How about gamification certification.

Facebook Ramps Up Lobbying Over Privacy

Facebook Inc. has beefed up its public policy efforts with an eye to shaping federal privacy legislation, sharply increasing its lobbying expenditures and expanding its roster of Washington insiders, disclosure records show.

NYPD Looks to Mine Social Networks for Infor on Criminal Activity

Privacy is something most people worry about and try to protect, but on social networking giants like Facebook, it's almost impossible to protect all of your information despite privacy settings. Now, the New York Police Department (NYPD) is data mining Facebook, Twitter and MySpace to track hooligans who have committed or are planning to commit crimes.

Registration Opens for Game::Business::Law 2012

Registration is now open for the 4^th Annual Game::Business::Law Summit on January 25 - January 26, 2012. The event will be held at Southern Methodist University, Dedman School of Law and is hosted by The Guildhall at SMU, SMU's Dedman School of Law and The Center for American and International Law.

A Guide to Controlling Privacy, Info on Google+

Google+is the new social networking kid on the block, and one of the main reasons so many people are interested in the service over Facebook is Google+'s proclaimed focus on protecting users' privacy. Whether you're a new Google+ user or you're already a pro, understanding how to control your information on the site can make you feel much more at ease on the social network. Here's the lowdown on Google+'s privacy controls, including a few of the more buried settings you'll want to know about.

Who:
Pillsbury's Cydney Tune and Mark Litvack

What:
PLI's Technology and Entertainment Convergence 2011: Hot Business and Legal Issues in "Technotainment"

When:
September 9, 2011 (New York) & September 21, 2011 (San Francisco)

Links:
New York - http://www.pli.edu/re.aspx?pk=29651&t=HCF1_1TECH
San Francisco - http://www.pli.edu/re.aspx?pk=29652&t=HCF1_1TECH

Details:
PLI has completely revised this year's program to include today's major legal and business issues in the convergence of entertainment and technology.  The program brings together a faculty of experienced in-house lawyers, law firm attorneys and senior business executives on the cutting edge of this burgeoning practice.

Cydney Tune, Chair of this year's program, will be speaking on a panel titled "Licensing Film and Television Content for New Media and Platforms." In this presentation, the points of view of various stakeholders in the digital film and television content industry (content owners, distributors, platform providers) will be discussed. The panel will also address various digital video distribution models (e.g., transactional video-on-demand, subscription video-on-demand, free/ad-supported video-on-demand, and electronic sell-through) and the careful attention to deal structuring necessary to achieve an integrated, cross-platform model of sales and distribution that maximizes exploitation across all possible avenues.

Mark Litvack will be speaking on a panel titled "An Update On Social Media and Copyright - Is Anyone Winning This Race?" Social media (also known as participatory media, or user generated content) presents challenges for platform provider, copyright owners, brand holders, and users alike. In this presentation, the panel will address the legal obligations on these stakeholders, trends and practices in DMCA notice-and-takedown and Terms of Service enforcement and attempt to answer the question are content owners simply continuing to play a must-lose game of "Whack-a-Mole." The panel will also cover some of the innovative, voluntary efforts that build atop these obligations, including Content ID on YouTube including its "Copyright School" and Google's recent antipiracy initiatives and discuss the balance of the question about what the social media sites have done against what more they have left to do.

A weekly wrap up of interesting news about virtual worlds, virtual goods and other social media.

LinkedIn's 2Q Earnings Soar as Growth Accelerates

The results announced Thursday provided the first update on LinkedIn's progress since the company's headline-grabbing initial public offering in May. LinkedIn's shares have more than doubled from their IPO price of $45, stirring a debate about whether investors are overvaluing Internet companies. LinkedIn earned $4.5 million, or 4 cents per share, in the April-June period. That contrasted with earnings of $938,000, or 2 cents per share, at the same time last year.

Controversy Erupts Over SpotON3D's Patent Claims

Competing OpenSim hosting companies are concerned that SpotON3D's viewer plugin patent isn't original, will hinder innovation, and that the company isn't playing fair with the broader open source community. Other developers, however, say that SpotON3D's innovation can help energize OpenSim adoption -- and the patent, if it is granted, may not be that burdensome to the community.

Diablo III Will Have Real Money Auction House

For as amazing as Diablo II was, the economy was rather quickly ruined by the sale of virtual items. Most of the better loot required a significant time investment - or luck - so many players naturally flocked to the more convenient option. Blizzard, being the savvy developers that they are, has come up with a work-around for that: A flood of reports are coming in that Diablo III will feature an in-game auction house that will allow you to sell and buy virtual items (including virtual currency) for real cash.

EA Chief Vows to Keep Up With Big Changes In the Video Game Industry

Electronic Arts chief executive John Riccitiello said in a conference call today that the video game industry has fundamentally changed as gamers embrace new digital alternatives to console games - from mobile games to social games. And, he said, EA's strategy is changing with it.

SAP Launches The Ultimate Travel Challenge Dashboard

I find the concept of gamification fascinating so when I heard that a fellow team at SAP was launching a game to showcase one of the company's solutions it peaked my interest.  The game was built on SAP Crystal Solutions and showcases how the product can help your business by simulating the pressure of making informed decisions in a face-paced environment.

Augmented Reality Kills the QR Code Star

Augmented reality leader Layar just took its system to a whole new level by installing a real-world object recognition protocol that's a little like Google's Goggles. In one swoop it may have turned AR apps from intriguing, inspiring, and occasionally useful toys into serious tools for information discovery and, of course, advertising. Let's call it hacking the real world.

PayPal: 12M Monthly Users Are Paying For Virtual Goods

PayPal, which collects a lot of data on online payments, says the monetization of digital content has come a long way since the company was launched in 1998 and sold to eBay in 2002. Now it generates more than $1 billion in quarterly revenue and has more than 100 million active users.