A Brave New (Virtual) World: Ethics and Governance of XR and the Metaverse

[Music] thank you so much for coming i know it's very tough after a week of gdc and gdc parties so i appreciate everyone that's in the room this morning i want to welcome to this panel that is kind of spiritual so it's kind of ironic that we are trying to talk about the metaverse in a virtual way with you uh there and i want to present the fantastic people that here's with me and i will allow them to present themselves so anyone who can want to start maybe undress yes uh my name is andres and unlike what it says there uh i'm no longer a senior lecturer on intel property at the university of sussex i've been promoted to reader i have no idea what that means other than it's the same salary but a slightly different title and now i know sounds

nobody knows my company reality prom because it's a small consulting company um but they do know the projects that i've worked on in the past so i'll just mention that i helped start the hololens i worked at apple uh i worked at amazon on echo frames and i've been working in arvr for about 30 years now that's amazing so so glad to have you dylan uh my name is dylan um as is noted on the slide here i'm a research engineer slash designer and a deeply passionate individual that's been focused on creating realities and building vr experiences and advancing the technology um thanks to the support of the unity labs research staff and my team my work was recently presented at metaconnect and we've got a few new projects that will be debuted next year so i'm just excited to be amongst this awesome roster here and explore the future we are so lucky to have you here and

then we have a card another huge name in the digital rights uh front frontier maybe say thank you thank you much oh yeah my name is kurt opsahl i'm the deputy executive director and general counsel with the electronic frontier foundation i'm also part of the eff teams have been working on decentralization extended reality issues uh you know eff our mission we're trying to protect and preserve the rights we hold dear while moving into the future watch out the course for a future where technology will enhance our lives and preserve our human rights i have been a deeply admirer of the work that eff has been doing for years so it's a pleasure to have you all and to start our panel and our discussion i prepared some things to put everyone together in like in the same page i can see hands because we don't have a camera but i guess that a lot of you have heard about these words uh in the past months of the past year we are building in the middle earth we are billionaire mothers because the industry

has this shift that now everyone is building a metaverse and maybe we don't even what it is yet this of course we know that started with the book at least the concept and the word and then we have a lot of references that are going into pop culture about simulation theory about new realities about virtual realities and how are they portrayed in in in the pub media in the culture and also we were saying that we still don't have like a definition of what the metaverse is like a consensus on it somebody said that it's an embodied internet other talks about this as the next evolution of the internet we are here to discuss that if it is something new or it's just essentially the same internet but not in 3d um also another thing that everyone is kind of uh debating these days is which are the defining characteristics of the metaverse because at this point we are

as we were saying creating some realities and for those i i don't believe them in the audience that is every anyone that hasn't heard about the metaverse but maybe picture like the good plan the good place and how they constructed this reality and we want to talk about the ethics of creating this kind of virtual places and this kind of everything by design places also we have been reading about the opinions that the industry has on the metaverse and the technologies around the metaverse and this is from the cdc state of the game industry that about one third of the responders believe that the metaverse will not deliver on this promise so we will see if we can or cannot change your mind also we don't agree in the name sometimes it says metaverse some somebody says metaverse is talking about like a relationship like websites and the internet and also we have big topics to discuss today because we are kind of being sold

into that there is only one version of the metaverse or at least the one that is being presented in the media but we are here to talk about big topics like the centralization and centralization that are kind of two big philosophies of designing around the internet and particularly about interoperability both technical and legally and how these this kind of key concepts influence the metaphors that we will want to have in the future so um also we want to talk about a bit about walled gardens maybe you have heard of this it's a concept from internet governance when we are talking about kind of fragmentations of the web of on the internet and this is certainly something we don't want to reply in the metaverse models so for those who are as old as i am you might remember the truman show and the reality of that movie portraying that movie so this is kind of something something similar and the metaverse will encompass

everything in our lives of our listeners that the promise so we need to find ways to create a responsible design that is diverse accessible safe equitable and overall human rights space so this is our three central questions for our panel today who will control the metaverse about the revenue models that are we and how they will impact in digital rights and what are the governance ethical and legal challenges of the meddlers so for starting the first question about control these are our key topics so who the one who wants to start with these ones uh i'll give it a bit of a go on the first one um about what are the key characteristics that separate uh the metaverse from the current internet of virtual worlds i'm going to assume the mantle the old man nielsen

cloud and claim that inherently there is no difference so i would like to start with a bit of the skeptical side i have been writing and researching on this regulation of the area for a while and i've seen various definitions as you were saying mikayla about what exactly is the metaverse and other definitions that i have to say that there is nothing new here at least for us who lived through the first virtual world's craze around 2006 2007 maybe even before there are repetition of lots of grandiose claims and it may seem that metaverse um that we're seeing it may depend on on on who is doing it on the on three definitions i would say that this is potentially going to be a virtual environment that is ruled by platforms

