New on VoxPopuLII: Čyras on Legal Frameworks of Virtual Worlds

Professor Dr. Vytautas Čyras of the Vilnius University Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics has posted On a Legal Framework in a Virtual World: Lessons from the VirtualLife Project, on the VoxPopuLII Blog, published by the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University Law School.

In this post, Professor Čyras describes the regulatory infrastructure of VirtualLife, the experimental European Union-funded virtual world. In this infrastructure, legal and technological constraints are used together in an attempt to provide effective but flexible regulation.

Professor Čyras emphasizes the decentralized, “federalist” governance structure of VirtualLife — which provides for uniform protection of core rights while permitting groups to form smaller communities and to customize the laws that govern them — the peer-to-peer architecture of VirtualLife, which complements the decentralized governance structure; the VirtualLife e-contracting environment, which offers a variety of standard contract terms while allowing parties to create their own customized terms; and “virtual laws,” which enable technological grants and enforcement of intellectual property and other rights.

This post should be of interest to all those who are interested in the legal dimension of virtual worlds, including developers, policy makers, legal professionals, information systems researchers, and information providers.

Tags: Constitutions in virtual worlds, ecommerce, econtracts, Electronic commerce, Electronic contracts, Electronic voting, EU, European Union, evoting, Law in virtual worlds, Legal identity in virtual worlds, Modeling of law in virtual worlds, Online dispute resolution, Peer to peer architecture in legal information systems, Trust in virtual worlds, Virtual worlds and law, VirtualLife, VoxPopuLII, Vytautas Cyras