There was an old Star Trek episode (William Shatner edition) that centered around the havoc created by a race of beings that had become such intellectual giants that they no longer had use for their bodies. Their intelligence was encased in glass bubbles, and somehow, Captain Kirk managed to strike up a romance with one of these bubbles, or something like that. (Back in the '60s, that wouldn't have been considered weird or anything.) Anyway, the human race may be headed to bubble-headedness if the popularity of virtual world sites like Second Life, World of Warcraft, There.com and Everquest are any indication.

There was an old Star Trek episode (William Shatner edition) that centered around the havoc created by a race of beings that had become such intellectual giants that they no longer had use for their bodies. Their intelligence was encased in glass bubbles, and somehow, Captain Kirk managed to strike up a romance with one of these bubbles, or something like that. (Back in the '60s, that wouldn't have been considered weird or anything.) Anyway, the human race may be headed to bubble-headedness if the popularity of virtual world sites like Second Life, World of Warcraft, There.com and Everquest are any indication. In the virtual world, you can be somebody other than yourself, but your brain directs that somebody else (your "avatar," in the vernacular) to interact with other fake-real people to whom you can sell fake-real stuff and from whom you can buy fake-real stuff. And business is booming, which means it is only a matter of time before the fake-real world implicates the real world of property rights, both real and intellectual.

For a great look inside the virtual world and rights being created and challenged within it, not to mention an all-around great read, check out No Man Is an Island, Not Even in a Virtual World, by Leonard T. Nuara (Greenberg Traurig, LLP), along with Daniel A. Feuerstein, Kristin M. Bohl (Thacher Proffitt & Wood LLP) and Claude W. Roxborough, III (Miles & Stockbridge, PC). Nuara knows from whence he speaks because he's visited the virtual world, where he shared his avatar's life with the 46,875 other users who were logged on at the time. He notes that heady entrepreneurs are now making a living off of the virtual world, with the top ten earners raking in an average of $200,000 per annum. Furthermore, corporations like Dell, Disney, Reebok and Cisco are now setting up shop. But beyond explaining the growth of the virtual world, Nuara et al. take you inside the property rights (real and virtual) of this new world. How can there be property rights in a non-real world? ("Jim, I'm a doctor, not an IP lawyer"):

Within online platforms that encourage creation, virtual world participants are expending substantial amounts of time creating items they claim to own. That is, through game mechanics of the software platform provided, they are able to create, use, transfer and exclude other participants from virtual items they possess. (note omitted). *** Participants in virtual world platforms are spending a great deal of time and money in online worlds and believe they are entitled to have their "property" rights protected.

With this as springboard, the authors examine the primacy of Terms of Service agreements in the virtual world and the implications they have for the panoply of rights that exist in the non-reality. It's pretty mind-blowing, but it's happening now. Who knows? In a few generations, maybe we'll shuck these vessels we call "bodies" and take the next step toward that final frontier (where we can all, William Shatner-like, have an affair with a seemingly empty bubble).