Virtual Environments: Is one life enough?

CLASS SUMMARY:

The class discussion started by talking about Axel Bruns’ concept of the Consumer – Prosumer – Produser as outlined in his online lecture given as reading material last week. We considered what constitutes online content – from text to image – and how it is generated. Sharing content, making it widely available and generating an income from it raised the question of professional versus amateur content creators and this led to considering the nature of ‘value’. What value might our content have? and how can we determine that value?

The fair use of our content by others prompted an example from Locks about the student who discovered a photo of herself she had posted on Facebook was used by Tesco on a line of child’s shirts without her knowledge. Copyright and Intellectual Property (IP) issues were touched on as means of protecting content but the difficulty and cost of enforcement were recognised as issues.

We discussed the project work and asked that a brief progress report be given next week.

ACTIVITIES FOR NEXT WEEK:

1. Read: the journal article User-Generated Content & Virtual Worlds by Greg Lastowka. Written in 2008 it nevertheless identifies some key legal issues for those creating content in online virtual worlds.
2. Read: this thoughtful blog post about the legal issues around protecting ‘things’ you create in SL. Read the comments also. Content and Licensing in Virtual Worlds.
3. Write: the fifth post to your blog on content creation.