GeekLawyer’s Blog

Since he is participating in a round table panel Geeklawyer feels that he should punt the Society for Computers and Law’s conference. Billed as a “conference without the boring bit” the programme and the speakers & topics look very very interesting indeed. It’s geared towards looking at the issues of law facing the newest web technologies;

• New forms of property in data eg virtual “property”, reputations, and “mash ups”
• New forms of identity eg identities in social networking worlds such as Facebook
• New forms of speech eg collective content produced by wiki; user-generated content such as blogs; “open content”

We will look at issues like

• How do web 2.0, the “Semantic Web” and distributed computing interact?
• What are the commercial and business model implications of web 2.0?
• What are the social implications of social networking software and the “open access” paradigm?
• What are the intellectual property and data protection laws impacting on these technologies and their exploitation?
• Should public sector geospatial data be bought, sold, and “mashed up”, and if so, on what conditions?
• How can identity and reputation be managed on the new Web?
• Does Europe need to rewrite the laws of privacy and data protection in a web 2.0 world?
• What dangers are we exposing children and the unwary to in a world of ubiquitous disclosure?
• What laws govern virtual worlds? How do we do business there?
• How do control mobile and distributed data in a connected world?
• Should platforms like Facebook and You Tube be legally liable for user generated content?
• Is Google legal?
• What next in the music download wars in a web 2.0 world?

Geeklawyer will be participating in the roundtable debate about the disruptiveness or otherwise of blogs and Wikis.

date: 17th 18th September 2007

time: Monday: 9.30 am - 5.30 pm Tuesday: 9.30 am - 4.30 pm

members: £352.5
non-members: £470

venue: Herbert Smith, Exchange House, Primrose Street, London, EC2A 2HS.

Thanks to Alex at Impact for pointing out that Gikii is a separate conference organised by the university of Edinburgh and happening the day after. Doh, if I was any stupider I’d have to become a solicitor-advocate :P.

If you are at the Lamb pub in Lambs Conduit Street on Monday evening you can buy him a beer. Or several, ideally. Don’t sit next to him at the Herbert Smith dinner the following night though, he has very poor table manners and is prone to get excited in polite company.