As I've mentioned previously, today I took part in an online event to mark World Intellectual Property Day, held within the Second Life space. Very interesting event, with only a small number of technical issues. I did make a recording of it, but I think there was also an official recording which I imagine will be available in due course... Anyway, here's (roughly) what I said:

Next Wednesday is World Intellectual Property Day - and I'm going to be part of an event which takes place within the virtual world of Second Life. This is my first venture into Second Life, and it should be an exciting event. We'll be meeting at Pooley Stage, Pooley (251, 16, 55), at 2 p.m. Australian Eastern Standard Time on Wednesday 26 April (which equates to 9 p.m. Server Time on Tuesday 25 April).

21st Century Creativity in a Copyright World: How Can the Potential Be Realised?

You are invited to join the QUT Law Faculty's Intellectual Property: Knowledge, Culture, and Economy Program, in conjunction with the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation, for a free seminar on World Intellectual Property day at 2pm on Wednesday 26 April 2006. The rapid pace of technological change that we are experiencing requires us to always be aware of the balances inherent in copyright law; we must attempt to provide adequate protection to copyright owners, while at the same time allow for a rich culture of experimentation and innovation. Particularly, we must be careful not to close off new avenues for expression and creativity before they have a chance to develop. Join us for a discussion of the current context, covering fair use/fair dealing, blogs, mash-ups, parody, and much more.

I've been meaning to flag the fact that DGMLive has gone online. The site is the new online arm of Discipline Global Mobile, the record label founded by King Crimson guitarist Robert Fripp, and offers a growing number of Fripp and Crimson concerts and other goodies for purchase and download. This interests me as a fan, but also for other reasons: music purchased through DGMLive is available in MP3 and FLAC (lossless audio) formats, and is downloaded through the peer-to-peer filesharing software BitTorrent.

Neither of these facts sits well with standard music industry wisdom (now there's an oxymoron for you) that 1. the customer is the enemy, and cannot be trusted, 2. p2p filesharing tools of any kind are evil, and must be destroyed, and 3. because of 1. and 2., there is a need for new music formats which include strong digital rights management (DRM) measures to prevent unauthorised duplication, filesharing, or other supposedly illegal activities. At the same time, having been cheated by industry players at various times during his 40-odd-year career, Fripp can hardly be described as a friend of the music industry - which he has described repeatedly as being 'fulled by greed' -, so perhaps it's not so surprising that he would take a different approach to online distribution.

We're on to the last panel session of the conference now - a summary panel with Larry Lessig, Stuart Cunningham, and Sal Humphreys as well as conference host Brian Fitzgerald. Larry starts by pointing out that what's happening in the computer games field is real, it's common, and traditional property owners have exactly the wrong intuitions in dealing with it. For one, there is a significant monetary value being generated in the online environment (there is even a story of sweatshops in Mexico developing gaming assets and selling them profitably on eBay). It is also a very common activity - and one which is a voluntary form of play as work, much along the same lines as free and open source software development.

Responding to the previous presentations, Brian Fitzgerald and Nic Suzor now outline some of the legal issues involved here - games users' rights are governed generally by end-user licence agreements (EULAs), and these go right to the heart of the question here: in buying a game, does one buy a copy of the game, or a licence to use it? This then influences whether players own the content created in their interaction with the game. Indeed, the nature of the EULA may also influence what players are attracted to these games types.

Some legal cases of note here: in Blizzard vs bnetd, a group of players developed a replacement game server system for the Blizzard product Battle.net. While this is reverse engineering and prohibited by the EULA, reverse engineering is seen as a form of free speech by US courts - but this did not sway the courts' decision in favour of the reverse-engineers. An appeal against this decision is currently underway. In an Australian context, any restriction of reverse-engineering appears unlikely to be upheld in court.

John Banks - academic and ACID researcher as well as Auran staff member - is next, talking more about the Trainz experience in particular. He notes that there is a certain amount of accountability of the games publisher towards the game users, stemming from the massive development efforts which the users have made. There is an emergence of new ecologies of production here: of new kinds of distributed organisations and ad-hoc networks. In John Hartley's words, there is a value drift, a blurring of barriers between producers and consumers - a new participatory culture (Henry Jenkins term) is emerging.

The post-lunch sessions of this conference constitute a mini-conference on computer games and the law. It is opened by Greg Lane of the Brisbane-based games developer Auran, responsible for titles such as Dark Reign and Trainz. The computer games industry is significantly large - twice the size of the movie industry, and growing twice as fast. In its multimedia inputs it's also a classic example for creative industries production, which involves massively interdisciplinary inputs into its IP 'asset creation', as Greg puts it. Interestingly, too, games are increasingly involving user co-production or co-creation. This is the case with Trainz, a train simulator which enables its users to produce rolling stock models, physical environments, and action scenarios to be used in the game - and interestingly more content was produced by users for Trainz (which sold some 3-400,000 copies) than for the only competitor project by Microsoft, which sold ten times as much, due to Microsoft's reluctance to engage fully with its users.

The second speaker is Renato Ianella, from the Open Digital Rights Language Iniative. This project focusses on one of the three components of Creative Commons licences (human-, lawyer-, machine-readable): the machine-readable representation of licences. This is linked to digital rights management issues: on a technical level, DRM covers rights information management (RIM: rights holders, royalties, licence management) and technical protection measures (TPM: security, encryption, trust). RIM metadata is usually captured in an XML-based "Rights Expression Language" (REL).

The next session is chaired by Deputy Vice-Chancellor Arun Sharma from QUT. He notes the need to find pathways between commercial and free content - neither can exist simply by itself and both are needed in a fully functional environment. It is therefore important to support the entire continuum of approaches. Further, he also points out that applying creative content or other new licence schemes to new content is one project - but it is also necessary to consider the large amount of existing content and work out whether there are ways to apply such licences retroactively and thereby return older material to circulation.

On the Riverboat:
Liz Ferrier, Sal Humphreys, and Terry CutlerAfter last night's riverboat excursion, the second day at the Open Content Licencing conference has begun now, with a panel chaired by my colleague Stuart Cunningham from CIRAC. The session will deal with the role of open content licencing in government and public institutions. Stuart begins by noting the shift of cultural production from traditional producers to what used to be consumers and are now users (or, in the terminology I've used in my book, produsers). Stuart notes that this shift has various implications for governmental IP regimes and governments' overall engagement with citizens.