Tan on Metaverse Realities: Governance, Virtual Property and Legal Ordering in Emerging Virtual Worlds

Albert Tan, University of Groningen Faculty of Law, has published Metaverse Realities: Governance, Virtual Property and Legal Ordering in Emerging Virtual Worlds. Here is the abstract.

Facebook's adoption of Meta has moved the metaverse from specialist discussion into mainstream legal debate. Yet the term still describes a loose family of virtual environments rather than a settled juridical object. Some worlds depend on conventional platform infrastructure; others place selected assets or governance functions on public blockchains. This article argues that legal analysis should begin with the institutional architecture through which a virtual world is operated. It develops the idea of a governance stack to identify the contractual rules, software systems, token arrangements, decision-making bodies and public law that together determine a participant's position. The analysis then turns to virtual property, non-fungible tokens, intellectual property, immersive data and cross-border remedies. Decentraland, The Sandbox, Cryptovoxels and Horizon Worlds show that claims of decentralisation can conceal very different allocations of power. The legal task is therefore to identify what the user actually acquires, who can alter that position, and which body of law supplies an enforceable remedy.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.