Governance in Virtual Worlds

When members of a virtual world such as Second Life® log in from countries on every continent, who has jurisdiction when laws are broken? Which country's copyright and trademark laws should apply when the copyright owner, copyright violator, and the servers are all in different countries?

These were some of the issues discussed in today's "Governance in Virtual Worlds" conference sponsored by the Sandra J. O'Connor School of Law at Arizona State University and held in Second Life at the Worlds2Worlds Amphitheatre. In this picture, Pathfinder Linden (also known in SL as Count Zeeman and in RL as John Lester) addresses the audience. During his talk, Pathfinder Linden made the important observation that one mistake made by many educators who are new to Second Life is to build a traditional classroom in Second Life that mimics RL classrooms, but that other more immersive approaches can be more effective.

A legal conference may seem dry to many, but the issues discussed affect or could affect all of us. Some of the issues discussed included:

• Whose laws apply when we are in virtual worlds when are logging in from so many countries with so very different laws. Speech that is legal in one country may be considered traitorous or blasphemous in another. Copyright and trademark laws vary between countries. One example cited was Italy, where publishing pictures of buildings or monuments can be a copyright violation; what happens when these pictures are published in a virtual world with servers in a different country?
• One audience member made the observation that parody is legally protected speech, but this will not be true in every country.
• Many virtual world members aren't aware of the fact that Linden Lab keeps copies of all conversations, and that under US Federal security laws, the government can get access to these conversations, even years after they take place.
• One important evolving question is whether virtual worlds should be a separate jurisdiction rather than being subject to conflicting physical world jurisdictions; one audience member compared virtual worlds to the United Nations as a separate, global entity.
• An emerging legal issue is that of augmented reality (aka mixed reality), in which virtual worlds and the physical world merge. Who owns the content? Which jurisdiction's laws should apply if?
• The observation was made that a jurisdiction's laws should apply if its citizens are affected, but this leaves open the question of how to deal with conflicting laws, and for that matter, how to define "affected".
• Jamie Palisades, former Chancellor of Second Life's Confederacy of Democratic Simulators, an important experiment in self-governance and constitutional government within a virtual world that has active members on five continents, and in which this writer is involved, spoke of some of the issues involved in virtual self-governance.

Because of technical glitches and the need to leave early, this writer missed a good deal of the conference, but found much of the discussion fascinating. These are issues that will only grow in importance as virtual worlds and augmented reality become more entrenched in our lives.

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All photographs in this report are by ©2010 by Erik Gordon Bainbridge. All rights reserved.