FAQ
Metaverse Republic FAQ
2.1
1. What is the Metaverse Republic?
The Metaverse Republic is an independent, non-profitmaking organisation that will provide enforceable dispute resolution to SecondLife by means of a judicial system (in other words, courts) and a democratically elected Parliament.
2. Is the Metaverse Republic up and running yet?
No. We are still in the process of designing the constitution and technical systems. It will take quite some time before we are ready to go, since we must be very careful to get things right.
3. How will the Metaverse Republic work?
There will be courts, where anybody will be able to bring a case, and the outcomes will be decided by skilled, professional judges, and possibly also juries. The decisions of the court will ultimately be able to be enforced by the use of a banishment database. Anybody who, for example, fails to observe a court order, can have her or his avatar name(s) placed on the banishment database. Using sophisticated systems currently under design by our Techincal Team, landowners (both of individual parcels and whole estates) will be able to “subscribe” to the banishment database (for free), which will automatically eject/ban from that land all the avatars whose names are on the database.
All subscribers will be entitled to vote in regular elections to the Parliament (as well as the executive and a body called the Public Oversight Panel). The Parliament will, in turn, be able to pass laws binding on the courts. It will also be possible for entire local communities to subscribe en bloc by subscribing all of their land (such as a whole estate), and every citizen of that local community (whether directly a landowner or not) will be entitled to vote.
4. Will the courts only be able to deal with disputes between subscribers, or on subscribing land?
No: the courts will deal with all people who use the virtual worlds in which the Metaverse Republic operates. Creating artificial boundaries would serve only to undermine the effectiveness of the system and create unnecessary confusion.
5. Who are you to be making laws for other people?
Ultimately, we are not: because the democratic Parliament will, subject to some necessary constitutional limits, have the power to pass laws binding on all the courts, we are just setting up a structure within which people can make laws for themselves.
6. Why is a system like this necessary when just banning griefers ourselves or using BanLink is a faster way of dealing with problems? Isn’t it enough that there are real-life courts?
The main point of the Metaverse Republic is not to deal with griefers – it is to support enforceable contracts, and other behavior rules, by having a fair and inexpensive system for impartial dispute resolution. That could be used for griefing issues, and other land use or behaviour disputes, but is also likely to help maintain a fair and efficient business environment for the micro-payment transactions that are becoming common in Second Life and other virtual worlds, as well as better enabling local communities to form and enforce their own rulesets.
Disputes about virtual world transactions and and in-world local rules often cannot be efficiently regulated or adjudicated in off-world legal systems, due to the transaction size, the nature of the parties or the subject-matter of the dispute.
7. Are you just role-players?
No. This is a serious system for a serious commercial economy. SecondLife is not a game; we are not playing at running a judicio-political system any more than Anshe Cheung is playing at running a business.
(That is not to say that there are no role-play governments in SecondLife; there are no doubt quite a few, perhaps the most well known of which are the Goreans.)
8. Isn’t banishment too harsh a punishment for most cases?
Yes. That is why we will not use it in most cases. Banishment is the ultimate penalty, just like, in off-world legal systems, going to prison is the ultimate penalty. In both cases, it is, ultimately, the only thing that can be done effectively to a person against that person’s will; however, lesser penalties (or other orders, such as compensation, etc.) can be enforced by threat of invoking the greater penalty.
In off-world jurisdictions, for example, a criminal court will impose a fine or a civil court will make an order for damages. If the person refuses to pay the fine, he or she can ultimately go to prison. If he or she refuses to pay damages, the court can make a further order, for example, for seizure of assets. If the person then physically stops the bailiff taking the assets away, or takes them back after they have been taken, he or she can be convicted of assault or theft and, ultimately, go to prison.
In the Metaverse Republic, a person, for example, who is the beneficiary of an order against another person to pay compensation can bring another case against that person if the compensation is not paid, and if successful, the court would be likely to order that the person be banished until the payment is made.
9. Won’t people just be able to say that they’ve paid their compensation or whatever even when they haven’t, and nobody will know for sure whether they’re telling the truth or not?
We are in the process of developing an automated payment object that will automatically register any payments made pursuant to court orders. People will be presumed not to have satisfied the court order unless payment is made through the object.
