A number of interesting recent papers on law in virtual worlds are available from the research page of VirtualLife, a virtual world project of the European Commission’s Seventh Research Framework Programme (FP7), Information & Communication Technologies (ICT), Objective 1.5 Networked Media (Netmedia). The project’s main academic partners are Vilniaus universitetas, Matematikos ir informatikos fakultetas, and Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, Juristische Fakultät, Lehrstuhl Prof. Dr. Gerald Spindler. Here are the VirtualLife research works related to legal informatics/communication:
- G. Spindler, K. Anton, J. Wehage, Overview of the legal issues in virtual worlds. In: Proceedings of the 1st International ICST Conference on User Centric Media, UCMedia 2009, Venice, 9-11 December 2009.
- Summary: The paper discusses virtual world property, user evaluation systems, data protection, intellectual property, advertising, the virtual world provider’s liability for user-generated content, and online dispute resolution in the VirtualLife system.
- Dan Bogdanov & Ilja Livenson, VirtualLife: Secure identity management in peer-to-peer systems. In: Proceedings of the 1st International ICST Conference on User Centric Media, UCMedia 2009, Venice, 9-11 December 2009,
- Abstract: “The popularity of virtual worlds and their increasing economic impact has created a situation where the value of trusted identification has risen substantially. We propose an identity management solution that provides the user with secure credentials and allows to decrease the required trust that the user must have towards the server running the virtual world. Additionally, the identity management system allows the virtual world to incorporate reputation information. This allows the ‘wisdom of the crowd’ to provide more input to users about the reliability of a certain identity. We describe how to use these identities to provide secure services in the virtual world. These include secure communications, digital signatures and secure bindings to external services.”
- Vytautas Čyras, Transforming legal rules into virtual world rules: a case study in the VirtualLife platform. In: Proceedings of the 1st International ICST Conference on User Centric Media, UCMedia 2009, Venice, 9-11 December 2009; TrustVWs workshop “Virtual Worlds: Trust, Security, Rule of Law.”
- Abstract: “The paper addresses the implementation of legal rules in online virtual world software. The development is performed within a peer-to-peer virtual world platform in the frame of the FP7 VirtualLife project. The goal of the project is to create a serious, secure and legally ruled collaboration environment. The novelty of the platform is an in-world legal framework, which is real world compliant. The approach ‘From rules in law to rules in artifact’ is followed. The development accords with the conception ‘Code is law’ advocated by Lawrence Lessig. The approach implies the transformation of legal rules (that are formulated in a natural language) into machine-readable format. Such a transformation can be viewed as a kind of translation. Automating the translation requires human expert abilities. This is needed in both the interpretation of legal rules and legal knowledge representation.”
- D. Bogdanov, M.V. Crispino, V. Čyras, K. Lapin, M. Panebarco and F. Zuliani. Virtual world platform VirtualLife: P2P, security, rule of law and learning support. In: Proceedings of 2009 NEM Summit Towards Future Media Internet, 28-30 September 2009, Saint-Malo, pp. 124-129.
- Abstract: “This paper addresses the purposes, design decisions and innovative features produced while developing a peer-to-peer virtual world platform within the FP7 VirtualLife project. VirtualLife project aims to create a safe, democratic and legally ruled collaboration environment to be used for business, education and entertainment. The novelty of the platform is mainly in the issues of security and trust and in the implementation of an in-world legal framework, which is real world law compliant. Nevertheless, the research has also been focused on other technical aspects such as network, scripting and real-time 3D engine issues.”
- Čyras, V., Lapin K. User needs and legally ruled collaboration in virtual world platform VirtualLife. In Methods of Artificial Intelligence, Burczynski, T., Cholewa, W. and Moczulski, W. (eds.) AI-METH Series, Gliwice, Poland, November 2009, pp. 69-76. AI-METH 2009 Symposium on Methods of Artificial Intelligence. ISBN 83-60759-15-4.
- Abstract: “The paper addresses the purposes and design decisions produced while developing a peer-to-peer virtual world platform. The work is being done within the FP7 VirtualLife project. The purpose of the project is to create a safe, democratic and legally ruled collaboration environment. The novelty of the platform is mainly in the issues of security and trust and in the implementation of an in-world legal framework, which is real world compliant. The rule of law principle is extended to a virtual world. Such an extension advances the level of intelligence of an artifact. The approach accords with a trend in legal informatics ‘From norms in law to rules in artifact’. In the paper the authors reflect on user needs and learning support in a university virtual campus, a potential scenario. Virtual worlds’ opportunities in enhancing learning are discussed. A new paradigm of the content is characterized as interaction versus information.”
- V. Čyras & K. Lapin. Learning support and legally ruled collaboration in the VirtualLife virtual world platform. In: Proceedings of Associated Workshops and Doctoral Consortium of the13th East-European Conference, ADBIS 2009, Riga, Latvia, September 7-10, 2009, Grundspenkis, J. et al. (eds.) LNCS, Springer (in print). INTEL-EDU workshop.
