Meet The Video Game Lawyers

The legal issues surrounding gaming -- everything from virtual currencies in games like World of Warcraft to privacy issues surrounding a corporate sponsor's virtual world -- are a hot topic these days.

One large corporate law firm, Pillsbury LLC, has built a dedicated team to handle video game and virtual world cases. A boutique industry has popped up to handle the glut of video game cases out there which also includes Sheppard Mullin and Canada's Davis LLP. Virtual currencies are one of the major issues that video game lawyers deal with on a daily basis. A host of overlapping local, state, and national regulations all surround the trade of virtual currencies online. Laws regarding debit card usage, for instance, can affect how payments for online currencies are processed. Banking laws regulate how American video game fans purchase payments on European and Japanese games as well. There is also the added difficulty of dealing with P2P virtual currencies such as Bitcoin. More traditional issues such as intellectual property -- which carried over from movies, books, and music into the world of Xboxes and MMORPGs -- are also a factor.