You wait months for an NFT case, and then two drop in the matter of days. First an English court confirmed that tokens are property (more on that when I get my hands on the decision), and now there is a fascinating copyright case taking place in Germany that could Read more…
Elon Musk is buying Twitter for $44 billion USD. Surely. Certainly. Maybe. It’s complicated. Regardless, the news have exploded in tech and mainstream news, everyone has a take. Musk announced that he would be a champion of free speech, prompting cheers from the right (who think that this means that Read more…
I am a big believer in the power of stories. In 1993, journalist Julian Dibbell wrote an article for the Village Voice entitled “A Rape in Cyperspace“, in which he described a series of moderating decisions that were taken at an early virtual community called LambdaMOO. The online shenanigans are Read more…
Most of the writing about the legal issues surrounding NFTs has been rightly concentrated on two topics, what rights does the buyer acquire when purchasing a token, and the issue of copyright infringement. But I have been thinking for a while that perhaps one of the most interesting legal subjects Read more…
Please gather around, and listen to this cautionary tale of schadenfreude and greed. This is not a tale for the faint of heart; it involves a cabal of crypto-enthusiasts involved in a decentralised autonomous organisation (DAO), a failed film adaptation by Alejandro Jodorowsky of the classic book Dune , and Read more…
Amongst many other things, writer Neal Stephenson is famous for having coined the term “Metaverse” in his 1992 cyberpunk novel “Snow Crash”, but he has also written a lot about virtual worlds in some of his later work, particularly the novel “Reamde“, which is a techno-political thriller which introduces a Read more…
2021 has been the year of the NFT here at Llama Towers. It seems like there’s no shortage of stories coming out of the NFT scene, so to avoid having to rename the blog to “NFT Weekly News” I haven’t been reacting to the latest occurrence with the same enthusiasm Read more…
Text of my presentation at the IGF panel Videogames and their Uniting Power. Thanks very much to the organisers for the kind invitation to join this panel, it is an honour. I have to start with a disclaimer, I am just an academic who has been writing on the interface Read more…
It’s been another interesting day in the wilderness that is NFT-land. While many people (myself included) have spent a good part of the legal commentary on the NFT art market, the most valuable tokens can be found in collectibles, these usually take the shape of a stock character that is Read more…
This is the text of my presentation at this year’s Gikii Conference, expanding some of the themes and giving more detail. The slides can be found here. Before I begin, I need to make a quick explanation of the title. The phrase comes from the painting by René Magritte “The Read more…