or it's going to be web 3 uh led or is going to be open virtual platforms so whatever the discussion we're going to have it may depend on what type of metaphors we're talking about i know things exactly what type of materials we we may get or maybe we may get different versions of the three of them so um in in some ways uh this will depend the platform metaverse is just a subsidiary of existing platforms so it's going to be pretty much the same the web3 metaverse is going to be a tokenized utopia unicorn and rainbows and blockchains or the entirely open decentralized internet metalworks that it would be very different so the last two would definitely be different from what we have right now i hope that makes sense yeah absolutely and i love like the two things like the old man yelling at cloud

i can't identify with that and i also a bit of a skeptical but i think that for me at least the key is when we have that we can kind of separate the virtual worlds for from the from the metaverse who who wants to chime in on this if i could add something on in addition to that i think there'll be a very important transition that can be controlled by entities that might potentially seek to very specifically mandate apis that they can copyright and they can control that could take us away from the current internet paradigm in and divert us from the promise of web 3 through that practice and i'm i'm seeing whispers of that um and i i i do hope that we have enough awareness to make sure that we can we can navigate around that and prevent that from allowing the true interoperability and the promise of what it is that i think that we're seeking with this discussion

absolutely that is what i sometimes call legal interoperability because to go from one method to another if you don't have agreements and contracts that allowed out from a legal standpoint you're going to go like a very strict customs that are going to take all your digital goods and also you need technical interoperability because you need uh a technical architecture that allows to portray the object and and the functions of the auction in another software environments so as you were saying for me is something big having interoperability card you were working your hand up for decentralization yeah i want to say a few words on decentralization well first of all it's sort of redecentralization like decentralization was a key feature of the early internet where it was a network of networks and in some sense what you imagine a decentralized metaverse is sort of a world of worlds where your universe at least of worlds where you can go

around them in between various ones but we've seen the internet has been continually centralized over the last couple of decades and we've seen some of the problems of that single points of controls and single points of failures now we'll talk about this in more of it but i think a walled garden uh it might be attractive to some it provides additional uh securities that has an environment that you might be able to rely on to be in a particular way but it's still best to have a choice to be able to move freely between the environments you want to visit so you don't want to be locked out or locked in so we want to have a decentralized metaphor that is interoperable and locked open resisting attempts to centralize its architecture it services its protocols and that will make it more resilient against censorship surveillance and other forms of centralized control but we can imagine that then we can build it but to do that interoperability will be a key having a consistent avatar that goes with you across pilot funds subject to your control but not tied to a single provider

and we'll talk about more of these things but the important thing is we're setting these technologies today which are the stage for the technologies of tomorrow i wanted to jump in on that point too i think that you know as kurt said that the internet was designed to be decentralized for robustness and and for freedom um but we could very easily get back to centralization even after re-decentralizing it we can recentralize it again um and and one of the things that i see one of the dangers i see leading to that is that um people talk about decentralization like it's a panacea but what they really want is democratization and some of the the actual technologies that people are talking about especially with web 3 are prone to recentralization there's a lot of discussion now about even though blockchain is out there you go through various centralized providers to get to it and i think one of the most important things to think about is is with daos which i think i love the concept of of trying to build democracy into our structures is that when just as a slight change in the way

the dao is built can make a huge difference if it's one vote per person that's democracy if it's one vote per token or per coin or per share that's a plutocracy and plutocracies invariably lead to recentralization because they're concentrations of wealth the people who have the wealth have more votes they can sway they can tilt the playing field in their direction without a countervailing force and they can get all the coins eventually and so what we need is systems that continually redemocratize these these things they don't just do it once but they keep redividing the pie equally so that we all have a fair say and i don't see very many dials that even think about that there's only a few that are thinking about people versus coins just a side note on that for those who are in a dow that is set up as a plutocracy as i'll be saying where it is done by the amount of tokens you control uh you should look through the history of corporate governance because that's basically the model of shareholders and we have had hundreds of

years of issues in corporate governments i think there's a lot to be learned about mistakes that were made there that can be applied to setting up a a system that deals with that cares about minority shareholder rights or as abby says just go straight to actual democratization where it is one person perhaps um also a little bit on that one of the problems i see with the decentralization versus centralization debate is that what we are seeing is that uh it appears like the internet aborts um a decentralization and we created the this network for decentralization with decentralization in mind but it keeps wanting to become centralized and it becomes centralized there i think that there are various reasons for this there are network theory reasons in which um there is the accumulation of links that happens and there are architectural reasons for that and i think that

