Web 2.0 Internet Law in the 21st Century

Posted by Simon DJ at 3:17 pm

On 23 June, I joined a panel of Tom Ilube (Garlik), Daniel Waterhouse (3i) and Clive Davies (Fujitsu) at the Society for Computers & Law Annual Conference on a panel to discuss the “Brave New World of Web 2.0″. I hung around over the next day and half, partly out of fascination for an excellent programme, and partly to join another panel of Professor Lilian Edwards (U of Southampton), Rohan Massey (McDermott, Will & Emery), Graham Smith (Bird & Bird) and Paul Ganley (Baker & McKenzie) to discuss the Regulation of the Internet.

It was easily the most engaging and inspiring conference I’ve attended, amongst dozens. There were over 100 knowledgeable and participative attendees in a lecture theatre at St Anne’s College, Oxford, with a well-attended and very entertaining dinner on the Friday night. Professor Chris Reed of Queen Mary University proved a hugely erudite and entertaining guest speaker, complete with ukulele.

Here’s a flavour of my takeaways from the conference:

> “Web 2.0” is everthing O’Reilly said, as well as a quest for control by individuals over their retail, financial, entertainment, social and political experiences. Businesses who enable individual control are perceived to be doing better than those which begin to assert control over their users (Second Life vs Friendster was one suggested example)

> There are 2 new rashes sweeping the legal community - Facebook and blawgs [legal blogs] - despite the inertia of their IT departments. You don’t need to know how the corporate document creation system works to be a Web 2.0 geek.

> Lawyers are primarily preoccupied with content generated by users collectively in a distributed environment; the related processing of (personal) data; the creation, ownership and exchange of property in virtual worlds; the competing trends towards and against Net Neutrality; and figuring out the relationship between Earth and the planet EU.

> While some Second Lifers are notably engaged in designing and building genitalia for their avatar’s, perhaps the most important development might actually be the recent opening of the Swedish embassy on Second Life. Will your avatar be issued a visa for Sweden? Will that entitle your real world self to go there?

There was plenty more worth relating, both legal and more general, but I thought I’d share some personal musings now that the vast array of other anecdotes and random thoughts have had a chance to percolate:

> I’d love to be able to make other people’s avatars appear the way I feel that they should look, independently of how they’ve been designed to look by the owner, but without anyone being able to see it - just as one can save people’s email addresses to one’s contacts as “cretin” etc.

> The opening of the Swedish embassy on Second Life poses the interesting question of just how “real” the Swedish embassy web site - or any web site, for that matter - might actually be. Could we not also set our browsers to display web sites in the way we choose to view them? To view all authority figures in their underwear, for example?

> Virtual world manifestations of real world fixations seem such a wasted opportunity. It’s worth considering, at least for the fun of it, how you might escape the constraints of Toyota cars, Reuters data, the Swedish Embassy and yours or anyone else’s genitalia. And it’s then you remember What it’s All About, after all.

The fun of it.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 24th, 2007 at 3:17 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.