Ed Cavazos: Cyberlaw

Ed Cavazos is an attorney who’s always focused on the cutting edges of technology law, including cyberlaw. He manages the Austin office of Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman. Ed negotiates complex technology-related transactions and routinely advises on corporate and general business matters, licensing, strategic partnerships, development contracts, data rights and privacy issues. He represents internet, e-commerce, software, hardware, video game and media/entertainment clients. He litigates complex IP disputes, including patent, trade secret, copyright, trademark, contract breach and internet-related claims.

In our conversation with Ed, we discuss cyberlaw, including censorship, social media monopolies, the right of publicity, the Metaverse and the law, and much more.

Ed Cavazos: “The earliest incarnation of these Metaverses – in the best ones, the most highly populated ones – are game environments. You look at what’s going on with some of these MMO games, where millions of people are interacting, and there the interactions are game interactions. It changes things a little bit if we’re playing a game, where your character is a thief, and your game role is to try to steal things from people. Even if those things have real world translatable value, I’m not sure you could call it theft in terms of going down to the DA and reporting and saying Jon’s thief character in this vanity game stole my shield and that shield’s worth $100 on eBay – I want him put in jail in the real world for that. It starts creating some real fuzzy weird lines about ‘are you changing the rules when you go and use it.’ And I think we’re going to have to face that in the Metaverse quite a bit.”

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