mrjoro.org

Ownership in the Augmented World

Joseph Rozier
August 1, 2004

Introduction

Technological innovations often have disruptive consequences. The relative disruptions of different technologies is up for debate--is the Internet more disruptive than the television? Is the ability to have instant and easy access to much of the collective knowledge of the world more disruptive than the revolutionary ability to send messages over thousands of miles in seconds? Regardless of the relative impact of the digital revolution, few would argue that it has not had an incredible impact on the lives of most individuals in industrialized (and, in many ways, non-industrialized) nations.

One of the more recent phenomena of the digital revolution has been the integration of digital technology into everyday life. While the dominant model for many years consisted of a person sitting in front of a computer, recent progress has begun to change this model. The MIT Media Lab's Things That Think consortium, for example, has the goal of "invent[ing] the future of digitally augmented objects and environments". The basic concept is to enhance a person's everyday experiences by using digitally enhanced (often networked) objects and spaces. This augmented world provides more flexibility than the physical laws of the real world allows. For example, a plant growing in the corner of an office can be an aesthetically pleasing decoration piece. With an augmented world, the plant could be replaced with a virtual plant that provides information, such as how well the stock market is doing.

The relatively new concept of the augmented world has many aspects that are worthy of investigation. In the example of the augmented plant, for instance, what if a person simply wanted the joys of nurturing a real-life plant? How much are people currently willing to have their lives digitally enhanced? Exploring questions like this help to evolve this new technology and, in a way, to impact the future of society. One topic that will have a significant impact on the development of augmented technology is how current notions of ownership blend with the newly augmented space. Ownership--whether individual or community, physical or conceptual--is a strong force in much of society. Will it be easy to extend the rules of ownership to the augmented space? Will it make people more willing to accept augmentation, or it will it serve as a hindrance? Can augmentations cause people to question their notions of ownership in the real world?

The goal of this essay is to explore these questions of ownership in an augmented world. I will begin by more clearly defining what an augmented world is, and then elaborating on current concepts of ownership. I will then discuss how existing notions of ownership can affect the virtual and augmented worlds, and vice versa. Finally, I will explore in detail some of the issues regarding ownership in the augmented world that are worthy of investigation, as well as limitations that may be encountered during this investigation. This essay is not intended to answer most of the questions that it raises; rather, it is intended to be a starting point for exploration into ownership in the augmented space.

Definitions

The Augmented World

In general, the Augmented World (AW) can be thought of as holding a position between the Real World (RW) and the Virtual World (VW). The AW combines aspects of both "reality" and "virtual reality." Whereas the virtual world exists almost entirely within computers and their networks, the augmented world exists at the intersection of computing technology and the real, physical world. The augmented world is a world in which computers augment the real world with a new digital layer. This digital layer exists in two broad forms--an immersive layer that overlays, but is in some ways separate from, the real world, and a more layer which objects in the real world are digitally enhanced. These two forms are known respectively as Augmented Reality (AR) and Ubiquitous Computing (UC, or "ubicomp").

Ubiquitous Computing is perhaps the more familiar component of the Augmented World. The concept of Ubiquitous Computing was defined by Mark Weiser in the early 1990s in papers such as "The world is not a desktop." A classic example of UC is Brygg Ullmer and Hiroshi Ishii's metaDESK, in which a physical desk becomes a computer display, and physical objects placed around the desk can be used to interact with an attached computer. UC does not always require the presence of what most people think of as a "computer," though. For example, the Furby was an early attempt at augmenting toys. These stuffed animals responded to human speech and touch with eye movements and "speech." A Furby could also "cause" other Furbies to laugh or talk. Of course, the Furby was essentially a stuffed animal wrapped around a simple computer, with touch sensors and infrared communication. But to many of the millions of children (and adults) who owned the Furby, it was simply a stuffed animal which which one could interact.

Augmented Reality is another component of the Augmented World. Instead of providing individual objects with digital enhancements, a "virtual layer" is overlayed onto a real world space. The virtual layer can be visual enhancements, as in The Touring Machine, where Columbia University was augmented. The virtual layer in this case contained textual descriptions of the buildings on campus. An individual using the system is able to walk around campus and see the textual descriptions superimposed on the actual buildings. This is accomplished through the use of specially designed gear including goggles, GPS and a computer in a backpack. (Someone walking around campus with an individual using the system would see the same buildings; he or she would not see the virtual layer, though.) AR is intended to be immersive, in that the augmentations are intended to seem a part of the "real world" from the perspective of the user.

