A Brief Overview Of The Metaverse And The Legal Challenges It Will Present – Technology

United States:

A brief overview of the metaverse and the legal challenges it will pose

November 03, 2021

Morgan Lewis

To print this article, all you need to do is register or log in to Mondaq.com.

If you are just looking at the concepts of virtual reality and augmented reality, it may be time to break the learning curve as technology companies continue to talk about creating the “metaverse”.

Although vaguely defined, the term “metaverse” is typically used to describe the concept of a future iteration of the Internet made up of shared 3-D virtual spaces connected into a perceived virtual universe. In simpler terms, the metaverse refers to a virtual world where you can use avatars to interact with other people and places. Technology companies envision different types of Metaverse platforms. Such a platform would be based on blockchain and allow users to buy land and build environments using non-fungible tokens and cryptocurrencies. Another type of platform can be a more general virtual world where people can work, play, or socialize. Both artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning will play a key role in the development of a metaverse, as the metaverse is about merging our physical reality with the digital universe using avatars. In essence, the metaverse will be an ultimate pinnacle of virtual reality and augmented reality.

The new era of the metaverse will affect all aspects of our society, including entertainment, advertising, and the economy. For example, imagine a metaverse where you can walk into a virtual mall with your avatar, try on clothes from real clothing companies, and then buy the outfits that look best on your avatar (and therefore you) without your avatar to leave house. During the pandemic, musicians were able to host virtual concerts with virtual reality, similar to a metaverse. New ways of virtual interactions offer diverse possibilities for marketing, sales and events without physical presence.

The metaverse will also have legal implications. One topic will be the collaboration and interoperability between different Metaverse creators. If the purpose of the metaverse is to enable people to interact in a digital world, then each metaverse should be accessible from all devices and headsets. This could mean that technology companies have to agree to certain standards for a metaverse so that they can collaborate between different developers, or each company has to adhere to the technology restrictions created by its predecessors and license the rights to use another company’s underlying technology to have its own metaverse to build.

Another issue will be intellectual property ownership. In a previous blog post, we discussed the recent artificial intelligence case, in which the US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia ruled that an AI system cannot be named as the inventor of a patent. In contrast to US patent law, US copyright law does not provide for an express requirement of human authorship; However, US courts and the US Copyright Office generally operate on this requirement and refuse to register works that are not man-made. In fact, the Compendium of US Copyright Office Practices – a manual produced by the US Copyright Office to be used primarily by Copyright Office staff as a general guide to policies and procedures such as registration, filing, and recording – is “the term” ” Authorship “implies that in order for a work to be protected by copyright, it must owe its origin to a person. Materials that were produced exclusively by nature, plants or animals are not protected by copyright. The metaverse could contain virtual creations of avatars and AI aspects. If such creations are considered AI creations rather than human creations, they must not be granted certain types of intellectual property protection.

The metaverse could also cause problems for content owners as it will be difficult to monitor copyright infringement in the metaverse. Content licensees must also carefully review their license agreements to ensure that they have the right to use the licensed content in the Metaverse, as many license agreements may not have considered the use of licensed content in such forums.

The above issues are just a handful of legal issues that will arise from creating a metaverse, and other key issues such as data protection and privacy will immediately come to the fore as metaverses are developed and more people begin to interact in them.

This article is provided as a general information service and should not be construed as legal advice on any particular subject.

POPULAR ARTICLES ON: Technology Made in the United States

Mitigation of cyber risk in the supply chain

Wilson Elser Moskowitz Edelman & Dicker LLP

According to a study by the cyber security service provider BlueVoyant, 80 percent of the companies surveyed experienced a security breach that related to security gaps in their …

https://www.mondaq.com/unitedstates/fin-tech/1127424/a-brief-overview-of-the-metaverse-and-the-legal-challenges-it-will-present-