The Concept of Property in Virtual Worlds and Online Spaces by Professor Dan Hunter

SYNOPSIS
The rise of virtual worlds and massively multiplayer online games has brought with it an understanding of how people treat property in online spaces. This, coupled with the rise of social media games, has seen the emergence of a billion dollar market for assets that don't exist. This presentation maps out what we know about virtual property, and present some theories about what this means for the nature of online markets, intellectual property systems in Asia and the rest of the world, and the way that humans will live in a computer-mediated future.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Dan Hunter is an expert in internet law, intellectual property, and artificial intelligence & cognitive science models of law. He holds a Ph.D. from Cambridge University on the nature of legal reasoning, as well as computer science and law degrees from Monash University (Australia) and a Master in Laws from the University of Melbourne.

Before joining New York Law School, he held a chair in law at the University of Melbourne, was a tenured professor at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, and taught on the law faculty at Cambridge University.

He regularly publishes on issues dealing with the intersection of computers and law, including papers dealing with the regulation of virtual worlds, the use of artificial intelligence in law, and high technology aspects of intellectual property. His research has appeared in journals such as the California Law Review (three times), the Texas Law Review, the William & Mary Law Review, and the Journal of Legal Education. He is the co-author of a book (Building Intelligent Legal Information Systems, Kluwer 1994), is a judge for the resolution of domain name disputes for the World Intellectual Property Organization, and is on the editorial board of numerous journals.

His work has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the Australian Research Council. He is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship, an American Council of Learned Societies Research Fellowship, a Herchel Smith Research Fellowship in Intellectual Property Law, and a Science Commons Fellowship.

He was one of the first scholars to examine the social significance of virtual worlds, co-founded the scholarly blog Terra Nova (terranova.blogs.com), and since 2006 has run the State of Play Conference series for New York Law School.

He is currently working on an introductory text on intellectual property for Oxford University Press, as well as number of articles on trademark law and property law. His current projects include examination of the economics and laws relating to user-generated content, and the social significance of luxury handbags.