In some cases, the definition of the Augmented World provided is too loose. A laptop is certainly a physical object that performs computations, but it would be difficult to argue that it is "augmented" in some way. Rather, its primary purpose is a computational tool. A less extreme example is a television remote control. The remote control is a physical object that has basic computational abilities. Is it considered digitally augmented? Like the laptop, the digital components of the remote control serve only to provide its basic functionality. This contrasts with the metaDESK (in which a table and physical objects that normally have non-digital functionality are enhanced with a computer) and the Furby (in which the "basic functionality" of the Furby is a stuffed animal, enhanced to provide more interaction.). A tighter definition of what it means for an object or space to be augmented is that an augmented object or space uses computational components to enhance the object or space beyond its basic functionality.

It may be tempting to think of Ubiquitous Computing as "augmented objects" and Augmented Reality as "augmented spaces." However, the definitions are not so clear. Consider the case of semacodes, which are physical tags that can be placed on real-world locations. These tags contain two-dimensional barcodes that allow a user with a camera phone (or any device with a 2D barcode reader) to go to a website related to the physical location. A bus stop, for example, may have a semacode that links to a site providing schedules for the bus lines that serve that stop. The bus stop is, in a sense, "digitally augmented" because the physical space is linked to the internet. The bus stop itself, though, does not have a computer inside it, and it is not "immersed" in an augmented reality environment.

In some instances, the divide between a digitally augmented object and a digitally augmented space is not clear. For instance, the Ambient Orb is a glowing "crystal ball" that moves between a range of colors depending on some indicator, such as the weather forecast or the performance of the stock market. (In many ways, the Orb is similar to the virtual plant overlayed onto the real world as described in the introduction.) Is the Orb itself augmented, or is the Orb serving to augment the space? Although the "basic functionality" of the Orb is its augmentation, it can be thought of as an augmented lamp; it can also be considered as augmenting the space it inhabits with a digital layer of information.

Ownership

There are many different forms of ownership, but most of the forms share the common concept that something that is owned is exclusively controlled by an individual or group.

There are two broad categories of what can be owned:

There are three primary ways that members of a society can determine who owns what:

An individual that owns something has exclusive control over it. The owner can use it (in the case of a physical object) or apply it (in the case of an idea). The owner can decide under what circumstances others use or apply it, and the owner can decide to transfer ownership to someone else. If the owner desires, he or she can transfer ownership to society in general. (This is often done when people who own a copyright or patent allow anyone to use them without recompense.)

Community ownership differs from individual ownership in that the members of a community must reach a consensus as to how to control that which is owned. For example, if a city owns a park, the members of that city must decide whether or not the park will be open to nonresidents, what types of activities are permitted in the park, and under what circumstances the park may be sold to an individual. In this case, a formal legal framework may be developed to determine control; in the case of a city, an elected mayor who is accountable to the people may appoint members of a parks commission who makes these decisions.

Sometimes, an owner may choose to provide the appearance of community ownership without actually giving up his or her ownership rights. For example, a grocery store owner can post a bulletin board and invite the community to add posts to it. Although the members of the community may feel as if they partially own the bulletin board, they are actually relying on the generosity of the true owner. The grocery store owner could remove postings at will, and even discontinue use of the bulletin board on his or her whim.

Ownership is an inherently social phenomenon. Even at its most basic level, ownership suggests the control over an object at the exclusion of others. Beyond brute force ownership of physical objects, legal definitions of ownership rely on an agreement among people in a society that the rules will apply to that society. Informal notions of ownership rely even more on social agreements because they rely on constant negotiation among members. For these reasons, an exploration of notions of ownership must explore social conventions.

Ownership Concepts in the Digital World

As described above, the definition of ownership is not static; rather, it has evolved over time as new social structures developed. Thousands of years ago, a bloody fight may have been necessary to determine who really owns a spear. Although brute force is still used in many instances (as a victim of bullying-for-lunch-money could attest), a legal system has developed to more clearly define who owns what. Although legal systems originally covered the ownership of physical property, it developed over time to protect the expression of ideas and non-tangible property as well.

Technology advances often cause a new examination of ownership. Older notions of ownership are sometimes applied successfully, requiring little or no adjustment. At other times, wholly new forms of ownership are developed. As Christopher Hunter explains in his essay "Copyright and Culture", the printing press caused just such a re-examination. Although authors had some sense of ownership over their works going back to the Talmud and Ancient Rome, it was not until the printing press and the resulting explosion of publishing that the modern copyright framework developed. New situations arising from publishing confronted the population and the courts, and new rules of ownership were developed.

The rise of the Digital World (the combination of the Virtual World and the Augmented World) has had a similar interplay with the concept of ownership. In the following sections, the current state of this interplay in Digital World is discussed. Although the overarching goal of this work is to focus on issues worthy of investigation in the Augmented World, it would be impossible to discuss the AW without considering the Virtual World as well. Much of the current understanding of ownership in the Digital World comes from the Virtual World, which has been in existence for longer than the Augmented World.