actually decentralization is very difficult and my fear and i'm going to keep playing the skeptic card here my fear is that even if we try to achieve it um the the environment that we have right now is going to move towards centralization it's already happening depending on the model that we are looking at of the metaverse if it's going to be the meta facebook uh metaverse it's going to be centralized by almost by definition so yeah we have to be careful but also be aware that sometimes all of the best efforts support towards the decentralization may actually fail because uh that is the nature of uh of the network sorry i'm going to be very skeptical that's fantastic yeah you know i think these are real problems that that need to be solved like some of the advantages of centralization are like a single point where you can have a team

of security engineers who are making sure that it is up to date uh that they are putting out patches improving it and we have to make sure that if we have a decentralized system it is also secure and that requires a bit more work i think it's worthwhile because we will have a better future if there is lots of choice and people can move around and have that but it has to be one where they have their rights intact and part of that is having a secure and private experience that requires uh replication of some of these advantages that might become tempting for centralization and that's one of the reasons why i think walled gardens become appealing not that i'm going to argue for walled gardens but security can definitely be improved so that's the reason for a gated community theoretically is to be able to have some security as to who comes in and who goes out but also the reason wall gardens exist is because they just may not be enough good content out there yet i think initially we should expect walled gardens to happen because it's much more economical to build up your own content first

until you get to a certain point like we saw with compuserve and aol you get to a certain point because there isn't enough out there that you want that you feel is good enough but a certain point everything else out there becomes way better than what's inside the walled gardens and that's when the walls need to come down because people are going to leave your walled gardens to go out and and explore the world when the world becomes richer uh and and and more interesting than what's within the gardens and we'll see the same thing here again we'll see a whole bunch of walled gardens there won't be a lot of reasons for interconnecting these things together until people say they want to leave until people want to go and connect these things and build build bridges and build um new worlds that are bigger than any individual wild garden may be absolutely and if i could piggyback on that this is where it's it's so absolutely important to of course not only support open source efforts but even commercial efforts right now that have resisted acquisition by certain corporations to to to foster those communities and to to see where it is

that they're choosing to open source certain approaches like you know the implementation of wasm and other technologies to be able to make sure that on a platform that say i don't know changes the uh implementation of a standard web browser and prevents others from being able to implement any other browser on that platform that we can still get around that and have just in time compilation to make sure that you can have that interoperable experience that goes from platform to platform when you can see the trajectory that is is potentially going to lock that out and prevent that situation here so it's not just about application deployment it's also about again this this open flow of the ability for a standard set of apis and implementations to be able to go from platform to platform and we need to be very very careful and mindful where we're seeing those those gates close because to be able to say we support the web is one thing but to be able to actually support the open web is a very very different thing and we're seeing different walled gardens that are

very beautifully and strategically navigating a process that will prevent that open implementation of say as kurt mentioned uh which is extremely important an avatar that can bring basically within itself its own operating system its own set of applications etc in between these environments and we're beginning to to get the hints in my opinion of the prevention of this and i think that that's extremely dangerous and we need to be very mindful as to how we can prevent that situation absolutely i think that one one of the bad sides of centralization is people get tied to a system because that's where their content is that's where their friends are these network effects and it's difficult to move uh and i think you know avatars i think there's an example that that resonates well because it's a common thing now that people will spend a lot of time investing in their avatar and and its design what what clothes are being

weared how it how it interacts and if they have to go to a different platform they don't want to do that all over again they don't they want to be able to take that part of their identity with them they might have multiple identities that they put out there but they want to be able to interact with people keeping with them this identity that they've invested in and the steps that try to prevent that aren't really security and privacy except i think those parts can be handled it is more trying to get the network effects so that everyone's on your network and they won't right you know yeah oh so sorry no i was going to agree that this is something that we already have seen in the internet that everyone wants this old quote that if you are not paid for something you are the product this is going to replicate in this because if you're you're going if you have to pay in america and other metaverse is going to offer you like avatars and choices to create this content you're going to prefer that so for me that's the legal balance that we are going to have to strike because at the same time one of the revenue models

and we are going to talk a bit about this is profiting from content so i think like to to kind of quote this this part of the discussion is like the centralization is very tight to the revenue models that we're going to see maybe so that that was my two cents abby please go yeah so maybe maybe um this will help close this section out a little bit but the what we need to do for the so-called metaverse is very much like what happened with the web we need the ability to link between different spaces so that we can we can point to other spaces and and create semantic models between them we need portals but portals actually are like iframes if you look at browser technology they're they're kind of they need to be implemented as a sandbox because you don't want a doorway to another world being able to either steal information or impose and create an attack surface so you want to you want to sandbox it and isolate it the way the iframes were meant to do they don't they didn't work perfectly but they were meant to do this um and and we ultimately will be creating creating a web uh just

