Computer Games, Law, Regulation and Policy Symposium

The Games, Law and Regulation research group forms part of the Law Program of the Centre, led by Professor Brian Fitzgerald. This research group investigates the regulation, governance, policy and legal issues surrounding computer games and online social softwares. The symposium is also supported by the QUT Institute for Creative Industries and Innovation.

The ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation presents a symposium to explore:
* struggles over the use and reuse of IP
* rights and responsibilities of modders and machinima creators
* jurisdictional issues
* the clashes between developers and lawyers in creating terms of access
* the legitimacy or legality of terms in End User Licence Agreements and Terms of Service
* the legitimacy of secondary markets
* the status of ephemeral and user-created content with classification boards and internet regulators
* in-game governance and exclusion policies
* privacy, data mining and surveillance
* appropriate government support for the emerging games industry

This symposium will offer a chance to discuss the issues of game governance, from code through to government policy, and to explore an integrated set of solutions to the current problems. Bringing together people from creative industries, media studies, law, business and IT faculties, industry, government and player groups, the emphasis will be on exploring and suggesting alternatives to current practices.

Speakers include:
* Fred von Lohmann, Senior Intellectual Property Attorney, Electronic Frontier Foundation
* Dr Terry Cutler, President ACMI, Industry consultant and strategy advisor
* Professor Brian Fitzgerald, QUT Law School, Lead in Creative Commons Australia
* Professor Stuart Cunningham, Director Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation.
* Dr Sal Humphreys, Convenor, Games and Law Research Group, QUT
* Dr John Banks, Post-Doctoral Fellow, Games researcher, QUT Industry representatives, Government Representatives, Player representatives

To register: email symposium convener Dr Sal Humphreys: s.humphreys@qut.edu.au

Conference program

Conference themes

Regulation and governance in and around online games is a well raked over territory. In the past decade games studies has given much attention to the area, with critical legal scholars, game designers, sociologists, media theorists and political economists all identifying different interconnected levels at which governance and regulation can and should occur.

There are many uncertainties involved in the regulation of online games, including jurisdictional issues, the legitimacy of secondary markets, rights and responsibilities of modders and machinima creators, struggles over the use and reuse of IP, the legitimacy or legality of certain terms in EULAs and TOS, the status of ephemeral and user-created content with classification boards and internet regulators, governance in-game and exclusion policies, privacy and data mining and more.

The convergences in online games have generated many conflicts –

* between designers and lawyers – where designers may not want to restrict player content creation but lawyers impose the most risk averse EULA terms possible. The contract then seems to exist in a limbo where players know that the terms will generally not be enforced by developers, but there is a constant threat that they may be enforced at some unknown point in the future.
* between players and publishers, where players want to own IP in the objects they create and publishers most often will not allow it. Players want to create machinima and fan fiction and mods and it is never clear when a publisher will try and stop them. Players manage a precarious ‘citizenship’ in game worlds where justice is an arbitrary concept and exclusion processes are opaque.
* between community management teams and development teams where the community management team understand their role in design as integral to game success and the dev team just want to get on with the technical issues and tack the community/social side on later.
* between players who engage in RMT trade and players who don’t, or between people in mod communities who make shareware and those who charge for their mods.
* between government and gamers and publishers, where governments are tempted to intervene around classification, taxation and fraud, but are not clear where the line should be drawn between the game world and non-game world.

How are these issues to be resolved? What alternative models can we develop in the face of the obvious inability of current models to cope with the new challenges posed by online games? Are there ways in which we can align the interests of designers and lawyers, publishers and players, which don’t ignore the reality of the practices of each?

This symposium will offer a chance to discuss the issues of game governance, from code through to government policy, and to move towards finding an integrated set of solutions to the current problems. Bringing together people from creative industries, media studies, law, business and IT faculties, industry, government and player groups, the emphasis will be on exploring and suggesting alternatives to current practices.

The symposium will run as a series of panels convened around particular problems, interspersed with a number of invited papers and plenary speakers.