Legal Status and Accountability in Virtual Worlds: A Comparative Empirical Legal Study of Platform Control, Attribution, and Remedies

Virtual worlds combine contractual access, digital objects, and platform-controlled infrastructures whose legal treatment varies across relationships and jurisdictions. This comparative documentary study examines legal status, responsibility, and documented remedies in a purposive corpus of 233 conflict records across 16 jurisdictional labels, alongside 21 regulatory and contextual entries and 15 governance documents from eight platforms. Available sources support claimant-specific economic or restorative relief at the observed documentary stage in 79 of 233 records (33.9%); six further classifications remain unresolved. Their provisional inclusion yields 85/233 (36.5%). Source gaps and unresolved coding boundaries prevent final-case success or population estimates. Absence of documented relief does not establish absence of legal protection. Preserved labels from two coders for 58 cases yield raw agreement of 0.931 and Cohen’s κ = 0.854 for Material Remedy. This agreement does not validate later source amendments. Case-level platform control and three exploratory constructs failed the recorded agreement threshold and were excluded from quantitative comparisons. Doctrinal analysis separates contractual labels from public-law classification, formal identity from factual control, and entitlement from implementation. The eight-stage Virtual Worlds Legal Status and Accountability Framework is a qualitative decision aid requiring future independent validation.