The avatar law and (cyber) transnational contracts

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Abstract The virtual world, often referred to as “Metaverse”, has recently emerged as the forum for people to communicate and socialise with each other. It will not be long before economic activities take place in the Metaverse, booming the Metaverse economy. To provide legal certainties to such activities, the law on the subjects of such activities, namely avatars, needs to be explored, besides the law on the objects in the virtual world, or digital assets, which have already been extensively discussed. There can be three possible approaches to the law of avatars. They are to treat an avatar either as a device (thing) deployed by a person or corporation in the real world, as an agent of the latter, or as an entity with distinct legal personality. Depending on which approach is to be followed, the existing laws of identity management and trust services, those of agency or those of mutual recognition of legal personalities may be useful in forming the law on avatars. When choosing the approach to the issue, law-makers have to make a policy decision, carefully examining the economic and social benefits and problems that each approach will entail. In doing so, the functional analysis of the corporate law will be helpful.