Tag Archives: law

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Second Life is a feudal system

a castle in Second LifeThe Yale Law Journal has been doing an interesting set of discussions on the legal and economic aspects of synthetic worlds and metaverses. Bruce Sterling flagged one up that analyses the land ownership system in Second Life, and concludes that the closest real life analogy to the system would be good old-fashioned feudalism:

We can resolve this tension by describing a user’s interest as seisin rather than as ownership. A tenant seised of land had sworn homage to the lord from whom he held. In exchange, the lord symbolically delivered the tenant into possession. Thereafter, the tenant owed the lord various services and feudal incidents, and in return the lord was obliged to defend his possession against outsiders to the relationship. Every element of this system maps cleanly onto Second Life. A user swears homage by clicking “I agree” to Linden’s terms and conditions; Linden delivers her into possession by changing an appropriate database entry. She owes tier fees in place of feudal incidents; Linden defends her possession via software-based access controls.

Sub-letting is pretty common in Second Life as well, which just goes to enhance the analogy; given Linden Lab’s history of making sweeping, drastically unpopular and incontestable choices about the way they run their virtual world, I doubt you’d have many objections to the analogy from residents, either.

But what does this mean for the legal types themselves? The report concludes:

This analysis of the feudal dimensions of Second Life should make us optimistic about the legal future of virtual worlds. After all, for all its flaws, feudalism was a functional organization of society—indeed a better one than some of the alternatives.

In other words, “leave it be, it’s getting there slowly”. Eventually synthetic worlds with the complexity and infrastructure to support modern property rights will emerge… at which point the nice guys from Yale will no doubt find they’ve have been beaten to the punch by a stampede of virtual ambulance-chasers. [image by Torley]

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Loosening the stays of prohibition – Boston relaxes marijuana laws

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marijuana plantOne of the most curious aspects of the United States for an outsider like myself is the way that different states – and even counties, so I believe – can have their own legal framework in supplement to the one that governs the whole country. It makes a lot of sense from a sociological point of view, though; different regions will inevitably have different political characters, and the law should logically accommodate that.

But it’s got to be a two-way exchange, I guess – in other words, changes in the law may well change the demographic make-up of a region, as well as vice versa. So perhaps Massachusetts will see an influx of bohemians, artists and slackers in the wake of passing its new marijuana decriminalisation laws?

Maybe we’ll see a lot of weird new writers emerging from the local scene over there… after all, Boston apparently ranks as one of the eleven most literate cities in the United States. [image by Eric Caballero]

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The Lunar landgrab – who owns the Moon, anyway?

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the moonAfter a few decades of relative hiatus, there’s been a distinct increase of traffic around the Moon of late, and that has legal types scenting potential work in the offing. Once we start colonising our sister satellite – whether in person or via robot proxies – how do we decide who the territory belongs to?

Luckily for us, one Virgiliu Pop is already on the case. He’s a research specialist at the Romanian Space Agency (Romania has a space agency? Who knew?) who has been looking into the laws that might, by precedent, affect lunar settlements… and he reckons it’s rugged individualism and the pioneer spirit that will win the day:

“Homesteading is likely to transform the lunar desert in the same manner as it transformed the 19th Century United States,” he said. “Space is indeed a new frontier calling for individualism rather than collectivism, and its challenges need to be addressed with a legal regime favorable to property rights.”

As many empires have learned the hard way, maintaining control over distant colonies is no easy trick – and when the colony is at the other end of a steep gravity well, that’s only going to be more true. Anyone fancy a sweepstake on the period between first Lunar colony and first colonial secession? [image by jurvetson]

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Time to end prohibition?

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marijuana traffic lightsDid you know that alcohol prohibition ended in the United States seventy-five years ago this month? Me neither; following on neatly from the Swiss legal heroin program story comes news of a US organisation called Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, whose name should tell you exactly what they’re advocating: legalised regulation of all drugs. Here’s their pitch:

After nearly four decades of fueling the U.S. policy of a war on drugs with over a trillion tax dollars and 37 million arrests for nonviolent drug offenses, our confined population has quadrupled making building prisons the fastest growing industry in the United States. More than 2.2 million of our citizens are currently incarcerated and every year we arrest an additional 1.9 million more guaranteeing those prisons will be bursting at their seams. Every year we choose to continue this war will cost U.S. taxpayers another 69 billion dollars. Despite all the lives we have destroyed and all the money so ill spent, today illicit drugs are cheaper, more potent, and far easier to get than they were 35 years ago at the beginning of the war on drugs.

They’ve got a lot of facts and figures there, that’s for sure… and they’ve also just released a report that claims ending the war on drugs will boost the US economy by at least $76 billion a year, in addition to putting criminal cartels out of business.

LEAP are far from the first to make similar claims, of course, but their point about the economic effects is well timed and calculated to appeal to the status quo. Whether it will have any effect of the entrenched ideas of policy makers remains to be seen… over here in the UK, our government is trying to reclassify cannabis on the same level as methamphetamine, so I’m not exactly hopeful for a spontaneous outbreak of common sense in the halls of power. [image by aforero]

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Unlicensed tanning pills circumventing regulation

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tanning bed tubesHere’s a story for the modern age: despite warnings from the UK government, internet sales of an unlicensed tanning drug are booming. [image by savv]

Melanotan is a synthetic hormone developed by skin cancer researchers that has not been tested for safety, quality or effectiveness. The drug is being sold over the internet and in some tanning salons and bodybuilding gyms. It works by increasing levels of melanin, which is the body’s natural protection from the sun.

Now, it’s no news that people want to take short-cuts to the body (allegedly) beautiful. What is news is the fact that laws and clinical tests can’t keep up with the pace of supply and demand any more; once an idea is out there, someone’s going to see the market potential to make money selling it, and people are going to buy it.

Even when laws or bans are passed, the web effectively negates nation-state boundaries – what’s illegal here in the UK may not be in the Nigeria, for instance. Will controlling the distribution of drugs become as unwinnable a battle as preventing music piracy?

Oh, by the way – the UK government is at least trying to warn of the potential side-effects of the tanning drug:

Melanotan II has also been linked to an increase in libido.

Yeah, that‘ll discourage ’em.