Intellectual Property

Outside of virtual communities (which will be discussed later), much of the focus of ownership in the Virtual World is on Intellectual Property. Computer software, one component of the virtual world, has been significantly impacted by existing notions of intellectual property, but it has also led to a re-examination of copyright and patent rules.

Copyrights, which are used to protect the expression of an idea, prevent someone from copying a program written by someone else without permission. For example, if Alice writes a program that displays a photo album, Bob cannot simply copy Alice's code, make minor modifications, and claim it as his own without getting permission from Alice. This is the same concept as that which protects a novel or other written publication. Unlike these more traditionaly materials, though, a computer program must be copied to be used. The program, as described in the Wikipedia entry for Software Copyright, is copied from a distribution medium to the user's storage medium, and is copied to another storage medium for execution. Does existing copyright law distinguish between the copying that Bob intended to do and the copying that is required to run the program? It is possible that notions of "fair use" may have covered this situation, but to reduce any ambiguity, the United States Congress modified the copyright law. Section 117 specifically allows the copying required to run a program. This change allows existing copyright law to protect Alice from Bob's attempts to profit from her work, while extending the law to deal with the new reality of how computer programs work.

Patents can be used to protect a process, and computer programs are instructions that allow the computer to carry out a process. However, it was not always clear that patents could be used to protect computer programs. BitLaw's The History of Software Patents provides a description of the evolution of patents caused by the increasing use of software. Originally, the United States Patent and Trademark Office did not consider computer programs patentable because programs were seen as mathematical algorithms, which did not have patent protection. In 1981, the United States Supreme Court decided in Diamond v. Diehr that a process that was unique only because of a software component could still be patented. This caused some confusion, and ultimately led the Patent Office to develop new rules for computer programs. In 1996, the Patent Office released the Examination Guidelines for Computer-Related Inventions [PDF]. Patent law adapted to the new reality of the virtual world.

Many hold the view that this recognition of software patents has overwhelmed the Patent Office, so that obvious processes are granted patents. Slashdot, a discussion site dedicated to "News for Nerds" has a section on patents whose logo is a set of silverware overlaid with the words "Patent Pending." What some see as a particularly egregious example of the problems with the Patent Office's changes is a patent on online shopping carts (Patent No. 5,715,314). In essence, an obvious computer metaphor for a common real-world device was granted patent protection so that anyone wishing to use this metaphor must obtain permission from the patent holder. Problems resulting from the virtual world changes by the Patent Office have caused some organizations to work on reforming the reforms. To that end, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has started the Patent Busting Project.

Because of some of the changes that happened in the virtual realm, some intellectual property rules already exist for the augmented realm.

Physical Property

Although the Virtual World does not have physical property (as defined over generations), analogies to physical property still appear in the virtual realm. For example, issues around the ownership of domain names has in many ways mimicked the issues of land ownership. A domain name is a textual description that maps to an internet address; cnn.com is a domain name that allows a web browser to locate CNN's website. By their nature, these textual domain names are finite; there can be only one "cnn.com." Although these addresses are entirely digital--there is conceptually no physical dimension to them--their finite nature has led them to be treated like physical property.

Thus, analogies to the real world quicky developed. Just as there are land speculators who buy up large tracts of land in areas that are believed to be soon in-demand, domain name speculators buy up domain names with the sole intention of selling them later to someone who will actually use it. (There are even books, such as Tbe Insider's Guide to Domain Name Speculation, that provide instructions on how to domain-name speculate.)

As might be expected, these domain names also led to the re-examining of real world intellectual property rights as well. People attempted to apply trademark rules to the domain names, so that the computer company Apple, for example, could be guaranteed the right to own apple.com. The problem is that many people may own the same trademark, as long as the trademarks are in different areas (Apple computers does not own a trademark to the world "apple," it only owns the trademark in a specific area of commerce.) Because trademarks are not unique, but domain names are, there can be many legitimate claims on a single domain name. Even then, who decided that a trademark holder could own a domain name? As is often the case, these issues led to the creation of new laws and legal procedures, although these have not resolved the issues perfectly. The United States Congress has passed the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act, to allow trademark holders to take domain names from those who obtained the domain name in "bad faith," explicitly giving trademark protection to domain names. ICANN, the organization ultimately responsible for Internet address allocation, created the Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy. Both of these systems, though, tend to deal with trademark holders obtaining domain names from those who do not hold a valid trademark; they do not resolve what happens when multiple trademark holders claim the same domain name. It appears that the method for resolving this situation is to fall back on an old rule of ownership--"first-come, first-served."

