Cristiana Falcone is an advisor and member of the Related Parties Committee as well as the Sustainability Committee at TIM. She discusses new legal issues in NFT/Metaverse. NFT (Non-fungible tokens) are certificates of authenticity and ownership of real-world property. The Metaverse, however, is the future of the internet. Tech and academic communities know the challenges these technologies pose to legislators.
Cristiana Falcone, a recently published interview on the internet, commented on Meta, Facebook’s Metaverse. She highlighted its unique characteristic of being “a collective project open to all” and “powered by the company’s products and services”. With the goal of “developing technologies to help people connect, communities develop, and businesses grow”, Mark Zuckerberg estimates that it will take around 10 years to migrate the entire world wide web into the Metaverse he created.
Cristiana Falcone says that it will likely take as many years to create solid legal foundations for freedom of expression, privacy and transparency for consumers, fairness, and inclusion in the Metaverse, and she is still trying to figure out which rules to use.
We are pursuing this innovation.
NFTs have raised many legal issues in just a few months. Cristiana Falcone states that the complexity of smart contracts and blockchain technologies makes it difficult for consumers to get accurate information about the products or services they purchase. Artists and companies also don’t have this ability. They are not aware of their rights and obligations. Today, NFTs transpose old legal schemes, particularly regarding cybercrime, such as the application of Directive 5 and 231/2007 to money laundering through NFTs trading. Some of the old legal systems are not sufficient to protect intellectual property or consumer rights. For example, the right to withdraw is lost because of incompatibility of the product technology. Once a digital product is purchased through an NFT platform there is no way to end the contract or return it.
The European Union has been working for the past year on new rules to protect the digital world. These rules are primarily aimed at correcting distortions caused by power concentration in a few large players. Cristiana Falcone says, “Let’s ask ourselves, whether the legislator has the tools to legislate about an innovative, yet consolidated, and technically complex phenomenon in order to safeguard the Metaverse” Unlawful use of the Metaverse can lead to perverse digital behavior. But laws must be made to protect democracy’s basic rights without penalizing innovation, prosperity, and the growth and employment of new businesses.
Legislators should not hinder the buying and selling of NFTs or services/products within the Metaverse. However, proper regulation should be established to ensure their ethical and sustainable development. This will shift the legal issue from corporate governance to corporate governance. Cristiana Falcone says that the latter will have to be focused on technological barriers. This is because these technologies are constantly changing and creating new legal issues. We are grateful to Cristiana Falcone. You can view a brief biography on her LinkedIn profile.
Cristiana Falcone is a professional with more than 20 years of experience in the elaboration and implementation of business partnerships. She has worked with leaders from multinational companies (SONY Shell, Revlon), interacted with international governmental organizations (UNDCCP and IADB) as well as operated in the media (Radio Televisione Italiana Gruppo Espresso Univision, Viacom).
She was the head of the Media, Entertainment, Information, and Sports section at the World Economic Forum in 2004 and became Senior Advisor to the Executive Chairman and founder. This gave her the responsibility of developing innovative products and services and the assessment of geopolitical risks associated with emerging technologies.
She has been the CEO and Board member for the JMCMRJ Sorrell Foundation since 2006. This foundation promotes innovative global initiatives in education, health, and poverty reduction in order to reach the UNSDG goals. She is a board member of TIM, the Paley Center for Media and Internews. Internews, Tufts University’s cultural and editorial project Formiche, and the Summit Institute are also among her responsibilities.
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