Games aren't just for gamers any more. The legal issues surrounding intellectual property in virtual worlds have implications beyond GameBoys and PlayStations.

What are the relationships between real and virtual-world economies? What can these virtual worlds teach us about democracy? Will virtual worlds be regulated? Who owns avatars and game scenarios in Internet-based games?

These are among the topics discussed at The State of Play, an annual conference sponsored by the Institute for Law & Policy at New York Law School and the Information Society Project at Yale Law School. Ernest Miller interviews two of the conference's organizers.

James Grimmelmann is a third-year law student at Yale Law School and editor-in-chief of LawMeme.

Beth Noveck is a professor at New York Law School and director of that school's Institute for Information Law and Policy.

This program is one of a series, The Importance of...Law and IT, hosted by Ernest Miller.