I dug up this is discussion from Fortune Brainstorm titled “2018: Life on the Net,” featuring Lawrence Lessig (professor of Law at Stanford Law School), Joichi Ito (CEO of Creative Commons and Chairman of Six Apart Japan), and Philip Rosedale (founder and chairman of Linden Lab, who operate Second Life). It’s from July ‘08, which in internet age can make it almost irrelevant. In this case, however, the conversation remains fresh and interesting. The funniest moment: an attendee with a Southern accent calling Joi Ito, who has 24(!) current positions on LinkedIn, a ‘venture communist.’

Topics covered include: law stifling media technology, open source, venture capital trends and ethics, the internet requiring ‘environmental protection’, 2D/3D interface hybrids, producer-driven culture, and an “internet 9/11.”

[Google Video - 2018: Life on the Net]

One of the neatest things that happened were all of the social image mash-ups that were put together. Millions of people emailed photos to one of the many aggregators (NYTimes, CNN, et cetera), and we were able to see some incredible footage that was simply crowd sourced. CNN, thorough Microsoft’s PhotoSynth, did one of my favorites. Check it out here.

Mark Ghuneim, Founder/CEO of digital marketing agency Wiredset and social media service Trendrr, put together can excellent post on Mashable.com about the incredible impact the Social Media Sphere saw on inauguration day. Not only was it a politically memorable day, but technologically too. Check out the numbers (as put together by Mark):

Twitter — “Tweets containing “Obama” hit 35,000 per hour during his speech, and topped 150,000 for the day.”

YouTube Uploads — “There have been 332,000 new videos uploaded to YouTube with the tag of “Obama” this week, and 17,000 new videos for “Inauguration” in the last five days, 10,000 of which came in the last 24 hours [of the inauguration].”

Images on Flickr — 30,000 new uploads tagged “Obama” in last 24 hours of the ceremony.

And Blogs… — This is was just record breaking. Technorati reported 18,000 new blog entries related to Obama on that day alone.

These are all mind blowing figures. After allowing this to digest for a few days, I am left with the question of whether this all happened because of Obama or the factor of Social Media. Undoubtedly, it is a mix of both, however, what would we have seen if McCain had won. I am sure we would have also hit unprecedented social media happenings as result of technology today, but, is it the embrace of the Obama campaign that has and will keep this fervor alive?

“We can [describe] a user’s interest as seisin rather than as ownership. A tenant seised of land had sworn homage to the lord from whom he held. In exchange, the lord symbolically delivered the tenant into possession. Thereafter, the tenant owed the lord various services and feudal incidents, and in return the lord was obliged to defend his possession against outsiders to the relationship. Every element of this system maps cleanly onto Second Life. A user swears homage by clicking “I agree” to Linden’s terms and conditions; Linden delivers her into possession by changing an appropriate database entry. She owes tier fees in place of feudal incidents; Linden defends her possession via software-based access controls.”

When one hears “feudal” they automatically think “how awful!” Grimmelman, however, believes that this is not such a bad thing, and that “this analysis of the feudal dimensions of Second Life should make us optimistic about the legal future of virtual worlds.” The feudal system makes sense for now, and as virtual worlds grow and begin to interact more with the “offline world,” modern property rights will organically catch up online, too.

While I agree with Professor Grimmelmann’s interesting analysis, I am not so sure about his conclusion. The pace of growth of virtual worlds is much faster than what the law can catch up with (I think it is safe to say that technological breakthroughs and their applications always precede the laws built around them). Moreover, virtual worlds interacting with the traditional offline world will not happen in some abstract future, but is happening all the time, right now. Legitimate business activities in virtual worlds need to be protected by the law with the same agency that offline businesses are afforded, and Linden’s Terms of Use can’t be used as a magic shield that protects them from obvious breaches against its users.

For example, let’s say I rent a retail store on 5th Ave and a giant pipe in the ceiling bursts, damaging my inventory and causing a major loss of business. The landlord in this case is clearly responsible, and he or his insurance would pay for the damages. Now what if I operate a similar retail business in Second Life, and the servers go down without warning? Clearly the situation is analogous, but the protection of the business is completely off-kilter. My guess is that the legal system will only start paying attention to these issues when the money involved reaches a much higher scale, at which point, once again, it will be a bit too late.

[James Grimmelmann, Virtual World Feudalism, 118 Yale L.J. Pocket Part 126 (2009)]