To Catch a Virtual World Thief

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As weird as this legal activity may sound, it is deadly serious to the participants. And more important, to the rest of us it's a harbinger of many equally bizarre legal things to come. In a virtual world where everyone is on a level playing field and the only differentiating factor is creativity, intangibles such as design, innovation, and even genius are the true commodities. People argue, fight, and often litigate over wherever the money is. In the virtual economy, the money's an intellectual property and copyright is currency.

I can certainly understand why Alderman would sue. He is entitled to recoup his investment and shouldn't have future earnings diluted by a porn poacher. If a business's intellectual-property rights aren't protected, it will have a chilling effect on entrepreneurship and will retard investment in Internet businesses in general.

On the other hand, because the virtual world is based on mind stuff, not hand stuff—bits, and not atoms—it is difficult to avoid being at least a little derivative. Very few creations are truly unique. In the digital world more than in the physical one, each inspiration is layered on the reputation of predecessors. Too strict adherence to and application of copyright law will have a chilling effect on creativity, especially given the heavy-handedness of some big companies built around valuable trademarks. Take cartoon mice, for instance.

Intellectual-Property Protection

If online copyright protection is too strong, we will see a blast of recording industry-like legal shotgun shenanigans aimed against avatars and their artifacts by entertainment conglomerates. If copyright protection is too weak, no one will want to take the financial and emotional risk necessary to build a virtual business. We need a balance of IP law that tacitly acknowledges that the Internet is a special place and perhaps deserves special treatment. Perhaps theft could be reinterpreted and applied as the result of a stricter litmus test than in other media. Linking to someone else's Web site, for instance, doesn't intuitively seem like the same crime as, say, hot-wiring a car.

Stealing explicit code is clearly wrong, but avatar Volkov might have gotten sued even if he'd only reverse-engineered the look and feel of Eros' products; after all, the perception of theft to the owner is based on the look and feel of the artifact, not the underlying atomic structure. It is this larger sense of ownership that will cause much trouble in tomorrow's Internet. Lawyers will write laws protecting fungible stuff like code. This will result in intellectual-property protection only for the wealthy, who can afford good lawyers.

It seems that there needs to be more latitude with the legal protections afforded to artifacts in the virtual world. We need a simple system that is both egalitarian and intuitive. It's easier to create such a system by giving the benefit of the doubt to the borrower rather than deferring to the involuntary lender of the intellectual property. For instance, copying pictures, large hunks of songs, and linking to other Web sites should be permissible as long as attribution is given and the whole piece isn't lifted and resold. YouTube is suffering from exactly this problem. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act makes it all too easy for television networks, for example, to force even the smallest snippet of video to be lifted from a Web site, even though it is not being misappropriated in its entirety nor is anyone else making any money off of it.

I suspect that in the future, plagiarism may become a bigger IP crime than misappropriation, because attribution becomes critical in an online world where buzz can create instant Warholian celebrity, and reputation is the only differentiator between pseudonymous identities.

Holtzman, who blogs at Globalpov.com, is the author of Privacy Lost and founder and chief technology officer of pseuds Inc. He writes frequently on technology and privacy at http://www.businessweek.com/technology/.