renreynolds.com | philosophy: research project

Project Summary

This project examines the rights that might be associated with a relatively new type of object - the avatar. The project takes as its starting point the fact that online communities have existed for over twenty years and now have tens of millions of members. As these communities have matured the perceived value of acts and objects within the communities has developed. More widley the social context and meaning of being online and the role of virtual objects has shifted as online transactions - commercial, civil and personal, have become an integral part of life for many. In fact social and economic policy in most western courtiers and the idea of the digital divide suggests that not having access to the Internet and a relatively fixed form of identity there is perceived as a new facet social exclusion.

At the same, where rights are concerned, debates over the Internet and virtual worlds tend to be framed in commercial terms. There is an assumed commoditization of almost all aspects of the Internet including tokens of identity such as email addresses and avatars. Here there is an apparent discontinuity between the values attributed to virtual spaces and object by policy makers and developments in law, and the values recognized by members of virtual communities and certain other policy goals.

In part this project seeks to resist the assumed commoditization of large parts of the virtual sphere, especially in respect of identity. This will be done through an examination of the position of avatars in respect of current intellectual property law and the philosophical traditions that underpin the law. For example the project will consider virtual worlds as a model of a Lockean common to see if property rights might emerge at this level of abstraction. The project will also consider the connection between the individual and the avatar in the modern context in the light of Kant and Hegel's ideas of the relationship between property and autonomy.

More generally the project seeks to put such debates in the context of the actual social role and value of online communities and an according re-evaluation of a number of philosophical traditions in the light of the physical-virtual nexus that is emerging.

The project addresses these broad issues though a focus on a particular type of online object - the avatar, and specifically player-characters in Massively Multiplayer Online Role Play Games (MMORPGs). Though project will also take into account tokens of identity currently used in other online communities and will briefly consider the status of possible future forms of avatar such as those that combine elements of Artificial Intelligence (AI).

Overall the project will combine three approaches to the issues of avatars and rights: current status of law; social role and value of avatars, and a possibly re-formulation of some philosophical traditions of identity and rights in the light of the developing person-avatar nexus.

Ultimately the project will propose what rights should be accorded to avatars, the kind of legal framework that might be used to instantiate these rights and the practical consequences of this.

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Background

Who cares about Avatars ?
The idea of an avatar is ancient. It derives from Hindu myth where it refers to the incarnation of a being from one world into another - in its original form a god made human. In popular usage an avatar is taken to refer to the representation of a person or machine in a virtual world - generally some future 3D cyberspace along the lines described by William Gibson (Gibson 1984) or Neil Stephenson (Stephenson 1992).

Despite the science fiction associations avatars are alive and well today.

As far back as 1979 when ARPAnet (the forerunner of the Internet) had around 100 hosts (Segalle 1998), the first publicly available bulletin board system CBBS was launched in Chicago (Christos 1999). At the same time, at Essex University in the UK, Bartle and Trubshaw created the first Multi-User Dungeon or MUD (Bartle 1990). These were text-based environments where the only fixed representation of a user was a name, which persisted from session to session. However from these relatively simple building blocks the modern virtual community was born. While the CBBS community no longer exists, the community based around the famous BBS The WELL is still going almost 20 years after its creation in 1984.

The idea behind the first MUD has developed into a range of Massively Multiplayer Online Role Play Games (MMORPGs). These are large Internet based communities utilizing persistent representations 3D themed worlds, very close to the popular idea of cyberspace. Currently there are several million members of MMORPGs each of which have one or more player-characters - their instantiation within the virtual world.

While ostensibly quest based games set in virtual worlds, the social (Yee 2003 [2]) and economic (Castronova 2001, 2002) value of MMORPGs is non-trivial. MMORPGs are highly developed community spaces with complex social and political structures (Stald 2002), they are host to parties, demonstrations, marriages, funerals and art events. The average age of an MMORPG player is around 25 for males and 30 for females, and players spend an average of 20 hours per week in the game world (Yee 2003 [1]) in fact around of third of players spend more time week-on-week in a game such as EverQuest that they do in paid work (Castronova 2001).

Disputes
Despite or possibly as a result of the maturity of virtual worlds, the status of player-characters is highly disputed. In the case of EverQuest (currently the largest Western MMORPG) a number of players engage in the same of player-characters and virtual items. Player-characters can command values of well over $1,000. The developer-publisher of the game, Sony Online Entertainment, has taken steps to prevent this trade. These have included working with online action sites such as eBay and Yahoo! to stop auctions and terminating player accounts. However sites such as playerauctions.com now exists and the trade continues.

Aligned to these disputes are similar arguments over the status of level boosting services, the use of robots to control characters and status of Fan Fiction based on the EverQuest world.

In virtually all cases both sides of the dispute have framed their arguments in terms of intellectual property rights, specifically copyright.

Internet access rights
The fact that disputes over avatars are framed in terms of property rights is consistent with other disputes over virtual objects. Though this is not necessarily consistent with the accepted political role of the Internet and online communities.

With the explosion of the Internet during the 90s and the increased use of the net as a communications and transaction channel by commerce and governments alike, access to the net and services such as email have gradually delivered greater social benefits - to the degree that most western governments now see the provision of internet access as part of social and economic policy - as witnessed by the political use of concepts such as the 'information society' and the 'digital divide' (see EU Information Society web site) and vast array of global, national and local initiatives to get citizens online.

