It’s Gikii!

It’s mid-September, and that means Gikii! The geeks packed their gadgets and flew, walked, bicycled, sailed and slithered into Amsterdam for this year’s collection of law and geeky stuff. Gikii is earning a well-deserved reputation as one of the most fun-yet-thought-provoking conferences in the IP and IT circuit thanks to successful previous encounters featuring papers that have fared well in the mainstream, yet managed to be entertaining and often deep at the same time. This year was no disappointment, and we were treated to some truly admirable presentation skills, informative commentary, amicable heckling, and a number of lolcats that would require several cyberlitters and a large supply of virtual catnip to maintain. Special commendation should be given to IViR in general, and Joris van Hoboken and Bernt Hugenholtz in particular for hosting and organising the event.

Our usual live-blogger could not attend this year, but Jordan Hatcher did an admirable job of writing a comprehensive record of most sessions. As usual it is difficult to choose my favourite papers. The ones that I enjoyed the most were, in no particular order:

• Martin Jones, Sousveillance: The Emergent Digital Eye Witness. A very interesting paper about the rise of the digital environment where everything is recorded.
• Judith Rauhofer, “Get out of my head, bloodsucker!” Notions of surveillance in the vampire mind. Judith has many talents, she is a wonderful speaker, a sharp commenter, and she can illustrate complex legal issues through the use of popular culture with astounding ease. But she likes Twilight. I cannot condone such behaviour.
• Peter K. Yu, The Crossover Point. Peter presented about IP balance sheets, bilateral agreements, and how countries pass from pirates to producers, and the effects that such crossover may have to IP protection.
• Mathias Klang, Strangelove and Salami: An illustration of the unintended consequences of technical solutions. Very interesting take on the erosion of human rights explained through salami and nuclear deterrent… it makes sense if you watch this episode of “Yes Minister“.
• Lilian Edwards, Death 2.0. Yet another tour de force by panGloss, apparently one that has been constantly cited in the mainstream media. I can see why, as it tries to answer a very interesting question, what happens to your Facebook profile when you die?
• Miranda Mowbray and Burkhard Schafer, EAT ME. Two of my favourite gikii people teamed up this year to give us an insight into the world of molecular computing.
• Bernt Hugenholz, The Googlification of Copyright: The Google Book Settlement. I found this presentation an illustrative and fascinating look at the European implications of the Google Book agreement. Whoever said Gikii lacks depth?

I also enjoyed papers by Clive Feather, Melanie Dulong de Rosnay, and Nicolas Jondet. Fellow blogger Ray Corrigan should receive another honorary mention, as his papers are becoming a pre-lunch Gikii tradition.

The presentations should be online as soon as the Edinburgh University web server lets me make changes again.

Update: I have started uploading papers, so enjoy!