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.