The harm reaches a real person, so the medium should not matter

The argument

Proponents of prosecution begin from what the criminal law is for. Offences such as harassment, threat, fraud and indecent exposure are defined by the interest they protect: a person's safety, property, reputation or peace of mind. They are not defined by the tools used to attack that interest. On this reading augmented reality is a delivery mechanism rather than a separate moral realm, and the question is simply whether a real person has been subjected to conduct the law already forbids. Augmented reality is said to make this especially clear, because it anchors virtual content to actual locations and actual bodies. A persistent overlay attached to someone's home, workplace or face is not a private fantasy; it is addressed at that person and, in shared systems, displayed to everyone who passes. Proponents argue that a threat a target reads while standing on their own doorstep lands with the same force whatever rendered it, and that the fear, humiliation or financial loss which follows is not virtual at all. The victim cannot escape it by closing an application, because the content is tied to the places they have to occupy. From there the argument is that the law should follow the harm rather than the format. If prosecutors had to show that an act occurred in physical space, then conduct the law would punish on a street becomes lawful once it is layered over that street, and the protection a person enjoys depends on which medium their harasser happens to choose. Proponents conclude that treating augmented reality as exempt would leave real injuries without remedy for no principled reason, and that the ordinary course is to apply existing offences to the new setting and let courts judge, as they always have, whether the conduct in question met the threshold.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Critics answer that the analogy does work the argument has not earned. What happens in an overlay is an image, and the law has generally been reluctant to treat a representation as the act represented; on that view the proper response to a frightening or offensive overlay is to remove it, not to prosecute. They add that the practical questions are unresolved: which jurisdiction applies when the parties are in different countries, how intent is proved against a designer rather than a user, and what counts as the location of an act that exists only in a rendered layer. Until those are settled, critics argue, extending criminal liability invites inconsistent charging and treats serious offences and tasteless pranks under the same heading.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Offences are defined by the protected interest and by conduct, and the conduct element has always included some act in the world; dropping it leaves only the interest, which no legal system has been willing to protect against images alone. [Rejecting P2] Anchoring content to a place does not put it there: the overlay exists in the viewer's device, and a person who does not run the software is not reached by it at all. [Rejecting P3] The asymmetry is a feature of how offences are drafted rather than an arbitrary gap, and the remedy for a drafting gap is legislation defining the new conduct, not prosecution by analogy. [Rejecting C] At most it follows that augmented reality can be the instrument of an existing offence, not that a distinct category of crimes committed in augmented reality should be prosecuted.