The concept of physical property in the augmented world exists on two levels. When a physical object is digitally augmented, whoever owns the physical object is often considered to own the augmentation as well. For example, the metaDesk described above provides a digital augmentation to a real world desk. The metaDesk is probably owned by whoever owns the physical desk, either the formal owner (the person who purchased the desk) or the informal owner (the student who sits at that desk every day). However, augmentation can provide a complication even in a seemingly straightforward case like the metaDesk. The augmentation is a virtual layer on top of the physical desk. One could imagine the ability for a person to move his or her augmentation between multiple physical desks. In this case, the real-world layer and the augmented layer may be owned by different entities.

This split ownership is likely to happen whenever an augmentation is present as a layer not physically tied to a real-world object. For example, consider Hear&There, the augmented reality system that I created in the Sociable Media Group at the MIT Media Lab. This project allows individuals to create sound augmentations to place over a real-world location. Although the real-world location is owned by somebody, who owns the digitally augmented layer over that space? Does the owner of the real-world space have a right to control the digitally augmented layer as well? How these questions are resolved is determined in part by how the system is designed; ultimately, though, these questions may be resolved through legal limitations on the design.

When an augmentation is more closely tied to a physical object, real-world notions of ownership will dominate. The Furby presented above, while augmented, is still essentially a stuffed animal. The Furby can be owned the same way any other stuffed animal is owned. Questions of ownership with these types of augmented realities tend to occur more when they are considered as part of a larger system or community.

Digital Communities

Thus far, I have focused on ownership in terms of "things" in the digital domain, such as software programs and domain names. Another significant area in the virtual world that deserves examining is the virtual communities that develop online. Virtual communities can develop on a moderated online forum, at a personals website, around a collaborative endeavor, and in an online game (among others). Often, notions of ownership within these virtual communities reflect attempts to mimic real world notions of ownership. This mimicking can occur naturally within the confines of the system, or it can occur as a result of explicit decisions made by the creator of the community.

On-line games are a common example of virtual communities in which the rules of ownership are explicitly declared by the creators of the game. One popular on-line game is Everquest. In many of these games, people create characters that they use to interact with other members of the virtual community. These characters can often obtain "things" in the game, such as weapons and new skills. Many games develop their own economic systems, in which the characters can earn money to spend on buying new things. All of this property is virtual--it exists only in the memory of the game company's servers.

Who actually owns this property, though? Within the game, the people behind the characters have a sense of ownership over the property, and in the context of the day-to-day playing of the game, that is sufficient for most people to say that they own the virtual objects. However, what happens if the virtual property is taken away via a glitch, malicious actions of another player, or policy changes of the game company? In China, a gamer whose virtual property was stolen by a hacker successfully sued the maker of the game Hongyue ("Red Moon"). The game company was forced to restore the gamer's virtual property. Much of the legal case relied on the fact that the gamer had spent time and money to develop the character, so the virtual property can be treated much the same as physical or intellectual property that the gamer may have spent time and money developing as well.

If the people in the game own their own virtual property, can they sell it in the real world? Many do. In the early days of EverQuest, many people tried to make real-world money by selling their Everquest property on eBay; the seller would transfer the property to the winning bidder in the game after being paid in the real world. Sony, the makers of Everquest, eventually banned this practice and asked eBay to stop listing the virtual property. Why does the gamer not have the real world "right" to sell their own virtual property? Sony's End-User License Agreement (EULA) for EverQuest states, in Section 9, "you may not buy, sell or auction...any Game characters, items, coin or copyrighted material." It appears that Sony is claiming ultimate ownership of the virtual property. The users must agree to abide by the rules that Sony sets to play the game; the gamer is agreeing to Sony's interpretation of property rights.

From the example of EverQuest, it can be seen that while users often attempt to apply real-world interpretations of ownership rights to the virtual world, those rights can be modified by the person who is ultimately in control of the virtual environment. This differs from real-world ownership rights that are granted by the government; since the government is ultimately controlled by the society at large, in theory the rights of ownership are defined by the people at large as well. (One could argue that the game company is indirectly controlled by the members of the game's community because if they do not agree with the game company's policies, they will stop playing and, thus, stop paying.)

Even when a game company decides to apply real-world ownership ideas to the virtual world, real-world ownership issues may also be included. James Grimmelmann points out some issues with Second Life in his essay Free As In Gaming?. The users of this game are able to create their own characters and objects that conform to a set of interaction rules defined by the game. Linden Labs, the makers of this game, have decided that the users who create characters and objects in their game retain copyright to their creations. Grimmelmann presents a scenario in which someone films activity in Second Life to sell later. If your copyrighted character wanders in front of this camera, do you have a right to renumeration since your copyrighted image is being used to make money by someone else?