- Abstract: “The paper addresses the purposes and design decisions produced while developing a peer-to-peer virtual world platform. The work is being done within the FP7 VirtualLife project. The purpose of the project is to create a safe, democratic and legally ruled collaboration environment. The novelty of the platform is mainly in the issues of security and trust and in the implementation of an in-world legal framework, which is real world compliant. In the paper the authors reflect on user needs and learning support in a university virtual campus, a potential scenario. The opportunities of a virtual world in enhancing learning are discussed. A new paradigm of the content is characterized as interaction versus information.”
- Ilja Livenson, VirtualLife Security Infrastructure. Master’s thesis. University of Tartu, 2009.
- Summary: Describes VirtualLife’s security infrastructure, which incorporates “the X.509 PKI security infrastructure standard and provides identity management, support for multiple certi cates, single sign-on, generic authorisation framework, signing of multi-party contracts and other functionality.”
- User Centric Future Media Internet ( September 2008), Networked Media Unit, DG Information Society and Media of the European Commission. Contribution by M. Panebarco.
- Summary: The law-related sections discuss such topics as identity management, trust, security, virtual law, digital signatures, ecommerce, and digital rights management.
- D1.1.1 – Project Progress Report (Jan-Jun ’08 ).
- Law-Related Progress Made: “Elaboration of the concept of law governed interaction of artificial agents in multi-agent systems (MAS) in order to comply with the Constitution has been carried out. Analysing different type of commercial contracts between the avatars, a key assumption that shall always hold in VirtualLife is that liability is defined only when an avatar can be associated with a human being behind it. Ultimately only the human is liable for the actions of the avatar. A theoretical concept for the legal framework for VirtualLife has been developed. Research on data protection requirements regarding the authentication and authorisation system and the inclusion of terms of service have been concluded. Research on the liability (e.g. contributory or vicarious liability) of service providers for their users’/customers’ acts and the requirements for monetary transactions is nearly finished.”
- D1.1.2 – Project Progress Report (Jul-Dec’08)
- Law-Related Progress Made: “During the third quarter of 2008 D7.1 was finalised. On the basis of the use case scenarios developed in WP2 (D2.1 and D2.2) UGOE conducted detailed research in different areas of law evaluating, in particular, international journal articles and case law with a focus on the protection of intellectual property interests in virtual worlds arising from copyright law, the law of registered trademarks and the law against unfair competition; the protection of minors in virtual worlds; advertising in virtual worlds; user evaluation systems in virtual worlds; contract formation including the requirements regarding electronic signatures and dispute resolution in virtual worlds. (International) law journals and online publications were monitored for new publications concerning legal issues in the context of virtual world, which also resulted in an extensive list of the current state of scholarly writings in this area.”
- Law-Related Plans for Immediate Future: “In January and February 2009, there shall be an analysis of how the rules of the Supreme Constitution and the Virtual Nation Constitution can be translated into actual technical restraints in order to minimize disputes from the outset. Suggestion for the next two years: The progress of VirtualLife’s architecture as well as the fact that the law in the context of virtual worlds is developing constantly, it is advisable that the project has permanent legal support by UGOE. …”
- D2.1: End User Definition and Needs (5th May 2009)
- Summary: “This paper intends to examine the state of the art with regard to virtual worlds in 2008 and to identify the fields of applications which seem to be more promising. The final goal is to identify to which user needs Virtual Life should respond. … We present in the present work some additional information related to the overall panorama of Virtual Worlds, in which we include for the purposes of the present analysis some examples of Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games, MMORPGs, in order to provide a short overview of their main features (an in-depth analysis of these platforms is implemented in D.11.3). Moreover, the present document intends to provide a documentation of the procedure that has been followed for identifying the main requirements which will drive the development of the VirtualLife platform. A description of a roadmap setting the path for the forthcoming analysis of user needs, focused on a specific scenario that the consortium has selected due exploitation potentials is also provided.” Covers a number of law-related issues.
- WP 7 Virtual Nation Juridical System: References of D7.1 Preliminary Report of the Legal Fundamentals Concerning Virtual Worlds
- Abstract: “The ‘VirtualLife’ project aims to provide an immersive and secure environment, combining a high quality 3D virtual experience with the trustiness of a secure communication infrastructure. VirtualLife constitutes a new form of civil organization, aimed at the creation of secure and ruled places within the virtual world, where important transactions can occur. The aggregation in communities and the collaboration between users is encouraged in order to reach a management of common and private interests. This collaboration is achieved through the definition of common rules that take care of all the involved cultures. A standard collection of laws, the Virtual Constitution, finalized to the creation and regulation of a secure and trusted environment (Virtual Nation) will be studied. In order to reach high quality 3D metaverses the world objects will be distributed on a peer-to-peer network with nodes connected using a secure protocol. Thus, the resulting Virtual World will not be hosted on a central server cluster but will be based on a network of Virtual Zone Servers (VZ Servers). The peer-to-peer architecture will enable easy and fast sharing of contents without third ruling partners: the only ruling entity will be the law in force, defined by the users community and accepted by those users who join the community afterwards. Each VZ Server simulates all the entities in the zone and gives the users the possibility to create and share contents, media and data in a very intuitive way.”
HT Vytautas Čyras.
