1. Background: the intensifying "metaverse fever"
When the cyberpunk sci-fi novel Snow Crash was published in 1992, author Neal Stephenson would never have imagined that his concept of a "metaverse" would end up in the 19th century. It will shine brightly in the capital market after the year.
On March 10, 2021, as a "metaverse" concept stock, UGC sandbox game platform Roblox (RBLX) landed on the New York Stock Exchange in the form of DPO (Direct Public Offering), with a market value of over $40 billion on the first day of listing. In April of the same year, Epic Games, the world's leading 3D engine technology, completed a $1 billion financing, with a post-investment valuation of $28.7 billion. The company announced that the financing will be mainly used for company development and metaverse-related development. In August, ByteDance acquired Pico, a leading domestic VR equipment manufacturer, for 9 billion yuan, and invested 100 million yuan to invest in the game company Code Qiankun, which focuses on the concept of "metaverse". In October, Facebook announced that it would change its parent company’s name to “Meta”, shifting the focus of its future operations to building “Metaverse”. On January 18, 2022, Microsoft acquired Activision Blizzard for $68.7 billion in cash, and the concept of “Metaverse” is This acquisition negotiation has been mentioned more than eight times. According to Bloomberg, the market size of the Metaverse will reach $800 billion by 2024. According to PwC, the market size of the Metaverse will reach 15,000 by 2030. One hundred million U.S. dollars.
Meta (Facebook), Nvidia, ByteDance, Tencent and other major Internet giants are competing to deploy the metaverse, coupled with the capital activities of Roblox, Epic Games, Pico and other companies in the primary and secondary markets, along with NFT, Apple MR products The expectation of launching next year, etc., will jointly promote the continued popularity of the concept of "metaverse".
The current operating rules of the Metaverse
The concept of "metaverse" originated from the science fiction novel "Avalanche". The author of the original work constructed a virtual world. In this virtual world, people each have an avatar of the real world, and they can interact and live with each other according to their own designed identities. Just like the protagonist "Hiro", he is a pizza delivery driver in real life, but he is a hacker and a master of double-blade combat in the virtual world. At present, an authoritative definition of the concept of "metaverse" has not yet been formed, and Roblox, as the first listed stock of the "metaverse" concept, has clearly proposed eight elements of the definition of the "metaverse": identity, friends, immersion ( Immersive, Low friction, Variety, Anywhere, Economy, and Civility.
At present, the normal operation of the Metaverse relies on the support of six basic technologies, including interactive technology, blockchain technology, Internet of Things technology, artificial intelligence technology, network and computing technology, and video game technology. Among them, Interactivity provides Metaverse users with an immersive virtual reality experience. Blockchain technologies such as NFT, DeFi, decentralized exchanges, and smart contracts are the supporting technologies for the smooth operation of the Metaverse economic system. Internet of Things ensures the normal connection of all things in the Metaverse, Artificial Intelligence (AI) provides technical support for a large number of application scene changes in the Metaverse, Network and computing technology (Network) ensures the normal operation of the network, and video game technology (Games) ) provides a creation platform, interactive content and social scenes for the Metaverse and realizes traffic aggregation.
On May 18, 2021, the South Korean government launched the "Metaverse Alliance", which now includes more than 200 companies and institutions. Its goal is to establish a unified national-level VR and AR augmented reality platform, clean up Ethical and legal norms for virtual environments. It can be seen that, to open up a new continent in the virtual world, the first and foremost is to establish a set of matching order and rules, and this set of rules needs to be able to connect with the existing legal rules, and at the same time, it is accompanied by the unreasonable laws in the existing laws. , The cleaning of regulations that cannot keep pace with the times.
Legal Issues Facing the Metaverse
It is worth facing up to the fact that my country's Metaverse industry is still in its infancy as a whole, with the characteristics of immature and unstable emerging industries, and there are many potential risks such as systemic risks, privacy risks, intellectual property rights, capital manipulation, ethical constraints, and computing power pressure. crisis. Whether the Metaverse can develop healthily in the future depends on the research and development and breakthrough of the underlying technology on the one hand, and on the other hand, it needs the guidance and regulation of policies and laws. From the perspective of legal supervision alone, the author suggests that we should focus on the legal issues of data security compliance, intellectual property protection and virtual property protection in the Metaverse, in order to calmly deal with the transformation of virtual and real identities in the field of "Metaverse" in the future. Compliance management and risk prevention and control.
(1) Data security compliance issues
As a virtual space beyond reality, Metaverse takes immersive experience and real-time online as the main indicators to measure its technological development. This means that the Metaverse needs to conduct deep mining and real-time synchronization of personal data such as users' identity attributes, property resources, behavioral paths, physiological responses, social relationships, and even emotional states and brainwave patterns. For example, personal physiological data, shopping data, and even invisible pulse, heartbeat, and brain waves may be collected and analyzed by companies in the Metaverse Domain, and they can monitor the data of individuals effortlessly, which is more than the current Automated decision-making is more monitoring. At the same time, the ownership, usage rights and storage rights of data are separated from each other, which brings the risk of personal privacy leakage.
