A New Liability Standard for Injuries in Virtual Worlds by Prof Steven Hetcher

SYNOPSIS
I examine and reject what has become a dominant move in virtual world studies, namely, for scholars to seek to redefine the nature and scope of property rights entitlements in virtual world contexts: for example to claim that Lockean principles support recognition of property rights of users that trump contractual agreements as set out in EULAs. In my presentation I will argue that the types of interactive behavior occurring in virtual worlds increasingly call for a re-examination of the tort—based injurer/victim relationships between the parties rather than the property on contractual bases of these relationships. In particular, I will argue that the increasingly accidental nature of such injurious interactions calls for a shift from a strict liability to a fault liability regulatory regime.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Professor Steven Hetcher is a Professor of Law at Vanderbilt University Law School in Nashville, TN, USA. He holds a J.D. from Yale Law School, a M.A. in Public Policy from the University of Chicago and a Ph. D. in Philosophy from the University of Illinois. His scholarly interests span intellectual property, behavioral law & economics, social norms theory, tort theory and jurisprudence.

Professor Hetcher’s recent activities are focused on governance issues in online communities and virtual worlds. He recently published Using Social Norms to Regulate Fan Fiction and Remix Culture in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review (June, 2009) and organized the conference, User-Generated Content, Social Networking & Virtual Worlds (November, 2008), held at Vanderbilt Law School. Professor Hetcher is also the author of Norms In A Wired World (Cambridge University Press, 2004).