Policy and Legal Challenges of Virtual Worlds and Social Network Sites

arXiv:0808.1343v1 [cs.CY] 9 Aug 2008 Policy and Legal Challenges of Virtual Worlds and Social Network Sites Holger M. Kienle University of Victoria Victoria, Canada hkienle@acm.org Andreas Lober RAe Schulte Riesenkampff Frankfurt am Main, Germany alober@schulte-lawyers.de Hausi A. M¨uller University of Victoria Victoria, Canada hausi@cs.uvic.ca Abstract This paper addresses policy challenges of complex vir- tual environments such as virtual worlds, social network sites, and massive multiplayer online games. The com- plexity of these environments—apparent by the rich user interactions and sophisticated user-generated content that they offer—poses unique challenges for policy management and compliance. These challenges are also impacting the life cycle of the software system that implements the vir- tual environment. The goal of this paper is to identify and sketch important legal and policy challenges of virtual envi- ronments and how they affect stakeholders (i.e., operators, users, and lawmakers). Given the increasing significance of virtual environments, we expect that tackling these chal- lenges will become increasingly important in the future. 1. Introduction and Background In this paper, we explore the distinct characteristics of virtual environments, and identify the legal and policy chal- lenges that they pose. We argue that the complexity of these environments and the richness of interactions that they offer result also in an increase of complexity in the management, compliance, and auditing of policy and legal requirements. In the following, we address complex computer- generated environments, namely virtual worlds (VWs), so- cial network sites (SNSs), and Massive Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) [6] [16]. Examples of VWs are Second Life, There, and Habbo Hotel; examples of SNSs are Face- book, LinkedIn, and Xing; and examples of MMOGs are World of Warcraft, MapleStory, and RuneScape. In the sub- sequent discussion we will use the term virtual environment (VE) when discussing issues that apply to VWs, SNSs, and MMOGs. VEs have in common that they enable multiple users to interact and collaborate in a complex computer- generated environment. VEs are increasingly gaining significance in terms of numbers of users and generated revenue.1 As a result, policy and legal issues are becoming more and more im- portant for the stakeholders of VEs (i.e., users/players, providers/operators, and lawmakers/regulators). VEs are diverse in the sense that they (1) attract people based on a wide range of different interests such as shared hobbies, sports, religion, and sexual interests, (2) have dif- ferent purposes such as game-playing, socializing or busi- ness, (3) support different interaction patterns such as real- time 3D interactions or asynchronous communication based on message boards, and so on [4]. Consequently, there is no crisp definition of a VE that allows one to draw a clear boundary. In fact, one may view a simple listserv as a social network and, as such, as a VE [18]. A common character- istic of VEs is that there is an emerging culture shaped by social interactions of its members in a virtual environment. In the following, we contrast VEs with different kinds of web sites. The architecture of the World Wide Web has many characteristics that are similar to VEs and as a result many VEs are based on the Web’s infrastructure. For ex- ample, many social networks are implemented as web sites, and some 3D worlds run with web browser plug-ins (e.g., Habbo Hotel runs in Adobe’s Shockwave player). For dis- cussion purposes, we introduce a classification of web sites, which groups the sites with roughly increasing sophistica- tion in terms of content and interaction models: brochure-ware: These sites provide information that users can browse (e.g., to obtain information about products and services that they can obtain off-line) [23]. Users do not have to log on to the site and the site is static in the sense that it looks the same for all users. e-commerce: These sites are run by companies that sell products online. They may be pure online retailers (e-tailers) or have a clicks-and-bricks hybrid business 1For example, Xing claims that every day 5.7 million people use their platform. The most popular MMOG is World of Warcraft, whose owners claim to be generating 1 billion USD in revenue per year with over 10 million subscribers [8]. model [19]. To place orders, users have to create an account. Web 2.0: These sites are characterized by sophisticated functionality that often rival shrink-wrapped software products. These sites typically offer a participatory and interactive user experience [7]. Importantly, these sites have user-generated content where users are con- ducers, that is, they “both consume creative works and simultaneously add creative content to those same works” [21]. The above classification is an idealization because concrete web sites typically have features that blur into other groups. For exampl

…(Full text truncated)…

This content is AI-processed based on ArXiv data.