essentially like the web that we that we see in 2d but a web of all these spaces together that make the greater space and it's less about can i bring my middle earth fighter dwarf you know with plus one verbal sword into a science fiction battle that doesn't make sense semantically and the designers of each of those spaces don't want that to happen but that's not the point the point is that i have the freedom as kurt said they have the freedom to take what i've done and not be tied to a platform that isn't working in my favor and just like we did with with phone numbers we want portability we want the ability to say i screw you att i'm going over here and and that's it once we have that we have the ability we have more we have more power and more control over our destiny once we have that absolutely nobody is going to separate myself from my virtual pet companion i'm going to tell you that no man i know everyone let's move it for for the revenue models of the metaverse so uh we are going to have like a lot of memes because everyone here is kind of a geek

so we have also seen uh the respondents of the gdc state of the game industry that is a huge a huge backlash against nfts and against cryptocurrencies and implementing these in games but in the in the people's eye uh meta verses are kind of very related to gaming or are very kind of close to gaming uh the sentiment is strong about nfts and i really love this one i rather not endorse burning a rainforest down to confirm that someone in l owns a cpg so my questions for you is like taking out these possible models of revenue for the metavest by using content and data collection on content creation what are the what can we expect to see as the lawyer i guess i i can i can give it a style again um i sorry to sound like a broken record but it may depend really on the model

that is going to be adopted in the platform metaverse let's say your your meta metaverse all ownership will go to the platform and i'm expecting that this is going to be this is already what happens you don't own your content you're licensed you receive a license that allows you to operate in that space you don't know when your your virtual property all of that is owned by the by the developer the company that operates the space and and the idea that i think that the appeal of the web 3 idea of the metaverse is that the ownership is going to be tied with tokens and possibly with nfts even though there is as you were saying mikaela very rightly a big pushback against this and i think that this idea is that the smart contracts are going to mediate the scheme and the problem with that is obviously there is nothing that ties a token with the ownership of the of the item right out of the asset so you may have a token but then

you may claim or it may link to you to something but it doesn't there's nothing legal that says that that asset is yours just because you own that token we would have to build in a system of recognition of the ownership uh on tokens and i i'm afraid that that probably would make things very difficult very clunky if anyone has tried to use the central land i i've tried i found it extremely slow and clunky personally the third model would be to have something more open something akin to what second life was doing uh back in the early days and i don't know don't know if people are familiar with that uh you would pretty much own everything that you created and you would be able to get a cc license from that so it was still sort of a um owned in some ways uh by the platform but you'd a big getting a very strong copyright ownership claim those are the three models i think are

possibly emerging i worked on second life and i i don't take any credit for the for the ecosystem stuff that philip rosedale really uh spearheaded brought in actual economists and did a really great job of trying to create a virtual economy that could thrive that didn't suffer from inflation or deflation um and i think it's worth mentioning that a lot of these models that we're seeing emerge now are based on this idea of artificial scarcity which is inherently deflationary the whole idea of buying an nft today in the hope that it's going to triple or you know 10x in value or go to the moon is inherently deflation and it causes people to buy things and hoard them what we really want is a model of abundance and second life had that it had the ability to copy things really easily and people made money people in fact made made uh more money per person than they do today off of a lot of these other systems and including roblox and other other ugc systems and not only that but

the company made more money per person than than the companies today like google and facebook do off of advertising models it was actually it didn't scale because there were only millions of people there weren't hundreds of millions of people but it was a it was a good model still is and there's a lot to learn from it and i think a lot of people in this space just ignore that and start over and say well we should just do this and and what we're doing instead is is relying on this on this craziness of artists of scarcity the whole the internet the whole point of it was was abundance was was that things are now easy to copy and we should we should be reveling in that that that superpower of being able to create infinite numbers of things and not trying to impose these limits of scarcity in order just for some people to make money because clearly not everybody can make money that way it's impossible that we can all succeed so let's come up with a better model that we can actually all succeed at as a star trek fan i i support that wholeheartedly because i think about the replicators and i think that we could replicate everything at

all kind of zero marginal cost and we are trying to do the opposite here because we are trying to create artificial scarcity and close as you are saying something that is inherently possible in in the digital world and another interesting thing is like you were talking about second life revenue models and what we are seeing in the platforms that today uh deal with user-generated content is like the opposite model is like taking what people creates in those uh platforms and trying to appropriate that and i think as you were saying this is going to suffocate the creativity that we need in in the metaverse you know there's a meme uh went around for a while that you wouldn't download a car was like a campaign uh against downloading music and of course you would download a car and now in in a metaverse you can download a car but i think we can take some some lessons from that is that i guess people do want to have that they want to have a car that they can download

