Problems of Protecting Virtual Game Property by Means of Criminal Law

The legal regulation of social relations in virtual reality is attracting an increasing attention of scholars. There are corresponding Russian and foreign publications concerning different branches of law: civil, tax, labor, international humanitarian, and criminology. Criminological research is based, among other things, on the analysis of sociocultural factors: how online gaming behavior influences the «cultural normalization» of similar behavior in the real world, the problems and boundaries of permitted violence. At the same time, the problem of infringements on virtual game property is becoming more urgent. The first reason for this is the fact that the possession of virtual property can have legal and economic consequences in the real world. The second reason is connected with the absence, in most jurisdictions, of the legal regulation of the emerging property rights (or other «rights in rem») to game property, which hinders prosecution for crimes against it, or makes it impossible in some countries where criminal law protection is linked to positive legislation. The authors believe that it is best to view these crimes as offences against property, and not cybercrimes in the narrow sense of the word. It is obvious that the problems of defining the crime of theft in the virtual space are connected with the understanding of the object and other features of theft, and the analysis thus mainly focuses on comparing the legal nature of virtual game property with how it corresponds to the features of theft in the current legislation. Key concepts of the legal nature of virtual game property are formulated, which are then analyzed from the standpoint of their applicability in criminal law. According to the authors, there are two main ways to solve the problem of virtual game property protection: either, following the approaches found in foreign practice, the definition of theft should be broadened, or the legal protection regime sui generis should be created to deal with the protection of all cyber aspects of property relations.

Intellectual Property Issues in Video Games

The article deals with intellectual property issues related to the introduction of innovative technologies into games. The author concludes that the impact of a particular technology on the game is predominantly individual and requires independent study in relation to the field of intellectual rights. As private conclusions confirming this thesis, the article substantiates: 1) the specificity of the legal nature of in-game property in crypto games; 2) the peculiarities of the impact of virtual, augmented reality technologies (hereinafter — VR, AR-technologies or VR, AR) on the legal regime of content created by players, as well as the peculiarities of using trademarks in a virtual environment; 3) the need to develop innovative contractual models related to the regulation of intellectual rights between participants in the gaming industry; 4) the importance of ensuring certainty in the rights of subjects of the gaming industry, including when deciding who will own the rights to content created jointly by the player and gaming artificial intelligence, as well as when deciding whether to grant the player exclusive rights to the content created by him in games with VR, AR elements

NONEMPTY CORE-TYPE SOLUTIONS OVER BALANCED COALITIONS IN TU-GAMES

In this paper we introduce two related core-type solutions for games with transferable utility (TU-games) the [Formula: see text]-core and the [Formula: see text]-core. The elements of the solutions are pairs [Formula: see text] where x, as usual, is a vector representing a distribution of utility and [Formula: see text] is a balanced family of coalitions, in the case of the [Formula: see text]-core, and a minimal balanced one, in the case of the [Formula: see text]-core, describing a plausible organization of the players to achieve the vector x. Both solutions extend the notion of classical core but, unlike it, they are always nonempty for any TU-game. For the [Formula: see text]-core, which also exhibits a certain kind of "minimality" property, we provide a nice axiomatic characterization in terms of the four axioms nonemptiness (NE), individual rationality (IR), superadditivity (SUPA) and a weak reduced game property (WRGP) (with appropriate modifications to adapt them to the new framework) used to characterize the classical core. However, an additional axiom, the axiom of equal opportunity is required. It roughly states that if [Formula: see text] belongs to the [Formula: see text]-core then, any other admissible element of the form [Formula: see text] should belong to the solution too.

TWISTED DUAL GAMES AND THEIR PROPERTIES

We define a duality of solutions in coalitional games that we call a twisted duality. This twisted duality extends the rule of self-duality in bankruptcy problems. After showing that the prekernel and prenucleolus exhibit twisted duality, we define a twisted reduced game property and characterize the prekernel and prenucleolus by axioms including this property. We note that the Shapley value satisfies twisted duality, and we define another twisted reduced game property by and characterize the Shapley value by axioms including this property.

THE POSITIVE PREKERNEL OF A COOPERATIVE GAME

The positive prekernel, a solution of cooperative transferable utility games, is introduced. We show that this solution inherits many properties of the prekernel and of the core, which are both sub-solutions. It coincides with its individually rational variant, the positive kernel, when applied to any zero-monotonic game. The positive (pre)kernel is a sub-solution of the reactive (pre)bargaining set. We prove that the positive prekernel on the set of games with players belonging to a universe of at least three possible members can be axiomatized by non-emptiness, anonymity, reasonableness, the weak reduced game property, the converse reduced game property, and a weak version of unanimity for two-person games.