Communal Versus Individual Ownership

The virtual world also helps to bring forward questions of ownership that may not have been obvious in the past. An example of this is the rights of individuals in collective ownership. If a group of people collaborate to create a float for a parade, who owns the float? Who owns the rights to feature the float on memorabilia? Because the float is created locally by individuals working together, these issues can be resolved informally if they ever come up at all. However, the virtual world allows for easy world-wide collaboration among many participants who may not know each other. Wikipedia, an online collaborative encyclopedia, is an example. Every entry in the enclopedia is editable by anyone; as a result, most entries are the result of a combination of the work of many people. Who owns the copyright to each article, then? Should a "collective copyright" exist for each person who contributed? Should people get a copyright to those portions that they have edited? Does the copyright belong to the community at large? Wikipedia has solved this problem by declaring that all users who make edits are implicitly releasing their work to the public under the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL), under the principle of copyleft. Therefore, it does not matter who owns the copyright--the license grants anyone the right to use the material so long as anything that uses the material is also released under the GFDL. As is the case with Sony and EverQuest, participation in the system requires agreeing to the rules set out by that system.

Areas of Investigation

The above sections described some issues of ownership that have already affected or been affected by developments in the Digital World. The following sections move into describing topics that will guide an investigation into notions of ownership in the Augmented World. They will be useful in guiding evaluation of current research performed by others as well as in developing my own prototypes and further research. Ideally, using the areas described below, I will be able to design research that will help elucidate notions of ownership in the Augmented World.

Many of the following areas investigate how existing concepts of ownership may influence the Augmented World. At the most basic research level, this primarily focuses on the informal and, to some extent, "brute force" types of ownership. However, it is also important to consider the legal framework that has been developed to deal with Real World ownership, particularly the laws regarding Intellectual Property. These later issues are harder to determine using a prototype, and would likely require the collaboration with legal experts.

Organic vs. Artificial Rules

Ownership rules in the real world have had a chance to grow organically over time. There was no single person designing the system of human interactions that decided what could be owned by individuals and how ownership would be protected. These notions of ownership were negotiated between individuals and groups, and eventually a legal framework developed around these rules. In instances where a single ruler dicated concepts of ownership (such as the Code of Hammurabi), the rules were often developed from ownership concepts that already existed./p>

Digital augmentations can mimic the organic growth of ownership rules as well, but they could also have rules of ownership coded into them artificially by the creator of the augmentation. The designer of an augmentation may choose to establish no rules of ownership, with the thought that the community using the augmentation will develop their own rules over time. In this case, real world notions of ownership are likely to heavily influence the development of rules within the augmented system.

For example, consider the case of Hear&There, the system I created to digitally augment a real world space with sound. The system included an authoring toolkit that would allow an individual to edit and add sounds to an area, as well as to link sounds together. In the version that was implemented, there was no limitation on who could create sounds and where they could put them. Therefore, many people could place a sound on the same spot in real space--no one "owned" that augmented space. This could lead to problems over time, as the space became cacophonous. What would stop Bob from creating a noise in the same area as Alice? What if Bob wanted to create a loud, jarring rude noise at the entrance to a popular digital augmentation?

In a completely open system, the community must be relied on to set its own norms. The community standard could be that the first person to put a sound in a spot claims that spot. The community could also determine the maximum size of a sound (otherwise, one person could claim the entire area). However, once the community sets standards for ownership, there must be a system that allows the community to enforce its decisions. If the community has no capability of removing offending sound spots, then community norms become useless.

Digital augmentations that intend to allow the organic growth of ownership rules, therefore, must provide a mechanism to enforce those rules. This becomes tricky, because the designer of a system must decide in advance what types of rules the community will develop. This is incongruous with the organic nature of the rules.

This problem may be more common in an environment where a digital augmentation is somewhat separated from a physical representation. If an augmentation is closely tied to a physical representation, than that physical representation could conceivably be removed or destroyed. For example, if Hear&There relied on people placing augmented avatars in a physical space, then Bob's annoying avatar could be physically removed by others in the system. With semacodes, who decides who gets to place a semacode in an area? The system could be developed so that semacodes all refer to a central server that allows only one semacode per location, or the semacodes could point to any Internet address. In the former case, a method must exist for who determines what is at the URL for any given location. In the latter case, Real World ownership rules would certainly help decide--Bob could plaster his own preferred semacode over Alice's existing semacode if he wanted to, but the community could respond to this act of vandalism by replacing Alice's semacode next to Bob's. Real World methods of enforcement would obviate the need for digital methods.

An alternative to relying on organic rules of ownership is for the creator to develop artificial rules for the environment from the beginning. This might have the advantage of being easier to design, and it could require less effort from the members of the community to determine the rules. This is not an "all-or-nothing" steph, though. The creator could develop "first principles" that are enforced automatically (such as only alowing a single person to put a sound in a single spot), but then allow other notions of ownership to develop organically.

