What A Defaced Jeff Koons Sculpture Tells Us About Land Ownership In Augmented Reality
In the case of cybersquatting, the reliance on legally protected identifiers with a long body of trademark case law from the physical world made it possible for the courts to eventually circumscribe much of the practice. Augmented reality, on the other hand, poses something fundamentally new – geographic overlays that do not have natural correspondence with existing legal frameworks. Air rights, land rights, water rights, mineral rights – the classes of property rights that exist in the United States are numerous, yet all rely on usage of physical space in the physical world.
In contrast, attaching a piece of content in a virtual world to a GPS coordinate poses more complex challenges to the notion of “ownership” and “control” of space.
Can a company exert the right to commercial activity at a specific latitude and longitude coordinate across all digital applications present and future merely because they own that right in the physical world? Do online companies enjoy the right to plaster public spaces with digital billboards and commercialize government-owned land for free? What happens when an augmented reality startup is bought by another company – do all of the geofenced advertisements it had sold (themselves essentially micro-term digital land leases) transfer to the purchasing company? Does a company in the physical world have to pay money to Facebook to run an advertisement for users visiting its physical location? Or does Facebook’s digital overlay count itself as a new form of land ownership where it alone acts as landlord and legal system? Moreover, given the nature of the online world, a company in Russia can easily sell geofenced ads across the United States and vice-versa, meaning companies across the world can now act as virtual landlords across all the world’s physical space. Even if the US were to pass a law tying virtual use of a location to its physical ownership, could it stop a foreign company from erecting its own overlays over US soil?
In contrast, assigning ownership to abstract sequences of numbers across myriad applications that grow in number each day representing constructed overlays atop our physical world begs a deeper question of just what it means to “own” a space and in our ever-more-virtual world just what rights we have to the spaces we inhabit.
See the full story here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2017/10/25/what-a-defaced-jeff-koons-sculpture-tells-us-about-land-ownership-in-augmented-reality/#692fc14c3b43
And a related article here: https://shift.newco.co/weve-not-thought-through-the-legal-and-ethical-disruption-of-augmented-reality-e244769c6e9b