Criminal liability for intellectual property offenses of artificially intelligent entities in virtual and augmented reality environments
Gabriel Hallevy · Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks · 2018
Virtual worlds are created by computer code that generates each aspect of the virtual environment, which includes the visual scene, the 3D spatialized sound presented to the user, and the tactile and force feedback that the user may experience interacting with virtual objects. Criminal offenses may be committed in any environment, including real, virtual, or augmented. From a criminal law perspective, when considering a human offender immersed within a virtual environment and performing criminal activities, the nature of the virtual environment may not be a major factor considered by the court; instead, the law will generally focus on the offender’s understanding of what can be termed the physical reality of the crime (which consists of what is true about the physical world and the person’s beliefs about the physical world); that is, the “real” reality associated with the offense, and not the virtual reality associated with the offense. When the virtual or augmented reality experienced by the user is different than the physical reality in a certain level of detail, the question of criminal liability then focuses on the offender’s belief which is the basis for determining the offender’s fault. Most legal systems around the world prefer using the offender’s belief as the basis for fault rather than what actually happened (that is, the factual reality of the crime). To legal actors in these jurisdictions, it seems more just and fair to impose criminal liability on the basis of the offender’s subjective view of reality. This is, in short, for the factual mistake doctrine (“mistake of fact”): we prefer the offender’s factual mistake (subjective) rather than the factual situation (objective) that actually occurred as the basis for the offender’s fault. This chapter discusses the above concepts in the context of offenses occurring in virtual reality.