In either case, the existing legal structures of the Real World may still come into play. Once someone creates a digital augmentation, for example, they would own the copyright to that augmentation. The only way around this would be to require users of an augmented system to agree to certain terms before use, including the transfer of copyright. This is the approach that Wikipedia chose to allow additions to be added freely. However, the game Second Life specifically allows the creator of virtual objects to retain the copyright to his or her creations. Will people be willing to add to an augmented environment if they do not have copyright protections? What affect would copyright protections have on the development of community notions of ownership? Does copyright cover the association of an idea with a physical space (that is, can a person claim that his or her augmentation cannot be moved because the location is an integral part of the creation?)

As stated earlier, situations in which legal ownership rights from the Real World may cross over into the Augmented World are difficult to investigate using prototypes--the temptation may exist to remove any Real World legal rights to avoid risk of litigation. However, an investigation into augmented ownership would not be complete if artificial restrictions are placed on what can be investigated. These issues, therefore, will require collaboration with legal experts.

Community Decisions of Ownership

For many types of augmentation, the augmented layer can be considered to be "owned" by the community. The community as a whole can determine what types of augmentations are allowed in this layer. As discussed in the previous section, these decisions can grow organically (informal rules decided upon by the community, but not originally enforced by the augmentation system) or be designed as an inherent aspect of the augmentation.

Defining the community is one complication that will have to be considered for each project. Several questions must be considered when defining the community, including:

There are several different mechanisms in which community control can be manifested in a community-based augmentation system. Some mechanisms may be more appropriate than others depending on the type of augmentation. In some cases, it may be worth investigating different mechanisms within the same augmentation to determine what is most accepted by the community. The following sections describe a few of these mechanisms.

Wiki

Wikis are a type of collaboration in which anyone can edit contributions made to a community. A popular example of a wiki is Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia. Anyone can make any changes to any article in the encyclopedia at any time. These changes can also be reverted by anyone. The community as a whole does not actually "vote" on whether a contribution is correct or desirable; every decision is made by an individual.

Wikis are generally most effective whenever the content that is being collaboratively determined can be seen as "correct." In Wikipedia, the rules of style insist that each entry be devoid of personal bias and that only facts are presented. It may be more difficult to use a wiki whenever contributions to an environment are artistic in nature. If Alice spends time creating a sound in Hear&There, should Bob be able to edit that sound on his own accord? Would Alice even bother adding a sound if Bob could do that? One advantage to this system, though, is that it does allow the community to police itself. If Bob creates large graffiti sounds all over the Hear&There environment, any member of the community can simply remove them.

If wikis are used, then the system must still determine what form community contributions can take. Can existing augmentations be edited, moved, or added on to? Or can the augmentations be simply added or removed as a whole? It is also possible to limit editing rights to individuals who have "earned" the rights by some mechanism, and to limit contributions from known offenders of the community.

Juries

A jury system allows members of a community to vote on the worth, appropriateness, or some other aspect of an augmentation. The general purpose of the jury in an augmented system is to allow the community (or a specific subset of the community) to influence the augmented content.

The membership of a jury and the powers that the jury has can vary, and this variance provides one area of investigation. The jury in a community may be open to everyone in the community, or membership may be limited to a subset of the community. This subset could be created randomly, through some measurable mechanism of community respect, or through any of many other forms of creating a jury that is acceptable to the community. (Even if the means of creating the jury are designed into the system, if it is unacceptable to the community then no one will join the community.)

The power that a jury has also varies across different systems. In some cases, the jury provides a means of ranking augmentations, which may affect which augmentations members of the community are able to access. Juries may also have the ability of deciding competing claims in the favor of one or more parties. Juries may function as a type of policing group, in which the jury functions only to maintain community norms (for example, voting to remove augmentations that contradict formal or informal conduct agreements).

Juries may also have a set of rules that constrain how they work. It may be necessary for every member of a jury to vote before the jury's decision is made, or it could be that only a majority or some subset needs to vote. The vote may be coordinated (in which those members of the jury that are voting vote at the same time) or cumulative in some way over time. The voting process can be deliberative (in which the jurors consult each other before or during the vote) or anonymous.

A number of different jury systems can be seen in virtual and augmented communities today. For example, Hot or Not) uses a jury consisting of the entire community that ranks the relative attractiveness. The jury controls the ranking of the members of the community. The members of the jury do not have to vote on every person being ranked--the juror can cast a vote on as many members as he or she wishes.

Slashdot uses a somewhat complex jury system in which only a subset of the community has voting privileges at any given time. Slashdot provides a community forum to discuss technological issues. Each posting to a discussion has a point total, from -1 to 5. Each member of the jury has the right to add or delete a point from five posts before being removed (temporarily) from the jury. Because a member can filter by point total which posts he or she sees, those posts with high point values will have greater exposure within the community. The jury, therefore, does not have the ability to edit or remove posts, but it can affect what most people see in a discussion. Most of the members of the jury (known as "moderators") are selected randomly from the people that have been members of the community for some length of time. Certain parameters influence whether a member will be selected as a moderator, including how much the member participates in the community (by reading posts on the site and contributing posts). Once the juror exhausts his or her points, he or she is removed from the jury for a while.

