The Metaverse Republic

Or how the Metaverse Republic can co-exist peacefully with national law and virtual world terms of service whilst being fully independent from both

One of the commonest misconceptions of the Metaverse Republic project is that there is a conflict between, on the one hand, an independent system of law within a virtual world such as we are designing, and, on the other, the laws of various nations from which users of the virtual world come or the rules created by the operators of the virtual worlds and accepted by their users in their terms of service (or equivalent) agreements. In fact, there is no conflict: all three sets of rules can happily run in parallel to each other, because they each have their own independent means of enforcement, and because the existence of those rules, and that means of enforcement, is not a breach of any of the other two sets of rules.

This is what we call “normative parallelism”. The academic way of putting it is this: it is easily possible for two separate normative systems to exist in parallel in the same domain. So, for domain X, normative system A might impose duties P and Q, normative system B might impose duties Q and R, and normative system C might impose duty S, each with its own, independent, means of enforcement, without necessarily creating any conflict. Likewise, the systems might not apply the same standards in assessing an equivalent duty, so, for example, normative system A might impose duty Q1, and normative system B duty Q2, again, without any conflict. With one exception, the same is true of all kinds of normative relations, including rights, liabilities, privileges, etc. The one exception is that a conflict would arise if any normative system purported to mandate that which another normative system prohibited.

In less academic terms, it just means that it is perfectly possible for there to be two or more completely independent sets of rules about the same subject, binding on the same people, each with their own independent means of enforcement without there being a conflict between them. Think of a sports game: soccer, for example. People who play soccer are subject to at least two sets of rules about how they conduct themselves during the game: (1) the rules of soccer; and (2) the national law of the country in which they are playing. They do not conflict with each other, but co-exist peacefully, even though some of the rules are about the same things. If a person breaks the rules of soccer, he or she can be sent off, or the other side might get a free kick. If the person breaks the rules of national law, he or she could be convicted of a crime and sentenced, or made the subject of an injunction or ordered to pay damages. Just as the referee of a soccer game cannot send anybody to prison, so too can national courts not order that somebody be sent off the pitch during a soccer match. Furthermore, the referee of a soccer game is entitled, for example, to order a free kick: nobody has an independent right that the other team not get a free kick where the referee so orders it.

Additionally, the rules of soccer covers some things that the national law does not cover, overlaps with the national law in some respects, and does not cover many areas covered by the national law, none of which entail any conflict. So, handling the ball is prohibited in soccer, but not by national law; the same action on the pitch might be called by the rules of soccer a foul and by the national law an assault (but the referee is not breaking national law by applying a different standard in determining what constitutes a foul than the national law applies in determining what is an assault); and the referee would not be able, for example, to order a free kick or send a player off for stealing a fellow player’s wallet in the coach on the way to the match, even though that player would be liable to be convicted and sentenced for a crime in the national courts. Nobody is obliged to make the rules of soccer mirror national law so that it is illegal to play soccer unless everything that could be punished in a national court is also punishable by the referee and everything permitted by national law permitted by soccer: indeed, if that were the case, it would be impossible to play any sports at all.

The same applies to the Metaverse Republic: we are not obliged to make our laws the same, or even similar to, the laws of any particular nation, or international private law, or the terms of service of any particular virtual world, and, provided that our laws do not purport to compel people to do things that they are legally prohibited from doing, are not doing any wrong by creating and enforcing them. Just as the referee cannot, and does not purport to be able to, send anybody to prison, so too can the Metaverse Republic not enforce its rules in the same way as national courts by sending bailiffs to people’s homes and businesses and forcibly removing physical goods; but, similarly, just as national courts cannot, and do not purport to be able to decide who should have a free kick in a football match, they cannot, and do not purport to be able to, control whose name appears on our banishment database. Just as with the game of soccer, where the referee’s decision on, for example, whether a particular action by a player was a foul, does not bind (or even much influence) national courts in deciding whether the player was guilty or not of an assault, so too would the decisions of the Metaverse Republic’s courts not supplant or bind, or purport to supplant or bind, any set of national courts. Just as in a game of soccer, where the referee is entitled to send people off the pitch or order a free kick, the Metaverse Republic is entitled to add the names of people to a database, and encourage people who own virtual land in SecondLife and other virtual worlds to configure their land automatically to refuse entry to anybody on that database (just as individual owners of virtual land have an unfettered discretion, granted to them by the virtual world provider in exchange for the payment for that virtual land, to decide who, if anybody else, is allowed to use it, which includes the right partly to delegate that decision to others, including the Metaverse Republic). In that sense, the Metaverse Republic is also quite similar to a scheme called “Pub Watch” operated by a number of UK public houses, where anybody who is thought by the landlord of one public house member of the scheme to be behaving inappropriately can be barred by that landlord from all participating public houses (and note that the parallelism principle applies equally to Pub Watch as it does to soccer, even though with Pub Watch, unlike with soccer, the people who are barred from the public houses do not consent in advance to being part of the scheme).

So, even though the Metaverse Republic will perform functions that often overlap with the functions performed by national law and the terms of service of virtual worlds, because it has its own, independent, means of enforcement that it is entitled to use, there is no conflict between the Metaverse Republic and either national laws or the terms of service of virtual worlds, and, similarly, there is no obligation for the Metaverse Republic’s own laws to be the same as, or even similar to, those two other sets of rules, provided that it does not try to compel people to do what the other rules prohibit. For that reason, the Metaverse Republic has great scope to be innovative with its rules; the democratic parliament will have considerable scope to legislate in a way responsive to the needs of the electorate, and, similarly, the common law will have scope to develop in ways responsive to the particular needs of virtual worlds, as well as having regard to experiences of what has and has not worked well in other legal systems. With this flexibility, the Metaverse Republic has the opportunity to fill a gap in the provision of relatively inexpensive but sophisticated and fair international, virtual-world specific enforceable dispute resolution that is cost-effective for even relatively small disputes, which is left between national laws and virtual worlds’ terms of service.