IPR, Ownership and Freedom in Virtual Worlds

Author: Ren Reynolds 
Phone: +44(0)7778285273 
email ren@aldermangroup.com
web: www.renreynolds.com

Digital Games Industries: Developments, Impact and Direction 
19th-20th September 2003 
ESRC Centre for Research on Innovation and Competition 
University of Manchester, 
Manchester, 
England.

Keywords: IPR, Freedom, MMORPG, Rights, Kant

Abstract
This paper will explore the current state of Intelectual Property law in respect of player-characters in online role-play game communities and in respect of avatars general. It will also propose that there are philosophical arguments that resist the commoditization of avatars and suggest that they should have a sui generis legal status based on the rights of the individual. 

It is assumed by the developer-publishers of MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Role Player Games) that player-characters are items of intellectual property - specifically that they hold copyright in player-characters. Similarly, many players assume that they own 'their' player-character and a smaller group of players and companies trade in characters on sites such as playerauctions.com. 

Under current Intellectual Property law for copyright to subsist in something it that thing must be an origional work of an author. Whether player-characters pass these legal tests is moot at best. 

Irrespective of how current law may or may not apply to player-characters \ avatars it is valid to assess their status in the context of the developing social, cultural and economic value of online worlds. 

That is, if we take seriously the reality of the values and social utility of online spaces and the necessary relationship between ourselves and the various encoded identifiers \ intentions of self within these worlds e.g. player-characters, then not only do we challenge the metaphysical subject-object split that is fundamental to intellectual property law but create a nexus between avatars and rights of the individual. 

Specifically the individual-avatar link seems sufficiently strong to apply Kant's idea of self-ownership, as opposed to Locke's, to avatars and argue that this supports the exclusion of avatars from property discourse and argues for the necessary identification of avatars with self though Kant's notions autonomous moral agency when taken to apply strongly to virtual worlds. 

In conclusion it will be argued that averts should be excluded from the scope of property, however, it will be also argued that present player-characters are a boarder-line case that presents practical problems due to the commercial nature of current online communities and the range of practices within those communities. 

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(c)Ren Reynolds 2003 		Page 2 of 2
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