Right to Privacy, Peace & Ownership In A Virtual World

Do you ever feel like someone is watching you, recording every word you say or “borrowing” your great ideas? Well in the real world there are lots of ways you are protected from these kinds of things happening. It all falls under your human rights. In the Western World, human rights are insisted upon and in other parts of the world, they are dreamed about.

Wars have been fought throughout the ages about personal rights. Kings and rulers have either tried to be repressive or balanced in their rule, but all know that there is a limit to caging a person and trying to rob them of these rights. Viktor Frankl wrote about this specific issue in his book, Man’s Search for Meaning.

In a virtual world many of these issues can be explored in a “contained” way, but the effect on individuals can be enormous when rights and basic privileges are removed or withdrawn. A virtual world is a dynamic and powerful social experiment with many times, real world consequences and effects.

Ao, if you live or visit a virtual world remember this. It’s a tremendous privilege to live and have fun in a virtual world. Those of you who live in one, remember when you joined? There was wonder and awe and FUN?

Well some realms and lands in some virtual worlds have grown to be less fun. In fact, in some lands and realms, personal rights are being abused regularly. To help ensure we all remain safe and within the Terms of Service Agreement of a particular virtual world (that most of us would have simply clicked on and not read) here are some critical points to always keep in mind.

Terms of Service Agreements guarantee all residents in a virtual world with the right to privacy. There are three forms of disclosure that violate the Terms of Service of the virtual world I inhabit sometimes. To violate these may mean you receive a warning, a ban or suspension from the virtual world altogether.

The three types of disclosure that are not allowed in my virtual world are:

Right to Privacy

Disclosure: First Life This form of disclosure is defined as sharing personal information about a fellow Resident -- including gender, religion, age, marital status, race, sexual preference, and real-world location -– beyond what is provided by in their First Life page of their Resident profile. Disclosure of something that no reasonable person would believe ("Daniel Linden is from Mars") isn't a violation.

Remote Monitoring

Disclosure: Remote Monitoring Remotely monitoring inworld conversations without the knowledge or consent of all parties involved is a violation of the Terms of Service. If you feel recording a conversation is necessary, we recommend that you post a clearly visible sign in the recording location so that all Residents who enter can see it. Please note: the abuse team will need to determine if sufficient information was provided to the Residents who are being recorded. We recommend that you proceed with caution, provide documentation on your efforts to inform all parties they are being monitored, and find a secure area before recording begins.

Cutting & Pasting & Distributing Attributable "Conversations"

Disclosure: Sharing or posting a conversation inworld or in the virtual world Forums without consent of all involved Residents is a violation of the Terms of Service. Please note: this does not include posting of chat to MySpace, or external websites; those things might be illegal in real life, but those laws must be enforced by the proper real life enforcement agencies. "Conversation" means text that originally came from the virtual world chat or the virtual world instant messages. If it's totally unattributed, then it isn't considered disclosure.
Additionally, Residents will not be punished for sharing or posting a comment such as "Bob Resident said, 'You're the greatest

Intellectual Property Ownership

In my virtual world, subject to certain licenses in the terms of service, you retain the intellectual property rights you may have in your content, including copyrights. "Intellectual property rights" are completely separate to the rights of ownership of data -- the bits and bytes that reside on our servers. In order for us to provide the service of the virtual world at a reasonable cost, we must retain the right to own what we physically own or control -- the server infrastructure, including the data on it.

But ownership of bits and bytes of data does NOT by itself give the owner of the virtual world the right to publish or distribute your copyrighted material.

An Example

Think of the analogy of hosted email services, like the webmail services provided by many Internet portals. If you write an email on those services, you own the copyright to the content of that email. If you attach your copyrighted image to your email, you still own the copyright to that image.

In providing the service of sending that email, the service provider hosts data that represents that email and the attached image. The service provider owns the server infrastructure, including the data on it, and stores that data for your email and attachment in the "Sent" mail folder. But they can and will delete that data anytime they need to, for service and scalability reasons.

The email service is more valuable to the extent they can store more of your content, but for cost reasons they cannot guarantee that nothing will ever happen to that data. However, regardless of what happens to that data, under most terms of service for webmail that I've seen, you will still own the copyright to the content represented by that data.

It Is Meant To Be Fun!

Because of the creative tools and the un-real-worldly tools and capabilities of a virtual world, many violations of personal rights to privacy and monitoring of lives can take place. Many of us who inhabit these virtual worlds also know of realms that have become more like a “police state” where emphasis is put on spying on everyone around, territorialism, competition (even to the killing of races or individuals for sport). Again, as a social experiment, a virtual world will show the same flaws as the real world but six times more impactful and six times more quickly.

To quote a friend, SL should be “Fun! Fun! Fun! Let’s get back to our real purpose of being in a virtual world.