A few days ago, on a foreign online social platform, a netizen complained that he was tragically "RAPed by VR" during "VR sleep" in a meta-universe virtual space. Then a new term that seems to be somewhat ahead of the times, "VR rape", dominated the first place in the hot search list of the platform, and countless netizens have been eating melons for a while.
One
Start with VR "rape" together
This VR "rape case" occurred in a popular online VR social game, the design company of the game was founded in 2014, at the end of June 2021, the company completed an $80 million Series D financing, a moment of momentum, can be described as a benchmark in the field of VR social games. The VR social game has a high degree of freedom (the so-called "sandbox world"), and by wearing VR devices, players can even achieve physical performances that are almost indistinguishable from reality in this game, such as blinking, lip-syncing, gestures, etc.
The problem arises precisely in the high degree of freedom of the gaming experience. In order to allow players to experience the freedom of the "sandbox world" as much as possible, the game allows players to perform "VR sleep", that is, the player wears a VR headset to sleep while entering the game. This "VR rape case" occurred during the "VR sleep" process. In short, when the "victim" wears a VR headset to sleep in reality, the game character under his control is also sleeping in the virtual world. In this process, other players use the game characters they control to swing their waists on the game characters controlled by the "victim" and make certain offensive moves, which is the whole case of this VR "rape case". The "victim" said afterwards that he was forced to experience an incomparably "real" sexual assault - being woken up in his sleep, opening his eyes and seeing a strange game character performing obscene actions on his virtual body in his headset, all of which were extremely realistic.
Such incidents of "sexual assault" in cyberspace are not new. Back in the ancient days of the Internet in 1993, journalist Julian Dibbell published an article titled "A Rape in Cyberspace." The article records a series of misconduct committed by a player in a virtual community by controlling the virtual characters, voices and other characteristics of other players, which is probably the earliest record of online "sexual assault".
In 2016, when VR applications exploded, the "Belamire sexual assault incident" also caused widespread discussion in the VR game industry. According to be the "victim" of the incident, Belamire, after he made a sound on a public chat channel of a VR game and revealed his female identity, another VR player began to "touch" Belamire's avatar in the game. After Belamire explicitly refused, the player not only did not stop the improper movements, but instead intensified his touching of Belamire's avatar in the game. At that time, there were voices on the Internet that "such indecency, if placed in the real world, is enough to constitute the crime of forced indecency." ”
Two
Perhaps it is not the "abuser" who is in trouble, but the game designer and operator
The above -- "VR rape cases" or "Belamire sexual assault incidents" are all so-called "virtual sexual violence" incidents. In simple terms, "virtual sexual violence" is the "sexual violence" behavior committed by virtual characters controlled by players against virtual characters controlled by other players in virtual digital spaces such as metaversies and online games, is such behavior equivalent to sexual violence in reality and can be regulated by criminal law? The answer seems to be no.
Taking Japan, where the "VR rape case" occurred, for example, the Japanese criminal law and several special criminal laws have extremely detailed provisions on sexual crimes. Articles 176 to 179 of the Japanese Criminal Law respectively stipulate the crimes of forced indecency, rape, quasi-forced indecency and quasi-rape, gang rape and corresponding attempts, while special criminal laws such as the Law on the Regulation of Acts of Attracting Children online and the Law on Misdemeanours stipulate the penalties for voyeurism and online seduction against children, but despite such detailed provisions, it is difficult for the "perpetrator" in the "VR rape case" to meet the constituent elements of the above crimes.
First of all, as far as the crime of rape is concerned, Japanese criminal law requires that sexual relations must be made with others by means of violence or coercion, or by taking advantage of the loss of mind or irresistible opportunities, and it is clear that "rape" of virtual characters in the game cannot be evaluated as forced sexual relations with the player behind the virtual characters. Otherwise, wouldn't "killing" other players in a VR game constitute intentional homicide? This is patently absurd.
Secondly, as far as the crime of forced indecency is concerned, the Japanese criminal law requires that the act as a means of achieving indecency must be mandatory, that is, either by means of violence or coercion, or when the victim is asleep, unconscious, etc., to commit indecency, otherwise it does not constitute the relevant crime of forced indecency. In this case, it is barely possible to evaluate the victim as "in a state of mental loss such as deep sleep", but the indecent act must require the victim himself, not his avatar in the game, and Japan's jurisprudence so far has affirmed that the indecent act must have physical contact or at least the possibility of physical contact, which is obviously impossible to achieve in this case.
Thirdly, as far as the most basic jurisprudence is concerned, one of the most remarkable achievements of modern criminal law is the establishment of the theory of legal interests, thereby completely excluding acts that are objectively impossible to infringe on or threaten the interests of human life from the scope of criminal law. Taking sexual crimes (such as rape and forced indecency) as an example, the legal interest protected by the criminal law is people's "sexual self-determination", that is, the criminal law protects our freedom to "decide with whom, when and in what way to have sexual contact". Obviously, the "obscene" behavior in VR games, while offensive, is unlikely to threaten the player's sexual freedom in any way.
Of course, if the "victim" in this case is a minor, and the "abuser" induces the minor to meet offline in the process of "indecent" acts against the virtual character controlled by the player, it is possible to impose criminal regulations in Japan under the special criminal law of the Online Child Attraction Regulation Act.
If the case had occurred on the mainland, the legal evaluation of the "perpetrator" would have been similar to that of Japan, and there was no possibility of constituting a related crime.
From this, we have to face an embarrassing proposition: perhaps the legal risk is not the "perpetrator" of virtual violence, but the designer and operator of VR games. In the field of the philosophy of science and technology, there is a term called "technological alienation", which originally referred to the negative effects of technology as a creation of human beings to improve life and promote social progress, contrary to people's expectations. Technological alienation abounds in the Internet age, and even makes some Internet entrepreneurs eventually imprisoned.
A few years ago, the "broadcast case" that sensationalized the Internet, the designer of the network player originally designed a network player with cloud playback function, but it was used by countless network obscene video disseminators, and finally the founder of the company was sentenced to three years and six months in prison for suspected of spreading obscene materials for profit.
Recently known for AI face swapping the deep synthesis technology of the whole network has also been pushed to the cusp of the storm due to the phenomenon of technological alienation, AI face swap was born only for entertainment of the public at the beginning, but gradually became a means of revenge, that is, the use of deep synthesis technology to replace the faces of celebrities in, around 2020, nearly 90% of the AI face swap videos on the Internet involve pornographic content, not only in AI face swaps, deep synthesis technology is also widely used in fake news synthesis, It is currently a typical representative of technological alienation in the metaverse era.
The "VR rape" incident may become the fuse of technological alienation in vr applications. Prior to this, there was a precedent for the use of VR games to produce obscene videos of virtual game characters, and the widespread dissemination of these illegal contents had to arouse the attention of the relevant designers and operators of virtual reality games and deep synthesis technology applications to their own criminal risks.
Since ancient times, the duplicity of technology is nothing new, and kitchen knives can be used both for cooking and killing; Einstein's E=MC² mass-energy conversion formula not only lays the foundation for our use of nuclear energy, but also can be used to build atomic bombs that kill countless people... The same is true of the metacosm and the technologies of its convergence.
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