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Full-Text Articles in Law
Virtual Property, Joshua A.T. Fairfield
Virtual Property, Joshua A.T. Fairfield
Joshua A.T. Fairfield
This article explores three new concepts in property law. First, the article defines an emerging property form - virtual property - which is not intellectual property, but that more efficiently governs rivalrous, persistent, and interconnected online resources. Second, the article demonstrates that the threat to high-value uses of internet resources is not the traditional tragedy of the commons that results in overuse. Rather, the naturally layered nature of the internet leads to overlapping rights of exclusion that cause underuse of internet resources: a tragedy of the anticommons. And finally, the article shows that the common law of property can act …
Avatar Experimentation: Human Subjects Research In Virtual Worlds, Joshua A.T. Fairfield
Avatar Experimentation: Human Subjects Research In Virtual Worlds, Joshua A.T. Fairfield
Joshua A.T. Fairfield
Researchers love virtual worlds. They are drawn to virtual worlds because of the opportunity to study real populations and real behavior in shared simulated environments. The growing number of virtual worlds and population growth within such worlds has led to a sizeable increase in the number of human subjects experiments taking place in such worlds. Virtual world users care deeply about their avatars, their virtual property, their privacy, their relationships, their community, and their accounts. People within virtual worlds act much as they would in the physical world, because the experience of the virtual world is "real" to them. The …