Electronic product companies like to show adverts on the telly where people are using their products to enhance their lives. The actors in the adverts show a wonderful life, gleaming smiles and personal connections, all rendered honest by hardware. But what is the reality?
Veronica Brown is a hot fashion designer, making a living off the virtual lingerie and formal wear she sells inside the online fantasy world Second Life. She expects to have earned about $60,000 this year from people who buy her digital garments to outfit their animated self-images in this fast-growing virtual community.
Got that? She makes virtual lingerie. There are those among us who would say that the best lingerie is virtual, but that is a different post.
What is a virtual community? It is a place where people can go to not be themselves. Or rather, to be not themselves. See Second Life for an example of what I am talking about. All of the characters are idealized in some way. But they all have large chests. Pecs for men, melons for women. The men often have artful facial hair that you carve rather than grow and shave.
This article talks about property rights in this virtual world, and this is a topic that will allow us to reexamine the relationship between property rights and civil liberties in the future. Now? Not so much.
In Second Life, Linden Lab executives wanted to avoid this confusion, believing that users needed clear ownership for economic activity to thrive, recounted Cory Ondrejka, chief technical officer. Otherwise, users would have little incentive to invest.
But he stressed that this ownership did not extend to full property rights — creators have intellectual property rights to the software patterns used in making virtual objects but no rights to the objects themselves. Under this formulation, Brown owns her designs but not the individual dresses and pieces of underwear. Nor do her customers “own” the apparel they purchase and hang in their virtual closets.
Right now, it is about virtual thongs.