In a past life, Ms. Janelle Bonanno was an excellent lawyer in New York City before she was a gamer extraordinaire.
Well, to be honest, she was always a gamer. It is with great pleasure that I congratulate The Escapist‘s Business Development Manager Janelle Bonanno for publishing a white paper with New York Law School Institute for Information Law and Policy called “Facilitating Collaboration On Geospatial Data Using Social and Legal Norms.” For lawyers, being published in a prestigious law journal like this is a pretty big deal.
Now you may think that a paper with a title like that is all dry and boring – and you might be half right – but Ms. Bonanno’s white paper is actually pretty compelling stuff for people in our field. Gamers know that accurate maps are extremely important, and the “Geospatial” data that Janelle wants to encourage us to collect via social media would provide ways for people with no background in cartography to still provide meaningful data. The way the legality of maps is set up now, databases and wikis about our world is copyrightable – which is like saying the anatomy of the human body is protected by copyrights for the first person to discover it. Wiping away the rights of “map-makers” so this important global data can be accessible and improved upon by all will be instrumental in helping people in emergency situations, like the 2010 earthquake in Haiti.
If you’re interested, read on at the New York Law School’s website. And again, kudos to Janelle Bonanno!
Be sure to follow her on Twitter. And if you’re lucky, you can find her on StarCraft II and beat the pants off her pesky Roach rush.