Personal privacy data is constantly updated and expanded as the underlying resources for the continuous operation of the Metaverse. How are these data resources collected, stored and managed? How to reasonably authorize and use it in compliance? How to avoid being stolen or misused? How to prevent new forms of crime based on data in the metaverse form?
At present, Article 32 of my country's "Data Security Law" stipulates that any organization or individual shall collect data in a legal and proper way, and shall not steal or obtain data in other illegal ways. If laws and administrative regulations stipulate the purpose and scope of data collection and use, the data shall be collected and used within the purpose and scope stipulated by laws and administrative regulations; If an administrative license is required for services, the service provider shall obtain a license in accordance with the law; Article 36 stipulates that without the approval of the competent authority of the People's Republic of China, no organization or individual within the territory of the People's Republic of China may provide foreign judicial or law enforcement agencies with storage in the territory of the People's Republic of China. The data. Both current and future metaverse companies must at least abide by the above regulations, store and use data legally and compliantly. Data is the basic element of the Metaverse. In addition to traditional regulatory agencies such as the government, there must also be corresponding regulatory bodies in the Metaverse.
(2) Intellectual property protection issues
The issue of intellectual property rights has always existed in the digital space. Although blockchain technology provides technical possibilities for authentication, confirmation of rights, and accountability, a large number of UGC (User Generated Content, User Generated Content) in the metaverse space ) and IP applications across virtual-real boundaries add to the complexity and confusion of IP management.
As a collective shared space, almost everyone is the creator of this space, which will lead to a large number of multi-person collaborative works. There is a certain randomness and instability in this cooperative relationship, and it is necessary to establish clear rights confirmation rules for this collaborative product. In addition, in order to improve the user experience, Metaverse developers generally put real-world elements into the scenes they set, including but not limited to real-life buildings, roads, objects and other elements. Copyright disputes may often arise.
According to the provisions of Article 3 of my country's Copyright Law, works include not only written works, but also fine arts, architectural works, artistic works, graphic works and model works, etc. Therefore, Metaverse developers introduce works in the real world into the virtual world for Behaviors that improve user experience have certain legal risks.
(3) Virtual property protection issues
In the economic activities of the metaverse, virtual property including NFT (Non-Fungible Tokens, non-fungible currency) is continuously circulated and traded. Metaverse and NFT are cutting-edge concepts, and no laws and regulations have been promulgated at home and abroad to regulate them, but the country's supervision and protection of virtual property has already begun.
As far as the legal nature of virtual property is concerned, in terms of legislation, Article 127 of my country's "Civil Code" expressly stipulates that "if the law has provisions on data, network and virtual property, such provisions shall be followed." In practice, Many courts have made judgments in accordance with the Opinions of the Supreme People's Court and the National Development and Reform Commission on Providing Judicial Services and Guarantee for Accelerating the Improvement of the Socialist Market Economic System in the New Era. Therefore, it can be considered that data and network virtual property belong to the scope of protection objects of civil property rights.
As far as the transaction risk of virtual property is concerned, under China's current legal system, virtual currencies such as Bitcoin ( BTC ) and Ethereum ( ETH ) are properties that can be transferred, traded and yielded through money as consideration. Although NFT also has the nature of a certain virtual currency, its main regulatory risk is still in the chaos of the market caused by its speculation. Due to the characteristics of anonymity and fast transaction of virtual property, there is a high risk of money laundering. my country has established a set of anti-money laundering legal supervision system that tends to be perfect, including the Anti-Money Laundering Law of the People's Republic of China, the Anti-Money Laundering Law of the People's Republic of China The Criminal Law of the Republic and the Measures for the Supervision and Administration of Anti-Money Laundering and Anti-Terrorist Financing of Financial Institutions have added a layer of protection to the rapidly developing virtual property trading market.
Outlook: The regulatory system for the operation of the Metaverse will continue to improve
Recently, the "2020-2021 Metaverse Development Research Report" released by Tsinghua University wrote that 2020 is a critical point for the virtualization of human society, paving the way for 2021 to become the first year of the Metaverse. On the one hand, the epidemic has accelerated social virtualization. Under the isolation policy of the new crown epidemic, the time spent online by the whole society has increased significantly, and the "home economy" has developed rapidly. On the other hand, online life has changed from the original short-term exception state to the normal state, from the supplement of the real world to a parallel world with the real world, the real life of human beings began to migrate to the virtual world on a large scale, and human beings became the “amphibious” between reality and digital. species".
The author expects that in the next period of time, research on the development direction of the metaverse and possible risk aversion will gradually appear, and the most fundamental problem is reflected in the bearing of digital assets and digital identities. For example, will there be an organization called the Metaverse Property Office? Just imagine, if the metaverse is regarded as the ultimate form of future Internet development, then it is urgent to formulate an effective metaverse operation regulation system, which not only needs to solve the problem of capital expansion brought about by interconnection in the metaverse, but also to deal with the metaverse. The issue of conflict and fusion of old and new ideas, civilizations. Whether the Metaverse is a "wind outlet" or a "risk outlet" is currently unknown, but as a legal service provider, you should have forward-looking thinking and take the lead in building a system for the Metaverse at the level of legal risk prevention and control!