Prompt's TechBlog

The Canvas warehouses in London's Kings Cross Freight Depot were the very real life (RL!) setting for this week's Virtual Worlds Forum Europe 2007, which gathered IT industry directors, regulators, lawyers and the occasional MP or peer of the realm to discuss business, branding and bylaws within virtual worlds.

More than 450+ participants and over 60 international speakers including Lord Puttnam of Queensgate and Lord Triesman - a minister at the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills - helped make up a veritable who's who of Europe's virtual worlds. The hottest issue was if, how and when governments will choose to police virtual worlds. TimesOnline reported Lord Triesman hoping virtual world operators like Linden Labs and Mattel would take the lead in regulation, singling out anti-social behaviour and identity theft as "sharp challenges", but also admitting that for more serious issues such as child pornography there was "a certain inevitability about government involvement."

Call us cynical if you will, but we reckon it's far more likely that treasury heads will be turned by the estimated millions of 'RL' dollars being exchanged in virtual world's daily, before any law enforcement agency begins tracking criminals.