A couple of weeks ago, I was reading Benjamin Duranske's excellent virtual-worlds-and-law blog, Virtually Blind, and came across the following remark:
Most writers, including VB’s editor, take commodification and subsequent legal intervention as a foregone conclusion at this point.
This got me thinking: the first State of Play conference was in November, 2003, and since then the arguments have settled down considerably. When we do get legal intervention, it will be far more informed than it would have been 5 years ago.
I'm wondering, though, what degree of consensus there is out there with regards to how the law "should" treat virtual worlds?
For example, it seems fairly clear now that game-like worlds (such as WoW) are a different kind of animal to non-game worlds (such as SL). People may disagree in the details (for example how much of a defence a developer has to maintain in order to keep their game-like status), but there does seem to be a consensus that supportive legal intervention aimed at one kind of virtual world could hurt the other kind.
What other broad areas of consensus are there? I don't mean what should there be, I mean what are there? Can we say things about virtual property, player rights, IP, or any of the other big issues, that even people on opposing sides of an argument can agree on? Or is everything important pretty much settled now and we're now just arguing about who gets the CD collection?