10. Why is it important to have enforceable contracts in SecondLife anyway?
An economy can only flourish in so far as its transactions can adequately be safeguarded against exploitation or intractable dispute. For simple transactions, such as the purchase and sale of in-world objects, SecondLife provides such a means in the software code itself. However, no such system is available (or, without unimaginably huge advances in computer technology, possible) for more sophisticated arrangements, such as contracts of employment or for the provision of services. Unsurprisingly, therefore, most of the SecondLife economy is founded almost exclusively on simple transactions.
If more sophisticated transactions in the future become effectively enforceable in a way that they are not now, all this could very well change. Far greater collaboration will be possible, such that work could be carried out by large teams of individual specialists, rather than singular and personally trusted individuals slowly doing all of the work themselves. A wage-based economy could well come into being; think, for instance, of the World of Warcraft gold farmers, and how they were able to earn a better living farming virtual gold than they were by working in actual mines, and what benefit could be brought to SecondLife by legions of such people working as part of large SecondLife specific organisations to provide an ever increasingly sophisticated set of virtual goods and services.
If the SecondLife economy is to be anything more than a bubble, or is to be based on anything more than sex and gambling (not that we make any judgment as to the propriety of either of those activities), then enforceable contracts, amongst other incidents of a sophisticated judicial system, are essential.
11. How will the enforcement work if people can just come back as alts?
People who have built up reputations and large networks of friends and contacts have much to lose by switching to an alternate account. A reputation, often built over months or even years, would have to be built from scratch – entire networks of contacts would have to be re-accumulated. If the person simply told all her/his previous friends that he/she was returning as an alt, the friends may very well want to know (or guess) why, and having to tell all one’s friends (and business associates) that one has been banished by the Metaverse Republic might become embarassing. Furthermore, any one of them might report the alternate account to our enforcement people, resulting in that account being banned, too.
Of course, not everyone has an established reputation: just as with off-world legal systems, some people will be worth bringing actions against, and some will not. In off-world legal systems, it is the size of the person’s pool of assets that counts: in virtual worlds, it will be the investment in reputation and social networks.
There might also, in the future, be technical means of linking accounts, such as a better version of the credential verification system that Linden Lab uses to track who is an adult, or IP linking (possibly already used by Linden Lab).
12. Is there not potential for abuses of power in such a system?
We are working very hard to design the constitution to minimise the possibility of abuses of power by distributing power carefully amongst a series of quite independent institutions of state, in accordance with the principle of the separation of the powers. Further details of that can be found in our Founding Charter, or its executive summary.
However, in this system, unlike any first-life government, there is an additional, powerful check against abuses of power: market forces. Because subscription to the database is voluntary, and because the system cannot work unless a good number of people are subscribed, if the system becomes corrupt or abuses its power, people will simply unsubscribe, and its power would collapse. Conversely, if it acted fairly and justly, more people would be inclined to subscribe, and its power would increase.
13. However well you design your constitution, how can you stop the people who actually have their hands on the tools (the database, the land, etc.) from ignoring the constitution and laws?
Although we have not yet finalised our technical systems, our preferred solution to this issue at this stage is to use a cobination of open-source software (so that everybody can see how the code works), reqire approval of the code by our democratic institutions, and require automated logging of each use of the systems in question.
Other options under consideration for resource management include registering as a real-life non-profit organisation, and having the people on the executive (which will be partly elected) on the board of that organisation, or alternatively, using an external service to manage the non-profit under the direction of our executive; and using a bot account to hold all of our land.
14. How will the system pay for the land that it will need for the courts and Parliament, and pay its judges and other officers?
This is not something on which we have made any final decisions yet, as the system is still under design. One possibility currently being considered is renting an island, letting out much of the land, and using the revenue from that to pay for the remaining land on which we will house our public buildings. Some income will be generated through fines, although we do not expect that it will be substantial.
The judiciary will have its own, separate, finance, although might be subsidised by the general treasury to some extent. Its finances will largely derive from court fees and costs, which will ultimately be born by the losing party in every case, and will be enforced in the same way as other orders of the court. The court costs will be based on a fixed scale, determined in advance of each case.
In the early days of the system, it might well be that it is not possible to pay any office holders. If and when the system becomes more successful, that position will no doubt be reviewed. Ultimately, we would like to be able to pay whatever it takes to recruit and retain the best people for the job (assuming a SecondLife-scaled income). If the system flourishes, we believe that we will be able to do that in time.
