Past Events

Financial information as psychological construction: Information processing, news, and rumors in financial markets by Professor Thomas Oberlechner

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The Ludic Turn in Virtual Law by Professor Greg Lastowka

SYNOPSIS
Current legal research on massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) intentionally marginalizes the fact that the majority of these new social arenas are structured around game-like rules. Yet even virtual worlds like Second Life owe a great deal, in their architecture and guiding logic, to social practices of games and play. Legal scholars studying virtual worlds should not ignore the way in which the unique characteristics of games and play shape the rules of virtual worlds.

Virtual worlds are governed, to a significant degree, by rules of play. When we consider the work of Johan Huizinga, Roger Caillois, Bernard Suits, and other theorists of adult play, we find a strong consensus that ludic rules are specially crafted toward procedural and hedonic ends rather than instrumental and efficient ends. As a result, the guiding rules and software codes of virtual worlds inevitably diverge in important ways from the guiding logic of law. more >>

Goffman As Sociologist Of Technology: The Staging, Mediation, And Performance Of Ordinary And On-Line Interaction - By Prof Trevor Pinch

SYNOPSIS
Erving Goffman is not usually thought of as a sociologist of technology. In this talk Professor Pinch returns to two of Goffman's earliest studies and argues that materiality and technology are highly consequential for the interaction Goffman studied. Professor Pinch shows how Goffman's familiar notions of "role distance" and the distinction between "front stage" and "backstage" are both set within examples replete with materiality and technology. He compares Goffman with Latour as sociologist of mundane artefacts. Then having shown how ordinary interaction is materially, staged, mediated, and performed, Professor Pinch argues that the interactionist approach can be useful in the study Web 2.0 sites. He concludes the talk with examples from his own study of the on-line remixing and mash-up site, ACIDplanet.com.

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A New Liability Standard for Injuries in Virtual Worlds by Prof Steven Hetcher

SYNOPSIS
I examine and reject what has become a dominant move in virtual world studies, namely, for scholars to seek to redefine the nature and scope of property rights entitlements in virtual world contexts: for example to claim that Lockean principles support recognition of property rights of users that trump contractual agreements as set out in EULAs. In my presentation I will argue that the types of interactive behavior occurring in virtual worlds increasingly call for a re-examination of the tort—based injurer/victim relationships between the parties rather than the property on contractual bases of these relationships. In particular, I will argue that the increasingly accidental nature of such injurious interactions calls for a shift from a strict liability to a fault liability regulatory regime.

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