| Home |
|||||||||
Virtual Speech Rights in Virtual Worlds |
|||||||||
|
What rights do we have in virtual worlds? Do we actually own anything in a virtual world? The laws in virtual worlds are set down by End User License Agreements (EULAs). Aren’t virtual worlds supposed to be places of freedom? Not really. The creators of these virtual rights have to right to censor your speech, the right to delete anything of piece of virtual property you have for any reason, and the right to log your activities, like your chat, while you are in their world, taking away your privacy. So what can be done? There are many solutions. Developers and people living in these virtual worlds can work out avatar rights between themselves with enough people demanding rights. Another possibility is having the government to step in and offer incentives for developers creating legal regimes within virtual worlds. In Little Brother, the department of homeland security used the internet as a means to spy on citizens and as a result, the Xnet was created to evade the privacy violations by the government. These solutions would work in theory, but users, like Tracer, seem to think otherwise. It’s obvious that as more and more people come to live in virtual worlds that this issue of virtual rights will become more prominent. |
||||||||
| Calvin R. - ENGL 138 | |||||||||