元宇宙中，打工人如何维护自己的权益？

Metaverse vs employment law: the reality of the virtual workplace

元宇宙与雇佣法：虚拟工作场所的现实

In December, 43-year-old doctoral researcher Nina Jane Patel put on a headset and entered Meta's virtual world to see what was hAppening that day. "Within seconds of being there, there were three avatars near me," she says. "Suddenly they were taking selfies... I couldn't see at first that they were groping the avatar's upper body..."

去年12月，43岁的博士研究员妮娜·简·帕特尔（Nina Jane Patel）戴上耳机，进入Meta的虚拟世界，看看当日有什么新鲜事。她说：“我刚进去几秒钟，身边就出现了三个化身。突然他们开始自拍了……一开始我没反应过来他们在摸我化身的上半身……”

The incident took place in the metaverse - an immersive virtual world accessed via wearable technology. Last year Microsoft, in its first step towards blending the physical and digital worlds of work, began rolling out a plan to enable workers to appear on its Teams collaboration software as avatars.

这一事件发生在元宇宙——一个通过可穿戴技术进入的沉浸式虚拟世界。去年，微软推出一项计划，让员工以化身的方式来使用微软Teams协作软件，朝着现实与虚拟相结合的混合办公方式迈出了第一步。

But the metaverse takes hybrid working a step further, and brings with it a host of thorny employment law issues. These range from practical challenges, such as how are employees paid, to more philosophical ones, like whether avatars have a legal identity. "The legal conundrums are about as diverse as the possibilities of the metaverse itself," says Jonathan Newman, managing associate at law firm Simmons & Simmons.

但是，元宇宙一方面推进了混合的工作方式，另一方面也带来了一系列雇佣法的棘手问题。例如从员工薪酬支付方式的这种实际问题，到虚拟化身是否有合法的身份等更加哲学的问题。西盟斯律师事务所（Simmons & Simmons）副总经理乔纳森·纽曼（Jonathan Newman）表示：“法律难题就像元宇宙本身的可能性一样多种多样。”

"Existing laws do not account for new paradigms being created in immersive technology," writes Brittan Heller, a technology lawyer and fellow at US-based think-tank Atlantic Council in a discussion paper published in 2020. "Many questions prompted by the new technology bring us beyond current frontiers of the law: How are scans of user data collected? How is the information stored? How often is the information updated? How long is data retained?"

美国智库大西洋理事会（Atlantic Council）的研究员兼技术律师布里坦·海勒（Brittan Heller）在2020年发表的一份讨论报告中写道：“现有法律无法适用于沉浸技术带来的新局面，现有法律无法解决新技术引发的许多问题，包括如何收集扫描的用户数据？如何存储信息？多久更新一次信息？数据保留多久？”

Nor do the laws that protect employees from harassment and discrimination map neatly on to a world in which users operate digitally. Holding an avatar accountable for acts such as harassment would mean attributing a legal persona to it so it could be sued or prosecuted.

保护员工免受骚扰和歧视的法律也没有充分适用于虚拟世界。如果要化身对骚扰等行为负责，那么就需要赋予该化身法律人格，这样才可以起诉或诉讼他。

In a blog post last year, Meta said the "metaverse won't be built overnight by a single company." But Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg has pledged to spend $10bn a year over the next decade on the metaverse, while other big tech groups are snapping at his heels.

Meta在去年的一篇博客文章提到：“元宇宙不会由一家公司在一夜之间建成。”但Meta创始人马克·扎克伯格（Mark Zuckerberg）承诺，未来十年将每年在元宇宙上投入100亿美元，其他科技巨头也不甘示弱。

Meta's blog acknowledged that the wait for the technology is "frustrating for those of us eager to dive right in, it gives us time to ask the difficult questions about how they should be built". Workers expected to inhabit the metaverse might be glad of that.

Meta在博客上承认，这项技术的发展是一个漫长的过程，“对于迫不及待想投入元宇宙的人来说，这是一种煎熬，我们需要在这段时间里思考一些复杂的问题，思考应该建立一个怎样的元宇宙。”那些期待加入元宇宙的员工会为此感到高兴。