Virtual Estates Lead to Real-World Headaches - NYTimes.com
Off-line, the post office does not send someone to burn your correspondence after an obituary appears in the paper. The deed and title company does not send a crew to tear down your home. But online, under the agreements that users accept, that can be the default setting.
“When you have a real, tangible sword or gold coin, you can have an exclusive right to that object and the law can recognize that,” said Greg Lastowka, a law professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey who is writing a book on property rights and virtual goods. “But when you have the mediation of the network software and the owner of the virtual environment, they have an interest as well. They’re caught in the middle.”
By their very names — MySpace, YouTube — companies promote a sense of ownership about content that users create. But control of digital assets is often disputed, and the mediators — whether they provide e-mail services, social networking or virtual real estate — have a big say.
“Access and control are the two big levers,” said Deven R. Desai, a visiting fellow at the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University in New Jersey and professor at the Thomas Jefferson School of Law in California. “Assuming it’s yours, can you access it, and how easy is it to move it around?”
Virtual property rights!