One example of juries in the augmented world is Maple. Maple, for example, each user selects a jury that decides which photograph will be displayed in the user's augmented picture frame. The user can also give a weight to each jurors vote. Each juror has a set number of photos that he or she can mark as worthy to appear in the frame. Each picture marked by a juror is given a number of points equal to that jurors voting weight. The picture with the highest point total is displayed on the frame. In this system, voting happens continuously. Jurors can shift their votes at any time, and new pictures may be added to the user's pool of potential pictures by certain members of the jury. Jurors may also use a discussion forum to try to convince other members of the jury how to vote.

"Benevelont Dictator"

In some augmented systems, it may make sense for an individual to makes decisions regarding ownership in the community. This "benevolent dictator" may claim the right of ownership (for example, the creator of the system or the person paying for the upkeep of the system). The leader may also be selected by the community through a vote or some other measurable mechanism.

Just as with juries, the type of control the leader has may vary. The leader, for example, may be able to modify augmentations, or may be able to only serve as an enforcer of community norms. If the leader is not acceptable to the community, the community may decide to replace him or her (if the system is designed to allow this). Alternatively, members of the community may decide to leave the community.

The benevolent dictator form may be particularly suited for systems that are relatively closed. For example, one could imagine a system in which a small community of individuals make contributions to The Touring Machine, adding information about the buildings on a campus. In this system, it may make sense for one person to be in charge of proof-reading the contributions and removing any that are obviously wrong.

Value and Cost

An area worth investigating in digital augmentations is the value and cost of digital augmentations, and how they affect ownership. In the above example where Bob was creating annoying sounds in an augmented Hear&There layer, what if it cost him something to be able to place a sound in a given area? Would he be so quick to place an annoying sound if he had to pay for it? The mechanism of cost could be different in different situations. In some cases, it would be possible to require cash (e.g. a user pre-pays into an account, and whenever he or she wants to add an augmentation, he or she must first "buy" the associated "real estate" for a specified amount). In other cases, a system similar to the karma system on slashdot could be used. Some method could be devised whereby users can gain karma by contributing, perhaps with the karma value determined by the community. Adding an augmented contribution in this example may cost karma.

Making users pay for adding augmentations to a space can lead to even more problems, as Bob might feel that he has the right to add whatever sound he wants as long as he pays for it. In the Real World, people often complain about the aesthetic choices of their neighbors, and neighborhood associations have developed long lists of rules as a result. Would something similar be necessary in the Augmented World?

Thus far, I have focused on the cost of adding digital augmentations to a space. Similar concepts of cost can be investigated in other types of augmentation. The cost of an augmented physical object exists on a few levels. If the ownership of the object is closely tied to whoever owns the real object, some issues of cost closely mimic the "real world"--the cost of the real object is determined by real world market forces. However, the cost of the augmentation is still worthy of investigation. For example, consider an augmented game in which users buy a physical avatar that interacts with the avatars of others. Digital objects that are used in the game (and perhaps traded and/or stolen between people) may have a cost associated with them.

Regardless of what form cost takes, it may be necessary to impose artificial limitations on the system. If one person has a lot of money, karma, or whatever is used as a form of "currency" in the augmented system, he or she could quickly dominate the augmented layer. How this domination develops and affects the community may be worth investigation, perhaps to see how much it mimics the accumulation of wealth in the real world. Alternatively, investigation different mechanisms of artificial limitations to prevent (or limit) this type of accumulation may be fruitful.

One issue when discussing cost is how much cost affects who can use the system. Just as cost can sometimes limit participation in the real world, it could affect the augmented world as well, particularly if the cost system uses cash. In a system using cash, people without much money may not be able to use the system. This would be even more likely if the system is viewed as more of a toy or game than as a necessity (see the Acceptance section). Even if the system did not use cash, cost could limit participation by new members who have not had an opportunity to accumulate whatever for of payment is used in the system.

Aside from the initial cost thus far described, another type of cost worthy of investigation is upkeep costs. In the virtual world, some online games (such as Second Life) charge upkeep costs to maintain property in the game. These upkeep costs are presented as "taxes," and are conceptually used to pay for the extra server maintenance associated with the creations. However, they serve another purpose in that it keeps ownership in the game fresh. If someone grows bored with the game and has no intention of adding to his or her digital property, then he or she is unlikely to pay the associated taxes. Once the taxes are no longer paid, the property can be confiscated and deleted or sold to someone who has an interest in maintaining the property. A similar concept could be used in the Augmented World, to encourage people to maintain their own augmentations in the world. The upkeep costs have some similar issues and concerns as original costs, including what form the costs will take.

