Real Concerns in Virtual Property

Abstract:     
This virtual property paper was the result of an independent study I completed in the summer of 2005, after my second year of law school at Loyola University in New Orleans. It is a very broad, yet thorough (I would like to think) overview of the legal and practical concerns of virtual property. Back in 2005, there was only a handful of articles dealing with this new topic (I cite nearly all of them). I found the idea for this paper while reading an article in WIRED magazine about Edward Castronova, an economist who began to track the evolution of virtual currency and is largely responsible for shedding light on the real world value of virtual worlds.

Please keep in mind that the research and data from this paper is from mid-2005 at the latest. If I were to do another paper on this topic, I think it would be incredibly interesting to compare the statistics from when this paper was written to the statistics, research, and data from today. I think the results of how far virtual property has become would be staggering!

Number of Pages in PDF File: 39

Keywords: virtual property, Edward Castronova, intellectual property, law, virtual worlds

working papers series