Law Commons^™

Who Owns An Avatar? Copyright, Creativity, And Virtual Worlds, Tyler T. Ochoa

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law

Today's massively multi-player online role-playing games (MMORPGs) offer their users the ability to create or customize their own avatars with distinctive visual appearances. This Article contends that users who take advantage of that ability are exercising significant creative choices, such that they should be considered the "authors" and copyright owners of their own avatars. The Copyright Act envisions several types of collaborative authorship, including joint authorship, works made for hire, and collective works. None of these models provides a good fit for user-created avatars, because avatars meet some, but not all, of the elements for each model. Here, the two …