Law, Virtual Reality, and Augmented Reality
UNIVERSITY of PENNSYLVANIA LAW REVIEW Founded 1852 Formerly AMERICAN LAW REGISTER © 2018 University of Pennsylvania Law Review VOL. 166 APRIL 2018 NO. 5 ARTICLE LAW, VIRTUAL REALITY, AND AUGMENTED REALITY MARK A. LEMLEY† & EUGENE VOLOKH†† Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) are going to be big—not just for gaming but for work, for social life, and for evaluating and buying real-world products. Like many big technological advances, they will in some ways challenge legal doctrine. In this Article, we will speculate about some of these upcoming challenges, asking: † William H. Neukom Professor, Stanford Law School; partner, Durie Tangri LLP. Article © 2018 Mark A. Lemley & Eugene Volokh. †† Gary T. Schwartz Professor of Law, UCLA School of Law; academic affiliate, Mayer Brown LLP. Thanks to Sam Bray, Ryan Calo, Anupam Chander, Julie Cohen, Kristen Eichensehr, Nita Farahany, James Grimmelmann, Rose Hagan, Claire Hill, Chad Huston, Sarah Jeong, Bill McGeveran, Emily Murphy, Lisa Ouellette, Richard Re, Zahr Said, Rebecca Tushnet, Vladimir Volokh, and the participants at the UC Davis conference on Future-Proofing Law, the Stanford Law School conference on regulating disruption, the Internet Law Works in Progress Conference, and workshops at Stanford Law School, Duke Law School, the University of Minnesota Law School, and the University of Washington for comments on prior drafts; and to Tyler O’Brien and James Yoon for research assistance. (1051) 1052 University of Pennsylvania Law Review [Vol. 166: 1051 (1) How might the law treat “street crimes” in VR and AR—behavior such as disturbing the peace, indecent exposure, deliberately harmful visuals (such as strobe lighting used to provoke seizures in people with epilepsy), and “virtual groping”? Two key aspects of this, we will argue, are the Bangladesh problem (which will make criminal law very hard to practically enforce) and technologically enabled self-help (which will offer an attractive alternative protection to users, but also a further excuse for real-world police departments not to get involved).
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