| on 02/04/08 |
| Seems like most lawyers are extending the paradigm of the 1990's and early 2000's into what lies ahead: the emergence of virtual worlds as a "place" on the web where we do our work and live our lives.
Virtual Worlds News points us to an article written in Metropolitan Corporate Counsel (http://www.metrocorpcounselcom
) in which an attorney remarks that attorneys ought to take a look at virtual worlds primarily because of the IP issues that arise there. Of course this is true, but I take a slightly different approach. As I stated in response at Virtual Worlds News (http://tinyurl.com/2ceexy
):
"As a practicing attorney with a virtual worlds consultancy, I firmly believe that it will be workplace-related law rather than IP law that will be the hot area in virtual worlds before long. Not to discount IP law, but consider the ramifications on employment law, immigration law, tax law, and benefits law. Take a simple example based on what happens everyday, today: You'd like someone to help you build a new structure on your Second Life sim. You strike up a conversation with an avatar, who indicates that he'd like to help. So he agrees to build the structure and then serve as a greeter at the sim at various times during the typical week. You agree to pay him at the rate of $100L/per hour (converted to perhaps less than $ .50 US/hour.) Now the issues to be dealt with. Who is the avatar in real life? Are you unlawfully employing this person? Are you paying less than the prevailing minimum wage in the jurisdiction that the person behind the avatar is entitled to? What about benefits? Taxation? The issues are endless when the employment relationship, once done almost exclusively in-person, in the same jurisdiction, becomes essentially global in scope without any sense of the challenges imposed by distance. What this new paradigm will give rise to is a new sort of workplace law, one that is more complex than most attorneys are used to. A workplace law in which political borders are difficult to manage given the proximity presented by technology. Of course, I'm not offering legal advice here. Just one person's opinion on where the world might be headed."
All of this said, the emergence of virtual worlds and augmented reality is going to change a whole heck of a lot. From travel, to corporate real estate, to IP rules, to workplace attitudes, etc., I suspect that a person taking off today for the year 2025 will arrive at something that is fairly unrecognizable to what she's left. But we need to be careful about extending past assumptions into the future. Is IP law a critical area to examine in virtual worlds? Sure. But will it be the IP lawyers leading the charge? Perhaps initially. But we will all play an important part. |
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