But getting online is not simply about the act of gaining access to the net, it involves a wide set of issues such as education and seemingly narrow technical issues such as having some form of relatively fixed online identity e.g. an email address. In the wider Internet community not having an email address or not having one that remains relatively static reduces the ways in which one can use the net and interacts with individuals, organizations and government.

Despite this recognition of value there is no generally acknowledged right of Internet access or right to an email address. Access to the net and representations of identity within online communities are generally not seen in these terms, they are commercially provided services that operate under roughly free market conditions for which some governments happen to facilitate the access of citizens to.

In contrast Internet domains are owned and as such have rights associated with them. What's more in a dispute the value of a trademark and ideas of reputation are taken into consideration.

Hence there seems to be a discontinuity between the value and role of an Internet presence and the terms in which the debate is framed. Where rights are explored, these are restricted to commercial and property rights. Any link with wider individual rights seem to be excluded from the debate in the face of the political acceptance of the non-physical world providing and actual social good. Thus there seems adequate motivation for a re-evaluation of this structure of rights.

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Approaches

The overall research question "What set of rights should be associated with avatars in persistent virtual worlds ?" can be broken down into a number of linked sub-questions, project takes the following approach:

What is the current legal status of avatars ?

What is the social role and value of avatars ?

Where do avatars fall within the tradition of the philosophy identity, rights and property ?

What is the current legal status of avatars ?
While the status of avatars is disputed, none of the current disputes have gone to court. Moreover there is almost no literature dealing specifically with the legal status of avatars \ player characters. Hence this research will be based on UK and US statute and case law covering similar legal objects, prevailing international treaties and conventions e.g. Bern Convention, WIPO, and new and emerging legislation such as the DMCA and the EU's draft convention on intellectual property law and databases.

That is areas of law that might provide parallels or applicable legal frameworks will be examined. Of particular interest is a range of boundary areas such as those that bring into question the ownership of identity and examine the subject-object distinction presumed in intellectual property law. For example, questions about ownership of celebrity, the ownership of body parts and the relationship between primary and secondary 'texts' as in the case of Fan Fiction. Particular areas to be investigated will include:

· Virtual representations of real people - Beard (2001)
· Legal status of fictional characters such as cartoons - Beard (2001)
· Organ donation law - Nuffield Convention
· Domain ownership - WIPO and ICANN procedures for dispute resolution
· Ownership of group created texts - Adrian (2003)
· Author work boundaries - Pearce (2002), Scoville (1999)
· Fan Fiction - Tushnet (1997)
· Conventions on the patenting of DNA - Hasson (2002), Thompson (2002), Vicini (1999), Wiess (1997), WIPO (2000)
· Conventions on the ownership of indigenous cultural artefacts - WIPO (1999)

What is the social role and value of avatars ?
Taking a sociological approach to law the rights and legal status that accrue to things are established on the basis of the social status and role that society or some part thereof attributes to those things. This part of the project examines the role and status of avatars primarily from the perspective of the members of online communities. In addition the project will look more widely at the wider status of these communities and the relationship between online community status and wider social status.

Generally speaking online communities are held in high value by their members, as are objects within those communities. This can be seen from the time spent within communities, the types of acts that occur there and the financial value placed on traded objects. Also one can see from the language used by community members that the type value placed on the community and community objects are not simply those of property and more specifically property owned by the developer-publishers of these communities - hence there is a significant discontinuity between the assumptions of developer-publishers and the many of the members of the communities that they have helped create. Areas of community and value examined will include:

· Virtual communities - Rheingold (1993)
· Virtual communities as cultural spaces - Stald (2002)
· Virtual communities as communal spaces - Inkpen (1995)
· Virtual communities as 'spaces' - Oliver (2002)
· Status of cultural creations in online communities - Gottschalk (1995)
· Virtual world economics - Castronova (2002)
· Attitudinal and behavioural studies of players - Dolzan (2000), Kim (1998), Yee (2002[2])
· Self and Online Self - Trukle (1984), Poster (1990)
· Players and rights - Koster
· Value of virtual objects & acts - Floridi (2002), Horner (2001)

Philosophical
Having examined the current legal status and social value of avatars the project will focus on a philosophical examination of position of avatars within the philosophical tradition of intellectual property and more broadly debates about the relationship of identity and rights.

That is, the tradition of identity and rights makes certain assumptions about things like autonomy in the physical world. Avatars are an example of values and acts traditionally attributed to identity and a physical self that are now being projected into online worlds. This section of the project will look to re-evaluate aspects of these traditions in this new context. This will include and examination of the Lockean and Kantian \ Hegelian notions of property, rights and freedom.

This study will be subdivided as follows:

Basis of intellectual property rights, subject-object distinctions and the ‘romantic’ ideal of author

Philosophy of IPR - Fisher (2001)

Property and the individual – Christman (1994), MacPherson (1962), Rose (1994)

Utilitarian \ Economic basis of property

Economic theory of intellectual property - Landers (1989)

Modern challenges to economics of monopoly in near zero transaction cost environments – Boldrin (2002)

Lockean

Lockean basis of IPR – Shiffrin (2002), Volkman (2002)

Lockean self - Mackie (1967)

Hegel \ Kant tradition of property and relation between avatar \ virtual world and Kant’s autonomous moral agent

Kant, property and self – Guyer (2000)

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Conclusions

The project will examine the set of rights that current law, social value and various philosophical traditions suggest should apply to current player-characters and avatars generally. The possible practical implications of expressing these rights will be discussed in relation to the current commercial environment that supports the creation and management of virtual worlds other more distributed world models that are currently being posited.

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