Legal Issues with Real Estate in the Metaverse
- DOI
- 10.2991/978-2-494069-59-6_7How to use a DOI?
- Keywords
- Legal issues; Real Estate; Metaverse; Blockchain and NFTs
- Abstract
The word ‘meta’ gained prominence when the social media platform Facebook renamed itself ‘Meta Platforms, Inc.’ Originating from ancient Greek, the word means ‘beyond’ or to ‘transcend’ and was popularised in the 1990s by online gaming industry in games like ‘Dungeons and Dragons’. The term ‘metaverse’ itself was coined by author Neil Stephenson in his book ‘Snow Crash’. Today once again the online gaming industry is pushing the frontiers with blockchain, tokens and AI to create a new dimension, the ‘phygital’ world that merges the augmented, virtual and mixed reality to create a new immersive experience. Users are being given the opportunity to create and market their virtual goods and services, and digital assets including virtual real estate. This article explores the legal issues focussing on ownership rights arising from investing in real estate in the metaverse through a case study of ‘Second Life’ created by Linden Lab, the pioneers in real estate in the metaverse. The methodology adopted is a doctrinal study, based on currently available literature on the subject.
- Copyright
- © 2022 The Author(s)
- Open Access
- Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.
Cite this article
TY - CONF AU - Gita Radhakrishna PY - 2022 DA - 2022/12/22 TI - Legal Issues with Real Estate in the Metaverse BT - Proceedings of the International Conference on Law and Digitalization (ICLD 2022) PB - Atlantis Press SP - 74 EP - 82 SN - 2352-5398 UR - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-494069-59-6_7 DO - 10.2991/978-2-494069-59-6_7 ID - Radhakrishna2022 ER -