Did they play Dungeons & Dragons in Chambers?

Stanford Law professor Lawrence Lessig is really into Second Life (for those that don't know about such things... Second Life is a virtual world/chatroom/game/place to have cybersex). So much so that he attended the 4th anniversary party for Creative Commons (Lessig's cyber-copyright organization) as a Second Life avatar.... he wasn't actually there, he was just on a screen (there was, apparently, a raging party going on in Second Life itself).

It makes sense that Lessig would be doing such things... he is, after all, a poster child for the Wired set. More bizarre, however is that Judge Richard Posner also recently gave a lecture on property rights in Second Life. However, he gave it in Second Life... as a little balding, bespectacled cartoon character of himself. The lecture was apparently attended by a chipmunk and several supermodels.

Lessig clerked for Posner... might that have something to do with it? Probably.

However easy it is to make light of all of this, it is clear that the emerging importance of economic rights in cyber worlds is growing... according to the Washington Post, in November 2006 there were economic transactions in Second Life of over $20mm. Apparenly quite a bit of that was spent on, uh, virtual prostitution.