15. What will I be able to do if somebody brings a case against me?
At this stage, the judicial procedure has not been finalised, so this answer is provisional. However, it is envisaged that an official organ of the court (either a scripted object or a member of the judiciary) will always have to notify the defendant(s) so that they can be sure that the action is real, and not fictitious. The notice will contain a link to information about what the Metaverse Republic is, and the procedure for defending a case, as well as Metaverse Republic law generally. It is also envisaged that it will link to a directory of SecondLife lawyers, who will be able to advise as to the prospects of success of any prospective or pending action.
To respond, a person, we envisage, would reply with a notice (either a SecondLife notecard, or using a web interface) setting out what is admitted and what is denied and why, and generally how the party responds to the claim. Based on the answer, the judicial system would then either schedule a hearing to resolve any dispute, or make an order if there appeared to be no dispute.
16. How will the court be able to make decisions in cases where there are no official records of what happened?
There is nothing special about SecondLife or other virtual worlds such that it is uniquely difficult to resolve disputed issues of fact without the sort of conclusive evidence to which Linden Lab (and other creators of virtual worlds) potentially (but probably not in the least practically) has access: in the physical world, there are no server logs: conversation between people evaporates into the ether as soon as the words are uttered, remembered often only by those disputants at least one of whom is often either lying, mistaken or both. Money is often represented by fungible cash, every coin and banknote being, to all intents and purposes, identical to every other of the same denomination. Especially in the days before modern forensic evidence and closed-circuit television, criminal trials relied exclusively on the evidence of eyewitnesses, often combined with circumstantial evidence and some scant obvious physical evidence. Civil trials relied on witness testimony and a few documents (which were sometimes alleged to be, and sometimes were, forgeries). Despite that, however, the justice systems of the age before modern technology served their purpose, and, although were not perfect, were infinitely better than having no justice system at all. There is nothing special about virtual worlds that means that the very same sort of justice system cannot exist for them, too.
However, it certainly is possible to have a system of notarised documents with electronic signatures to make proving the contents of a contract easier than it might otherwise be. Although, in the physical world, oral contracts are, contrary to popular myth, upheld and enforced all the time, electronic notarisation undoubtedly reduces a potential source of uncertainty. There is already a notary service in SecondLife called nota bene, although that only works for quite short documents. We will be considering creating our own tools to allow the notarisation of longer documents. Another possibility is a registered payment system, whereby a scripted object securely records that a payment in a particular amount has been made by one avatar to another, through the object, on a particular date, to avoid disputes as to whether any particular person has received any particular amount of money.
17. If a court in the Metaverse Republic makes a decision against me that I disagree with, what will I be able to do?
In most cases, where the original case is heard in a lower court, it will be possible to appeal to the High Court (consisting of at least three judges) on the basis that the lower court has made an error of law. If one disagrees with the substantive law that the courts have applied, one will also be able to lobby Parliament to change the law, vote for a different set of members of Parliament at the next elections, or stand for election to Parliament oneself.
18. How often will elections be held?
Elections for the Parliament, Executive and Public Oversight Panel will be held every six months, using a single transferable vote system.
19. Isn’t this the same as the SecondLife Superior Court thing from 2005? Didn’t that fail?
The Metaverse Republic is similar in the sense that it involves an in-world court, and the SecondLife Superior Court did, indeed, fail. However, the reason that the SecondLife Superior Court failed was because it had no means of enforcement, which will inevitably doom any legal system to instant failure. In that respect, the Metaverse Republic is dissimilar. The Metaverse Republic is also dissimilar in that it, but not, as far as we are aware, the SecondLife superior court has a democratic Parliament capable of making laws binding on the courts.
20. How do I become involved in the Metaverse Republic?
While we are working to build the Metaverse Republic, we have three teams: (1) the Constitutional Team, charged with creating the constitution of the Metaverse Republic, and associated details; (2) the Management Team, charged with overall project management and resource administration; and (3) the Technical Team, charged with creating the tools necessary to enable the Metaverse Republic to work effectively.
To join the Constitutional Team, contact Ashcroft Burnham. To join the Management Team, contact Colleen Kesey. To join the Technical Team, contact Chase Marellan.
Thank you,
Ashcroft.