and if you make it a reasonable fee a convenience fee or you know you pay a subscription and you get some assets to do things there's a revenue model there but if it's a revenue model that's trying to make it so that you have to pay for your downloaded car something akin to what you would pay for a real life car like you'll get a few people to do that but that's that's not creating a better world they're trying to replicate as they were saying like replicate the scarcity of our world and one of the the you know challenging things uh that there was is with the internet has basically zero cost for copying things and a lot of our old world revenue models are based on it cost money to buy the materials put them together get them to a store ship them to your house or whatever all these costs and the internet makes those costs low and so the good world that comes out of that is that like the the creators and innovators behind it can get a larger chunk of their revenue than they currently get and people will be paying less right and

the right click mentality is out there absolutely and that's also something that people have to realize when they're getting involved in an nft if you really understand what it is it's a notation on a blockchain that says something often pointing to a url it is not a copyright in what it is on that url you do not get any rights transfer to it you get a notation on a blockchain now sometimes that is a cool notation it's the only one of that it's like getting an artist to to sign something if it's the original artist and they give you an nft of a piece of artwork that might be similar to a physical signature on a piece of artwork you buy an art gallery but if you're thinking you're getting ownership in any traditional sense like a legal sense that doesn't happen inherently from an nft my question is because i'm going to take advantage that there are a few lawyers in the in the room and i'd be lawyers and copyright lawyers for the worst uh to ask this is there any way you think that we can have ownership attached to

an nft we can create this setting in which we can transfer copyrights through an ft uh andres and i we were talking a lot about this uh on twitter because we we all seen what happened with spicedow and the confusion about copyright and what's uh at the acquisition of a book if they can uh what they can and can do uh with with copyright and there is this thing that is very confusing for people like act actually owning an object and having the the digital rights that sorry the rights the intellectual property rights that go with that so do you think that we can technically solve this to have a technically from the legal perspective solve this to have two ownership uh attached to an nft well sorry i'm gonna go ahead and record i was gonna say for sure from my you know u.s copyright uh law perspective you basically have we have a copyright registration system in

order to file a lawsuit to enforce your ip sites your rp rights uh you need to register the copyright with the copyright office you could imagine a system in which you are registering that instead of with the copyright office registering that on on a blockchain because that is an instance in which you want a permanent record that's feature that the blockchain had but it would have to be like a better system than the registration system with the copyright office which could probably be improved but is actually a pretty simple and cheap system to use and it's the only one that is enforced by law so if you have an nft that says this copyright belongs to you and you try and then sue over it it doesn't matter unless you also have a copyright restriction yes in other countries we don't have a registration system so in some ways it could be both easier and more difficult because the transfer of copyright then it has to have certain types of formalities in the uk for example

it needs to be the transfer of copyright has to be in in writing and signed i think that you could possibly argue that the signature you can use something your wallet to sign something that could be acceptable but i cannot see an nft or a smart contract fulfilling the requirements of in writing so i cannot see this working at least on the current framework the only way i um i can imagine something potentially using nfts is to create a new format in which you can build in sort of a dom contract into the system in which in the nft links or contains also in the smart contract um a transfer of ownership that is the only system that i can see but you you need to change the current standards that you have so it is possible or it's also possible to have ownership or transfer ownership of

on-chain items and items that exist only on the on the blockchain but those are extremely rare and very expensive there is a there is a cost that goes into uploading information to into the blockchain so i can see it right now it's not possible it's potentially viable i think that you can probably build hacks around this have a a a normal contract accompanying the creation of an nft etc etc but right now in the system as it stands it's very unlikely that that you will be able to to manage that if i could add something in the intersection between revenue models and say copyright given the topic i i'm personally working on and i'm working with a number of other individuals that are working on in a sort of inversion model with nfts where you have an experiential economy

um that creates an nft that lets for example say it's it's an application or a virtual reality experience and the participants that spend time in that experience are both investing some type of currency at that point but potentially also accruing a localized currency within that specific nft and at that point um uh and i can at least speak to the the projects i'm working on the individual that spends that time there is also able to sculpt and reshape that nft in sort of a remix form that that can be that will go with any any uh exchange of that nft to another owner at that point so i think that we we need a new concept of copyright in the sense that needs to be far more dynamic far more agile in that that individual that let's say you buy my nft you shape that experience and remix it into your own form someone else spends a thousand human hours in there they've accrued a different set of value there needs to be this attribution financially and say copyright wise whatever

something that can be legally defended i think is what we're coming down to because that's really all that matters here otherwise you're just making the claim there needs to be something that as it transfers from owner to owner that we accrue this um this value that carries itself amongst user to user to user buyer to buyer to buyer and is automatically attributed to anyone that played that role in that process there and i i'm not seeing that in in the legal spectrum right now but it's coming the next generation of nfts will not just be jpegs they will be experiences that accrue value based on individuals that spend time in there at a certain point and i think we need to prepare for that because i i don't think we are at this point i i'd like to see a radically different system a lot of what you said resonates with me but but i think you know and and i don't i don't call myself a game developer because i've never shipped a game title second life is probably the closest that it came to that but i think i know enough game developers to say it i think the game development community has been very open about ideas the whole

