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We are very lucky to have Brian Dartnell who is Senior Counsel at Electronic Arts as our Guest Speaker. Brian has been with EA for almost 9 years and this will be his third time speaking to the class. Brian will be giving us an overview of the myriad roles counsel plays within a very large video game production and publishing entity.

Brian’s bio (from Linked In):

Senior Counsel, Electronic Arts: November 2005 – Present, Vancouver, British Columbia

Responsible for the oversight and management of the legal team in Canada and the delivery of legal services to EA’s Canadian operations. Currently EA operates in 5 Provinces with more than 2000 full and part time employees based in Canada.

The Canadian legal team consists of four lawyers, a paralegal and an administrative assistant.

Responsible for providing advice, delivering training and assisting in the development of policy for internal clients on a broad range of legal issues including:

a) “People Matters” – employment, immigration, compensation and benefits, human rights, workers’ compensation, privacy, pension and benefits, and performer related issues;
b) “Corporate Matters” real estate, M&A, licensing, and ecommerce; and
c) Litigation – management of Canadian based litigation

Associate, Gowling Lafleur Henderson LLP: April 2000 – November 2005 (5 years 8 months)

Employment and Labour Law Practice

Associate, Owen Bird Law Corporation: March 1998 – April 2000 (2 years 2 months)

General Litigation Practice”

jon

Want to welcome all of you who are coming to the class starting tomorrow. There are few areas that seem to perpetually inhabit the cutting edge of culture and society the way video-games have over the last forty years or so. Every year it seems the course has yielded some substantive surprises in legal understanding. For example in the first few years we barely talked about End User Agreements and Terms of Service. It wasn’t yet clear that contract law would eclipse copyright law in so many ways that seem so very obvious today. It seems only a few short years ago that a unit on privacy was added, and I was shocked by the amount of material that came over the transom in preparing that class. Today my privacy folder for the class is thicker than the one on social issues/violence.

So what will be this years emergent themes? Impossible to know sitting here the night before class starts. All we can know is that in a year where the new generation of consoles find their feet, where the demographics of gamers has changed forever thanks to mobile devices, and where Facebook pays $2 Billion U.S. to purchase Oculus Rift, somethings gotta give…

Looking forward to whatever “it” turns out to be.

See you tomorrow.

Jon