In a few specific situations new law would be needed (though I really hope nobody wastes my tax dollars passing this one) because there just wasn’t such a thing before. Here, there just wasn’t such a thing as pretending to be a prostitute for real money before — you either we’re or weren’t. So if somebody wants to prohibit it, I think they’ll have to pass a new (asinine) law.

Not many situations fall on that side of the line though. I think of it a lot like the internet around 1996-1997. There wasn’t any special law about it, and everyone was wondering if there would have to be whole new codes written. As it turned out, 95% or more of “internet law” is just the application of old laws to the internet, but 5% of it did have to be written fresh. For example, it just costs too much to spam people in real life, so there weren’t any laws about it. The cost of postage kept the signal to noise ratio in your real life mailbox around 70/30, at worst. But on the internet? My email is 99% or more spam, because it’s basically free to advertise that way, and my address is very public. So you get new (albeit totally ineffective, so far) laws that cover that narrow situation. I’m guessing 5%, tops, of “virtual law” will be completely new. But even about the old stuff, the questions — like whether an avatar’s identity should be subject to subpoena — definitely do make for good discussion.

That said, in the U.S. at least, the laws that I found are incredibly specific to “telephone” communications. It has something to do with the fact that the wires, like airwaves, are considered a limited public asset, and the legislative history usually supports this, making it somewhat tough to apply them to VoIP.

The other odd thing I found is that there are just very few laws on the books covering commercial phone sex over any device anyway. If there’s an telecom law expert out there who knows of some, please post — I’ve looked, and am rapidly concluding that they just don’t exist in most states. I haven’t found much of anything, aside from that link above, which basically says, as I read it, that operators can only offer the service to people 18+ years old, which (at least for argument purposes) they’re doing by offering the services exclusively on the adult grid.

Virtual worlds have an interesting effect on both arguments, since nothing in Second Life is truly private to other gamers even if is not truly public in the sense of being out on the streets. But in real life, it is difficult to avoid, say, a big PORNO SOLD HERE sign on Main Street in Peoria. Not so in Second Life.

Furthermore, SL has a more discrete community than the web as a whole, and since the communities are formed by acquaintence rather than geographical necessity it could be argued that anything which takes place automatically passes the community standards test since users would be banned or ostracized easily if they posted offensive material.

I’m still skeptical of the conception of virtual worlds as a fount of unique law, but it sures makes for some interesting thought experiments.

It basically said that the distinction between gambling and escorting in second life was the difference between engaging in illegal behavior in second life on the one hand, and *pretending* to engage in illegal behavior in second life on the other.

Jurisdictional issues have been muddied by the US’s moves into online gambling enforcement with UIGEA as well as anti-terrorism activities that undermine the general notion that the location of a business defines its legality (other countries have dabbled in the same area recently – it is making running an online business fraught with unpredictable risk).

This issue has come up for some web sites where US locations with different “community standards” have been used to prosecute adult businesses that have no physical presence or do any marketing in.

Other key issues are if an online service is centralized or peer-to-peer?

If advertising or marketing sufficient to establish jurisdiction? This is a big question for online gambling in Europe now as the UK has moved to ban advertising of online gambling services that do not meet the UK’s “standards”. How this will stand up in the EU or the WTO is interesting.

For people not familiar with Lillie’s site, it’s consistently interesting and articulate. Worth the visit.