idea has been you know to to create a genre of games and people riff off the same ideas and of course people make money at it but it's been a very open community very anti-ip protection um and things like that and and i love that about it and i think that what we could imagine is a world in which we don't worry so much about ownership and we don't even worry so much about copying but we worry about about giving credit to who created ideas we focus on the creators of the idea which i think copyright law seems to be meant to do the idea that even before a register with the copyright office just publishing something implicitly gives me some protections um i can wave some of those with creative commons but but i can i get a lot of protections just by putting my own content out there in public and i think the idea could be if we could just do a better job of keeping track of who came up with what ideas and then who modified which ideas so what is the authorship chain of ideas so i take something that michaela said or wrote or painted or whatever and improve it can

we measure the value added by me and the value added by the next person in the chain and then if way down the chain it makes money great the money can flow back through the chain and if it doesn't make money that's okay too because the credit the authorship credit can flow back through the chain so if somebody makes a completely free game or movie they can at least list the credits of who contributed to it and so we worry less about what's in my wallet and worry more about what's in my history what's in my cv how did we each use each other's work in that that's what i mean by abundance because in a world like that it encourages us to put our ideas out there essentially for free and the hope that someone else will use them and improve them and make them better and build a richer world from that without worrying so much about can i get money for this thing on day one i don't want to worry about that i want to worry about creating i want to make things and put them out there and see them grow i absolutely agree with that and and also i did some research in something that is kind of technical on copyright by this called the the negative uh areas

of intellectual property and i totally agree that the video game industry was as a whole a lot of of permissive uh on the uses of video games and thanks to that we have streaming and we have esports as two version in industry that were built on top of video games and also we we have seen that there are alternative revenue models that can work because sharing content is the model of the social networks tiktok has this model it's not doesn't matter who kind of uh kind of um is copying it but it does matter who created it and it also it who added the value along the the the chain and also we are living in a culture that kind of uh glorifies repetition because we are seeing these trends of people doing the same dances which in the eyes of a copyright lawyer might be an aberration but this is the society we're living in and how people choose to consume content

so i totally see that that the video game industry can spearhead this kind of change into other areas of video of copyright yes yeah uh as you mentioned tick tock one of the things i think has been really impressive about tick tock is this where someone will sing a song and then someone will present a their tic toc which is a duet with the first song and then someone else will come on to harmonize with that and each one is making the song sort of a richer and deeper experience i think that's sort of what you're talking about you know it's done singing on tick tock is it maybe done with dancing as well but you can you can apply that theory i think to video games to all the other forms of content is each one built on absolutely and let's go to the elephant in the room the big challenges ahead we know that we all love cats so i included this talking about how are we distracted by 3d virtual cats while humanity in the metaverse is kind of catching fire

so our questions for ending this panel today are these that by no means are easy what are the league the legal analytical challenges that you foresee ahead and what kind of are like the more urgent red flags that we need to be paying attention to well i guess you know one of the challenges with with any kind of virtual reality universe which you are projecting yourself into that universe is in order to do that projection your device has to get a whole bunch of information about you uh and in some versions of this you know it's just your your voice and a relatively robotic avatar some visions your your hands will be moving in time with your hands your facial expression will be will be sent and we'll have a much richer experience from the person you're interacting with but all that data about everything you do is now being digitized and transmitted to another service so it can be rendered for for the other party but all of that is a tremendous amount

of information about you for which people can draw inferences use those to to advertise to uh uh convince you of things maybe it's not in traditional advertising and you're you're mentioning uh the truman show uh earlier which is an example of sort of a you know very dystopian of a world it was not a uh virtual world in the modern sense but it was basically a world in which all the interactions were being shown to one person that were being acted that were being betrayed to create a universe designed for them but designed to control them and that is something that is possible in a virtual reality where all the things around you that you're seeing are designed to give you an impression and leave you with a set of uh desires that fit other people's interests and not your own and so that's one of the risks that we have to have to address and make sure that we have the power that the users have the power that

people are able to keep their rights with them so this this is an i absolutely agree with that and i would say this is of course given the slide in the topic here absolutely important topic i strongly feel that we need to approach an environment technologically where we give zero trust to corporate entities we give zero trust to governmental entities and this needs to happen with the implementation of zero knowledge proofs this has to happen with the implementation of homomorphic encryption for example in the case of face id face id can be done right now with private biometrics those aren't just two words that is a very specific technology that uses homomorphic encryption to make sure that not only is it more bandwidth efficient and computationally efficient but there is no storage of the original image that was captured on device any company that tells you that they're protecting your privacy for example with something like face id and they're not implementing private biometrics is the

