It would be difficult to deny the claim that the closest real life analogy to the "land ownership system" in Second Life is the old-fashioned feudalism.
Second Life even sports a parallel to feudalism’s hierarchical chains of subinfeudation. Several large commercial operations purchase entire Regions from Linden, landscape and subdivide them, and then rent or sell plots to users. Like feudal lords, these “land barons” play a major role in dispensing justice related to landownership. Many of them impose “covenants” on their land, such as a prohibition against running businesses from virtual homes. Tellingly, users upset at a neighbor’s violation of the covenant must look to the land baron for recourse; Linden Labs has no involvement in these local disputes. Similarly, Linden stays out of seignorial disputes between these (land)lords and their tenants. Whereas offline landlords are expected to rely on the state when evicting recalcitrant tenants rather than self-help, Second Life land barons have no recourse but self-help.
A few words on issues of privacy in the context of virtual worlds with an excellent comparison to the prison.
The essential irony of virtual worlds is that populations seeking to build new lives away from the public eye are moving into an environment that is subject to constant surveillance. Virtual worlds currently operate like Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon prison. The Panopticon permitted a single guard in the center of the prison to monitor all of the prisoners. The same degree of surveillance exists in virtual worlds. The denizens of virtual worlds are constantly under surveillance by “game gods,” the private companies that design, maintain, and administer virtual worlds. The game gods then must comply with government requests for call details, wiretaps, stored chatlogs, and other business records. The result: game gods’ cameras are on all the time and the footage reaches law enforcement and the intelligence community.
The Swedish Financial Supervisory Authority (Finansinspektionen) has granted a license to conduct banking activities to Entropia Universe developer MindArk PE AB's wholly owned subsidiary Mind Bank AB.
According to the company's official statement:
Mind Bank AB will be the first bank that fully incorporates real money transactions with activities in a virtual world. Milions of transactions can be processed by the bank for further transer to MindArk and the virtual universe. Mind Bank will also offer selected bank services to customers on the conventional market
Participation in virtual communities is said to be governed by the contractual documents written by the proprietors and 'agreed' to by the participants. In a system where governance is controlled by contract, then the limits of contract are essentially constitutional principles. Where, then, can we find the limits that we will impose on contractual governance?
Some of Metaverse Law's readers may remember in-wolrd presentation of self-govermental project called Al Andalus Caliphate. Here is great machimina about Understanding Islam through Virtual Worlds and some similar initiatives including Al Andalus.
More info about the project:
Full video: link here
Paper: link here
Two interesting articles was published recently:
1. Trust Revisited: Content Creation Theft and Open Source Grids:
Very detailed story of legal issues related to transfering work form Second Life grid to Openlife grid.
2. IMVU Avatars “stole” my eyes (textures):
Vint Falken's story of Creative Commons licensed pictures published on Flickr and used in IMVU.
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