Loading ...End-User License Agreements aren’t all bad. They are necessary for interration - that incorporation-like thing for virtual worlds that Castronova talks about - in order to set out and delimit the game space. It is when they violate Castronova’s closed/open virtual world dichotomy that they become problematic. When EULAs are used to transgress the VR/RL* membrane in order to extend IP beyond its legislative bounds that they become abusive.
(Incidentally, I’ll talk about how they can be used to mediate that transgression in other contexts - like the user/avatar boundary - in another post.)
Jack Balkin states that platform owners / game developers control the artificial world through either code, contract, or a combination of the two. A simple example of this is controlling the use of offensive or profane language in family-friendly artificial environments. Many if not most of these spaces employ some sort of language filter.
The effectiveness of language filters at catching the undesired words or phrases, without too many false positives, varies considerably and is never perfect. Give a pre-teen a text box and he or she will try to find a way to say the things Mom and Dad don’t permit at the dinner table. So what is more contextually flexible but less directly enforceable than code?
Law.
*Virtual Reality / Real Life
Posted under Information Technology, Intellectual Property, Virtual Worlds
This post was written by Jeremy Costin on January 7, 2008