specific example of what i'm speaking of this needs to be codified into law this is one of the reasons why i'm one of the backers major backers of the xr safety initiative and a number of other groups that are aware of this and they understand that what what kurt mentioned there cannot occur as technology goes from the hmd which is still external to whatever will eventually be implanted within us if we accept that we must make sure that computation occurs without decryption encryption must occur and it must be mandated for anything that will actually be evaluating anything that we express externally or internally i've already proven demonstrations with multiple hmd devices that demonstrate that we don't need for example as kirk mentioned in a social scenario with interaction from one user to another that never needs to be decrypted from device to device there is no provider that actually needs to hold that data in a raw form and for as long as we don't fight to make sure that we're protecting that constant

encryption in between those stages then we open ourselves up to any form of manipulation of our consciousness that we probably some people may want it but we probably don't want in the longer term and more importantly we wouldn't want to imbue upon the next generations downward we need to begin a trend of understanding that we can have pure computation on encrypted data that is never decrypted and as for as long as we want to build a million arguments around that then we open ourselves up to exactly what i think that this fight is about what it was that kirk mentioned here and any other discussion around that is great but it has nothing to do with the fact that right now today we can make sure that computation can occur on encrypted data that is never decrypted from client to client and when we talk about interoperable metaverses in what scenario would we want anyone to be able to have any any third-party entity to have any understanding of what's happening there when right now today we can implement infrastructure that make sure that we still have that same

interoperable experience and nothing is decrypted everything else is negated in my opinion part of my strong feelings here yeah i i totally agree with you and i'm as a technologist i understand exactly what you're saying but i think a lot of those details get lost though because i try to explain to people why face id when you have a secure enclave on the phone is okay but face id in the cloud is not okay you understand it but i think a lot of people don't that's just face id to them and they say ban face id and there's a lot of these technologies a lot of the biometrics can be very valuable when they work for us when they work for our benefit they can help improve our cognition they can help us focus on our work they're really valuable technologies things like eye tracking which are going to be in in a variety of hmds in the next couple of years we'll see facebook's already talked about uh what they're doing there um a very valuable technology for being able to help us actually focus and and relate to each other but the key is i mean i think and a way to put this for people who are non-technical is the question is

are these technologies being used for us or are they being used for someone else who isn't acting in our in our benefit and that goes to the business model and the reason we have such distrust at this point uh and why we shouldn't trust anybody and agree with you on that is because they've abused it in in the name of the business model the business model is going to lead companies who make their money off of advertising and other exploitive technologies not that advertising itself is bad but the exploitive part is bad they are always going to tend to want to extract this information from us and use it in a way that benefits someone else and not us and so what we need to be banning is the exploitation what we need to be banning is the admitted field of use of this technology not the technologies themselves when they can be proven to be used in our to our benefit to our to our personal benefit and this even goes beyond consent because it brings up the next question as well if we just agree to it it's okay these things are so complicated and even the scientists who work on the machine learning algorithms don't even understand how they work half the time and they just work and so you

can't expect a layperson to be able to consent to something that the company doesn't even understand how it works so we have to be assuming that we can't consent to these things and we have to be proving that they're innocuous and that they they work for our benefit you know in the same way that the that the health industry has had to prove every year first do no harm first prove that you're actually helping people and then and don't do experiments on people don't do things that you're going to harm their health even though it still happens we have laws about these things we have rules uh hippocratic oath all these things push us in the direction of saying don't abuse people and we don't have that yet for all this all this uh cognitive technology which can easily be used to abuse people there's also a lot uh on maybe on card expertise but a lot of the arguments that you are talking are kind of the same arguments we are debating when talking about facial recognition and artificial intelligence about security about people that is being that is abusing these technologies and because they can control it and this

kind of creates this technocracy where you don't understand these technologies so you are being a subject to them um but this probably falls more on card's expertise well i would say like one of the things that i actually would make a pitch for all the you know game developers who are looking at these technologies and developing it now if you create a system that gives people that kind of trust that they can put their data into a system and feel confident about it i think that's going to be a winning proposition and one of the reasons why people are a little leery about facebook getting into the metaverse uh is that facebook has had a number of things that have broken trust in the past uh and so getting ahead of that and saying we're going to have a system where you have control over over your information and it's for real uh then that's going to be a better system if people believe that that's true and you can back that up i think technology uh that does back it up as dylan was saying

but i think that also we need to have policies that back that up looking at it from a legal policy and technology perspective to get to that that what's a great point to kind of close the debate this has been amazing and i want to kind of speak like four hours about this with each and every one of you because you are such amazing and all the things you would know and all the things and the doors you are opening so we had to stop here and we have five minutes for q a for a brief q a if someone has a question that we can answer in five minutes which is probably not the case but let's do it anyway can you hear me yes yep yeah i i first off jeff wanted to say thank you for talking about this i do talks on this stuff here in sf and