Invasions Into Existing Space

Whenever an augmented object or space invades an existing space, there are questions about how it affects any notions of ownership that already existed. Those who own the existing space, whether formally or informally, may resist, acquiesce, or willingly accept the new form of ownership. These augmentations can also cause people to question their existing senses of real world ownership.

Maple, an augmented world project that I created, requires a person to willingly give up ownership over some space in his or her own home. The premise of Maple is that the user gives a community of friends the right to select which photo should be displayed on a frame in the user's house. The frame consists of a digital screen that is connected to the Internet to receive the photo that currently has the most votes. In these cases, the user still maintains some sense of ownership. If the user is unhappy with the augmentation, he or she can simply turn off, hide, or remove the augmented frame. The user also has control over who has the right to choose the photograph, and what weight each individual's vote has. Without this sense of control, it is unlikely anyone would actually be willing to use the system.

Toyota has created an augmented car that is capable of expressing emotions to other drivers on the road. The front of the car is made to vaguely resemble a face (including headlights that can "wink"), and an antenna appears as a tail. The car could express anger by glowing red, squinting the "eyes" (headlights), and lowering the wheel base to appear as if it were crouching. Different expressions could also be used to indicate regret (e.g. for cutting somebody off) and the willingness to allow someone to enter in front of the augmented car. These augmentations are likely to have an effect on the sense of ownership that drivers tend to have over their lane of traffic. The effect is dependent on the individual and the situation. Would a person be willing to allow someone to enter his or her lane if the car could "ask permission" first? Would a person be calmed down if the car that just cut him or her off expresses regret?

One issue with the car augmentation is that it is still somewhat depersonalized. Although the car "expresses regret," the driver of the car is still an anonymous figure. Would a person's informal sense of lane ownership be affected more by a system that allows him to see information or images about the drivers around him and her? A car could have an additional screen that uses short-range wireless communication to get this information about the drivers that surround the car. Just as people could make their car "express regret," a person could send his or her "regret" image. Would seeing an actual person have a more powerful affect than an anonymous car? If this type messaging is too distracting, would it be sufficient to see a single representative picture of the person in the other car to onymize the other drivers? (How much would stereotypes affect the driver's perceptions, though?)

Ownership in the augmented world may cause significant conflict when a space or object that already has an owner is augmented by somebody else. As presented earlier, does Alice have any recourse if Bob creates an augmented layer over her physical property? If the Touring Machine was used to augment MIT's campus with descriptions, would MIT have the legal right to cease using the system? These issues may seem irrelevant in existing augmented systems, which are often used by only a few people in a proprietary system. The issues may become more relevant if augmentations become standardized and more widely available. Imagine a system in which users could go to different URLs to visit different augmented layers to the same space, and in which the method of access is ubiquitous. Insitutions and individuals are likely to pay more attention to the technology and its associated ownership issues at that point. Because the augmentation is closely related to the physical space, the owner of the physical space could make the claim that the augmentation could affect his, her or its reputation. This is one area that collaboration with legal experts will be necessary.

Acceptance

One of the most important considerations with regard to ownership in the Augmented World is user acceptance of the Augmented World itself. For a creation in the Augmented World to succeed, there must be individuals using those augmentations. For Hear&There, people must add and listen to the sounds. For semacodes, people must add the semacode markers, and others must use them to visit websites. For the metaDESK, people must sit at it and use it. For Furbies, people must purchase them and, to get the full effect of augmentation, get their friends to purchase them.

One problem with performing research into the Augmented World is that research often involves building prototypes. In order to research notions of ownership in these spaces, it is necessary that people accept the augmentation system and use it over a long enough time for real notions of ownership to develop. It will be difficult, for example, to determine how a community determines what sounds belong in Hear&There if people use the system for 10 minutes to create an initial sound and then never use the system again. The augmented space would have litter from many "ghosts" that do not really form a community.

Each augmentation must be evaluated for how likely it is to be accepted. In general, systems that require a significant change in behavior will require an overriding factor that will encourage use anyway. Even systems that only slightly modify existing behavior (such a small augmentation to everyday objects) will require something that will lead people to use the augmentation. Of course, non-acceptance of an augmentation system does not necessarily indicate that the prototype was designed incorrectly; it could indicate that most people are just not currently interested in that type of augmentation.

In some cases, whether an augmentation is accepted or not is itself part of the research goals for a project. For example, in Maple, one of the primary research goals is to determine whether a person is willing to partially give up control over an object in his or her own home to a jury. In the course of research, different types of control can be provided to the users to determine what encourages use of the system, and what discourages use. Are people more willing to use Maple if they can select the members of the jury? Do people require some sort of Maple veto power to continue using the system? A user that stops using Maple may simply indicate that the specific configuration of the system is not to his or her liking; this result in itself is an interesting and potentially significant result.