Legal issues on Identity Thefts of Avatars

<p>This article discusses the legal issues surrounding the impersonation of avatars active in the metaverse, primarily regarding privacy protection. A major difference between virtual spaces and the real world lies in the use of avatars to break free from the constraints of one’s physical appearance. The ability to freely control one’s appearance means the ability to freely mold one’s self-image or representation, which enables a person to participate in the new world that is the metaverse on their own terms. In the metaverse, the kind of avatar a person uses becomes extremely important.</p><p>Chapter 1 discusses the issues that arise when someone hijacks someone else’s avatar and behaves as its rightful owner.</p><p>Chapter 2 examines privacy rights in the metaverse. Freely forming relationships with others through one’s avatar, the prevention and elimination of wrongful interference by third parties with the image one has formed, and maintaining one’s avatar-mediated personal identity through relationships with others are important personal rights and interests that must be guaranteed.</p><p>In the metaverse, if a person’s personality is even partially expressed in an avatar, that affirms their identification with that avatar, no matter how many avatars they use. However, if multiple people use a single avatar, this weakens the person-avatar link, making the violation of personal identity rights unlikely even if an unrelated party were to use the avatar without permission.</p><p>Chapter 3 examines the issues surrounding the malicious act of impersonation. 1) Even if a person falsifies their own avatar only in another person’s environment, this should be regarded as a kind of infringement, and it would be prudent to adopt legislative measures to restrict this from the viewpoint of protecting the privacy of others. 2) The act of sharing a modified version of your own avatar with a third party is shared by the problems of "idol collage" and "deepfake." These are dealt with according to the nature of the defamation, which may be wide in scope. However, deterioration in “social evaluation” should be more precisely analyzed, and the scope should be clarified as much as possible. 3) When a person creates their own avatar using another person’s name and appearance and uses it in the virtual space, liability becomes a problem when the fake is made public. There is a danger in the actual person’s image becoming distorted due to the peculiarities of immersion, and if this is difficult to solve with existing legal doctrine, then it is meaningful to discuss identity rights.</p><p>Chapter 4 summarizes the conclusions of the previous chapters. First, it clarifies the nature and guarantees of identity rights (including legal interests) to protect one's image, self-image, and personal identity. Second, it clarifies that the conditions and methods of restricting acts of unfairly altering a person's avatar are at issue. Then it references appropriate ID management measures in the form of identity verification technology, third-party authentication systems for identity verification, and avatar registration systems; then in Chapter 5 it touches upon future outlooks.</p>