tVPN
White Paper: Virtual Items and Public Policy
7 February 2011. Today the Virtual Policy Network has released a White Paper on Virtual Items and Public Policy. The Paper provides an overview of virtual items and virtual currency are – covering the spectrum from Xbox points to MMO characters. The paper defines what the key public policy interests are in virtual items, and provides a survey of the legal responses to issues involving virtual ‘goods’ from jurisdictions as diverse as China, Korea, Finland the US, citing a number of cases of virtual ‘theft’.
Released today as a .pdf under Creative Commons, the white paper will also be a living document held as part of the Virtual Policy Network’s database of resources. See the new Global Policy section of the site for details.
the Virtual Policy Network is looking for people to support this work, extend the number of countries covered and keep our database up to date with legislative changes impacting convergent media – if you would like to become an associate of tVPN or support our work in other ways please contact us at: info AT virtualpolicy DOT net.
tVPN supports UK’s DotGovLabs R&D project
tVPN is supporting the UK’s DotGovLabs with it’s engagement with academics and the games industry as part of the ‘Games’ R&D project.
DotGovLabs is “is a shared R&D programme backed by Directgov, Businesslink.gov (including the RDA face-to-face arm of Businesslink) and NHS Choices. DotGovLabs looks to identify, explore and test areas of innovation to determine what benefits they could offer to provide better services to businesses, patients and citizens.”
The Games project is summaries as ” This DotGovLabs project is exploring whether there are any opportunities, in the games medium, that the government could be exploiting. The remit is wider than just building games in that the project is looking to gain input from industry experts into all elements of this medium. For example can the technologies of games (in terms of how it visualises context through computer graphics or virtual worlds) be exploited outside of a games scenario to allow us to communicate particular concepts better? Are there opportunities around gaming platforms to access different users groups?”
tVPN on Twitter
tVPN has added twitter to its stable of social media resources. The twitter feed can be found at http://twitter.com/VirtualPolicy. This compliments the tVPN Facebook group and YouTube Channel.
tVPN Site Update
tVPN has just moved to a CMS based web site. This allows us to bring you many more resources and use the power of social media to make you part of the policy debate.
New features include:
- Category based database of resources
- Discussion threads
- Social media links
As with any technology change there may be a few teething problems. If you find a problem with the site do mail us at info AT virtualpolicy.net.
DIS:E’08
the Virtual Policy Network is in festival mood. Our next event is the Digital Interactive Symposium: Edinburgh (DIS:E) – a half day event organized in conjunction with The University of Edinburgh and the Edinburgh Interactive Festival.
This year’s DIS:E will focus on education and training for the games and virtual world industries.
See events for more information.
