ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses virtual property, which has been one of the most spectacularly successful features of massively multiplayer games. Virtual world designers make some, but often quite limited, attempts at optimizing their "laws" for efficiency. The theory of property law helps explain these attempts and their limits. Reliable contract law – along with reliable property law – is the intuitive basis of functional market economy. If property gives individuals economic security, then contract allows them to put their property to use through productive exchange. Placing checks on seemingly overweening power is also a recurring theme in legal scholarship concerning governments. Constitutional lawyers, cyberspace theorists, and international lawyers all deal with the bogeyman of the sovereign who answers to no higher authority and who therefore cannot be directly compelled to do right. Yet these bodies of law have all identified and named techniques that might be used to bribe or to threaten the sovereign and to place limits on its capriciousness.
