2007 – London

GikII 2007

GikIII

24-25 September 2008
Oxford Internet Institute

GikII Returns!

19 September 2007
Room 1.20
Malet Place Engineering Bldg
University College London

Gikii 2, a one day workshop on the intersections between law, technology and popular culture, will be held on September 19th, 2007 in London, England.

The co-chairs are Lilian Edwards, Professor of Internet Law, University of Southampton, and Director of ILAWS, and Andres Guadamuz, Co-Director, AHRC Centre for Research into Intellectual Property and Technology Law, University of Edinburgh. The workshop will be once again kindly sponsored by the AHRC Centre, and will follow directly on from the soon to be announced Society for Computers and Law “Law 2.0” Workshop, to be held at Herbert Smith Solicitors, London, September 17-18; colleagues are warmly invited to attend both events.

There will be no workshop fee and lunch and coffee will be provided; a conference dinner will also be arranged free of charge. We may close the workshop at 30 participants, so register early!! Preference will be given to attendees who are providing a paper.

Gikii 2! Or as we like to call it
…Gikii 2: The Empire Strikes Back (Microsoft?)
…Gikii 2: This Time It’s Non-Virtual
…Return of the Dark Gikii

From the people who brought you Gikii 1, about which it was said:

“Like a normal conference, only without all the boring papers” Burkhard Schafer, University of Edinburgh

“… the GikII workshop was an eye opener. I think we were all amazed at the scope for combining serious academic debate with popular and even geek culture – Power Rangers (guilty), Star Trek, Buffy, Harry Potter, Beckham’s hair.” Abbe Brown, University of  Edinburgh, IP, Human Rights and Competition Law blog.

“The first session ended and the sensation that something different and unique had started was in the air… It was a delightful experience to have such an impressive group of geek/lawyers and geek/computer specialists discussing the frontiers of the law applied to cyberspace.” Fernando Barrio, London Metropolitan University, Electromate

“I gave a talk on Open Source Killer Robots…The trick was to wrap up a serious law point in a weird and wacky way. I failed because I don’t do law so I talked about formal methods and impossibility results instead, but the talk was well received.” Adriaan de Groot, Bobulate

The serious bit

The first GikII workshop in September 2006 established itself as the first workshop in the world where the worlds of law, technology and popular culture came together. We want to discuss whether geek law exists; by the end of the workshop we had created it. Topics covered at the first workshop included surveillance strategies in the novels of Harry Potter;  how to avoid building open source killer robots; whether we need a new legal regime for the regulation of virtual property; copyright law, anime, fansubs ; comparative pornography law, TRIPS and Japanese manga; virtual world governance; the law of entropy and old computers; technophobia and technophilia; and much much more.  Powerpoints of last year’s papers can be viewed here <http://www2.law.ed.ac.uk/ahrc/complaw/gikii.asp> , and both a Geek law book and a GikII Wiki are in the works.

If you have a paper burning for the oxygen of publicity on any aspect of law AND technology, science, geek culture, blogs, popular culture, wikis, science fiction or fantasy, computer games, digital culture, gender on-line, MMORPGS, virtual property or online human personae, then come to GikII 2: All Your Bases Still Belong To Us!

The call for papers

If you would like to participate, email your abstract of no more than 500 words. This should be sent to either l.edwards@soton.ac.uk or a.guadamuz@ed.ac.uk by July 15 2007. We will confirm acceptances by August 1. Abstracts may be accepted after this date depending on whether the workshop is full.