Exempting a medium would create a space where known offences carry no consequence

The argument

A second argument for prosecution is institutional rather than moral. Criminal law is drafted in general terms precisely so that it does not have to be rewritten each time a new technology appears, and proponents point out that earlier media were brought within existing offences rather than left outside them: the law against fraud was not suspended because a deception arrived by telephone, and threats did not become lawful when they moved to email. Augmented reality, on this view, is the next such setting, and the default should be continuity. The alternative, proponents argue, is a declared exemption, and exemptions attract the conduct they exempt. If it were established that nothing done through an overlay could be charged, the behaviour the law most wants to deter would migrate there deliberately. A harasser who wished to follow someone persistently, a fraudster who wished to misrepresent goods in the buyer's own living room, or a group that wished to intimidate a household could do so knowing in advance that the criminal law had been switched off. Proponents hold that this is not a hypothetical cost but the predictable result of announcing a safe medium. They also argue that prosecution is what makes the rest of the system credible. Platform enforcement can suspend an account, but it cannot compel attendance, order compensation or mark conduct as wrong on behalf of the public, and an offender removed from one service can return under another name. Leaving the matter entirely to private moderation, on this account, delegates the response to serious harm to companies that owe the victim nothing. Applying ordinary offences to augmented reality keeps the ultimate sanction in public hands and signals that the setting changes the evidence required, not whether the conduct is permitted.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Opponents reply that continuity is not automatic: the earlier media carried messages between people, whereas an overlay generates an environment, and it is the environment rather than any message that is said to offend. They also question the migration claim, arguing that conduct serious enough to frighten or defraud a real person usually leaves the overlay and becomes an offence in its own right, so the supposed gap is narrower than it appears. Finally they argue that reaching for prosecution first understates what platform design can do, since a system that never lets a stranger attach content to another person's home removes the opportunity rather than punishing it afterwards.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The earlier examples all involve a message sent to a person, where the medium was incidental; an environment generated around someone is the harder case those precedents were never asked to decide. [Rejecting P2] Declining to invent new offences is not declaring an exemption, since conduct that frightens or defrauds a real person remains chargeable under its own name whatever display was used. [Rejecting P3] Private moderation is not the only alternative to prosecution: injunctions and damages are public remedies, available to the person affected and binding on the offender. [Rejecting C] Continuity cannot be assumed where the setting changes what the act consists of, and treating the question as settled by default forecloses the definitional work that extending liability actually requires.