The Five Indicia of Virtual Property

[Excerpt] “Many Americans use “it” every day. Although it is intangible, it may be worth thousands of dollars. Because we can both control it and prevent other people from controlling it, we assume, without much thought, that we own it. Sometimes we pay someone a monthly fee to hold it for us. Sometimes, simply by using it, we increase its value. When we finish using it, we often sell it. “It” is virtual property, and it may take the form of an email address, a website, a bidding agent, a video game character, or any number of other intangible, digital commodities. If it were to be damaged or stolen, the immediate questions would be: (1) how should a court identify it; and (2) what degree of legal protection should it receive? Because no court or legislature in the United States yet has recognized virtual property interests, a combination of contract and custom currently controls the relationship between Internet users and service providers. […] The question therefore becomes, how should courts identify protectable virtual property interests? Partially due to the dramatic success of Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs)9 and the rise of secondary markets for virtual characters and treasures from those games, a recent frenzy of legal scholarship has struggled to resolve this question. This note supports the legal recognition of virtual property interests, as already convincingly justified by the legal analogy to traditional property interests set forth by Professor Joshua Fairfield, buttressed by the practical reality that virtual property has significant economic value. Building on these rationales, this note proposes five indicia, common to most forms of virtual property, which a court should use to identify legally protectable virtual property interests on the Internet. These indicia are: (1) rivalry; (2) persistence; (3) interconnectivity; (4) secondary markets; and (5) value-added-by-users. This note cautions, however, against applying this newfound definition indiscriminately against the interests of the very entities without whom the property would not exist: the businesses hosting the remotely accessed computer resources (i.e., the service providers). […] Part III of this note applies the five indicia to the well-established framework of traditional property to illustrate this balancing process. Throughout the development of the law in this area, courts must retain the freedom and flexibility to craft appropriate equitable remedies on a case-by-case basis, and special attention should be directed to the practical issues commonly faced by Internet service providers. The ultimate purpose of virtual property jurisprudence should be to strike a balance that provides legal redress to users whose legitimate virtual property interests have been violated while simultaneously reducing liability and disincentives to service providers who promote and sustain the growth of the Internet.

Education Unleashed: Participatory Culture, Education, and Innovation in Second Life

Part of the Volume on the Ecology of Games: Connecting Youth, Games, and LearningWhile virtual worlds share common technologies and audiences with games, they possess many unique characteristics. Particularly when compared to massively multiplayer online role-playing games, virtual worlds create very different learning and teaching opportunities through markets, creation, and connections to the real world, and lack of overt game goals. This chapter aims to expose a wide audience to the breadth and depth of learning occurring within Second Life (SL). From in-world classes in the scripting language to mixed-reality conferences about the future of broadcasting, a tremendous variety of both amateurs and experts are leveraging SL as a platform for education. In one sense, this isn't new since every technology is co-opted by communities for communication, but SL is different because every aspect of it was designed to encourage this co-opting, this remixing of the virtual and the real

Exploring the Potential of the Web-Based Virtual World of Second Life to Improve Substance Abuse Treatment Outcomes

Provides an overview of Second Life, an Internet-based virtual world, and summarizes discussions among addiction recovery experts about integrating virtual reality into behavioral treatment as a way to teach patients new responses to real environments

Virtual marketing in virtual enterprises

Virtualization caused tremendous evolution in the economics of marketing channels, patterns of physical distribution and the structure of distributors and developed a new concept that is known as virtual marketing (VM). VM combines the powerful technologies of interactive marketing and virtual reality. Virtual enterprise (VE) refers to an organization not having a clear physical locus. In other words, VE is an organization distributed geographically and whose work is coordinated through electronic communications." It should be mentioned that here VE encompasses all other similar phrases like Virtual company, virtual corporation, etc. One of the greatest challenges facing business owners and managers – both for traditional and virtual organizations- is finding a way to cost−effectively communicate frequently and consistently with their target markets; and the virtual marketing perform this function at the best possible. In this paper, we focus on the concept of “Virtual marketing in virtual enterprises”.virtuality, Virtual marketing, virtual enterprise

The Mickey Mouse world of humanities scholarship

Looks at the contradiction between commercial needs and scholarship such as in the area of copyright. Proposes the need for a serious debate on what is required from an electronic environment for scholarship, then act to set about constructing it. In particular sees the need to consider how the minority subjects, languages and concerns which are the peculiar prerogative of the humanities are to be served by rather than dictated to by networks and how the products of small learned societies are to be made available wherever and whenever needed. Finally the academic community has to begin to look at how non-commercial products of scholarship are to be made available and preserved or the future

The Distributed Partnering Model for Drug Discovery and Development

Proposes a model for bringing new drugs to market efficiently by creating "product definition companies" that would acquire early-stage discoveries from research institutions and invest in defining product applications to sell to pharmaceutical companies

Sports industry research North America: USA & Canada

The Sports Industry is a potential business that not only involves the game at the field. It includes different aspects like food & beverage, apparel, sponsorship, licensing, events, tourism, and infrastructure (ATKearney, 2011). In North America this industry is one of the most important in terms of creating a positive impact to the economy, increasing surprisingly fast the GDP of the United States and Canada. The United States and Canada are the world’s biggest sports nations that provide a wide range of sport facilities and infrastructure and hosts yearly enigmatic events in key cities like Boston, New York, Los Angeles, Vancouver and Toronto. For this reason, we identified that these countries are a strategic move for any sports-related company to keep growing within the Sports Industry. The current report aims to provide a comprehensive research about the Sports Industry in North America, describing and analyzing possible investment opportunities in these countries for the upcoming years. The document is structured to explain an I) Overview of The Sports Industry in the United States and Canada, including the main sports leagues, secondary sports, sport facilities and new technology and trends. Then, we will discuss about the II) Main Leagues in North America considering its main teams, athletes, events, and highlight sport cases. Finally, we will describe the III) Sports Media Industry in North America, explaining about the Print, TV, Radio, Online channels and current media trends

Education Reform for the Digital Era

Will the digital-learning movement repeat the mistakes of the charter-school movement? How much more successful might today's charter universe look if yesterday's proponents had focused on the policies and practices needed to ensure its quality, freedom, and resources over the long term? What mistakes might have been avoided? Damaging scandals forestalled? Missed opportunities seized