hearing other people talk about this is very valuable and confirms a lot of issues i've been saying my question is a bit about the bio sensor stuff you guys just mentioned which is for game devs how do you think a good way of educating game developers about these biosensors and the ethical issues since game developers want to have access to the data to use it during games how should they implement biosensors to use this type of data safely and securely and ethically just take a quick step to say that i mean the first rule is never upload it to the cloud use it locally and you can use it to improve someone's game experience great but don't save it

uh don't if you can avoid creating metadata from it don't try to create metadata especially don't use it for what you don't need and just delete it get rid of it don't store it don't allow third parties access to it say try to prove that every use of the data is for the benefit of the player in this case and i would build upon that absolutely agree with what avi mentioned there i i spoke about homomorphic encryption previously and that i've implemented it in a number of scenarios that are game-based scenarios at this point where you can have computation on data that is exchanged between clients that is it completely encrypted and is never decrypted so anyone right now can go onto github pull up a million repos that implement homomorphic encryption and whatever your engine of choice is or in some abstract library you can do this today you actually you never need to decrypt the data in order to provide the personalized experience be it a home page or be it a game experience you just have to make sure that at the other end when it's decrypted on some other client that it can't be siphoned

off at that end either but it would never be decrypted in this case that that's the whole part is you only get the end result of of the operation that's performed on the data just to make it a concrete example i know we don't have a lot of time but let's let's say it's it's my face and we're worried about identity theft and so we have to create avatars and we want to create eventually photorealistic avatars so at some point my face is going to be transmitted to you uh on your side and we can encrypt it along the way different kind of encryption uh not exactly we're talking about but at some point it's going to get decrypted and and the client on the other end is going to receive it and we have to be very careful that that can't be siphoned off and used to for someone to pretend to be me and a person impersonate me to my bank for example or something worse uh hi guys uh i'm john mcmath also known as the samurai lawyer in the vr space uh really glad to see you all uh my question is about the difficulty of communicating technology technological specifications

to lawmakers specifically you guys have talked a lot about the need for legislation by way of analogy sometimes i have to explain to a judge or a jury around here what a mass spectrometer is or how dna testing works and that's when you start to realize that there can be that disconnect between the lawmaker and the scientific uh grasp or or sophistication so i'm wondering if you guys can address how do we bridge that gap um a quick on that that for me i i do a work a lot of work in education uh on policy makers but also on regular people and i think that one of the keys is trying to make people understand through simple analysis and trying to to make them feel welcome into the technology because for a lot of people when they hear technology and

particularly people that come from like law and other areas that are kind of more social they tend to close down so you need to translate the the abstract ideas and the concepts and the importance of this not only just and kind of bring those difficult technical terms into in a way that they feel welcome to understand that uh i would second that completely it's there there are a number of lawyers particularly in i think in academia and and also in policy that try to specialize in explaining um technical issues to to a legal audience that that sometimes it usually asks the geek lawyers and it is very difficult because sometimes you have to get past that perception that oh this is something it's either complicated or i don't need to know about this or even worse um the

filter that already exists is lobbyist um it's sometimes very difficult that the technology is being explained by someone that that has an agenda and is getting paid to do that so um it's it's sometimes a very thankless job that and i can only say that you know videos all sorts of popular engagement that you can do and as a technologist that can be understood by lawyers and by lawmakers it's it's useful it's very useful i've used lots of videos when trying to explain things to to policymakers to make it easier and the more content that we can have access to the better i i've just tried collaborating uh i'll collaborate with lawyers whenever you want to help try to explain these things and i think i think what matters is not just to simplify the tech because otherwise if you simplify it you wind up with some lawmakers you're talking about a series of tubes and not i'm really understanding

the details but if you tell in terms of stories and you say you imagine you're walking down the street and this happens and then this happens and then this happens everybody can understand that and so that's been the most effective way is to turn these things into stories and then what you want is the lawyers to come back and poke holes in it to say is that really going to happen like is that are you just dreaming or is that actually really likely and you got to be very very clear about that because you don't want to you don't want to you know cry wolf you want to you want to really talk about the real dangers uh of of of what's likely to happen based on what we know and the realities of things i'll just just add to this that uh it would be great if lawmakers policymakers also employed technologists in-house uh that would help understand these issues and you know i think we have we have a good set of geeky lawyers uh several on this on the zoom but uh you know also on the side of policymakers so that they can get that geek to geek protocol to transfer the information

and have that be embedded in the policy the policy is based on the actual technologies not just now but the ones that are being foreseen so we can get ahead i think we don't have more time so thank you everyone for coming for this panel and a big round of applause to our incredible panelists here [Music] you