Abstract
The article deals with the question of how new developments in the field of virtual reality may affect the understanding of the current legal institutes of intellectual property law and civil law. Specifically, this article focuses on the issue of ownership in the context of virtual worlds and virtual reality.
Virtual reality is a technology that has attracted a great deal of interest from investors in recent years, and there has been increasing talk of the possibility of creating a "metaverse". Although considerations over the legal nature of intangible digital objects are not a new topic, it is the current technological developments with a goal of creating a metaverse that may provide a new input for addressing these issues.
In the first part of the article, the author focuses on the societal significance of virtual reality, including its distinction from the current possibilities of virtual worlds. The article then discusses the current conceptual perspective on the legal nature of digital objects and discusses earlier court decisions concerning virtual objects.
At the same time, the article focuses on existing civil law institutes and examines whether the impact of this technology may have an impact on their redefinition or on the emergence of new institutes. In this way, it builds on the literature dealing with virtual property, although it does not deal with the concept per se.