Wian Erlank

• LLD
• Professor (Full) at North-West University

Transformative Property Law honours Professor AJ Van der Walt (1956–2016) – scholar, mentor, and teacher. As the first incumbent of the DST/NRF South African Research Chair in Property Law his primary research goal was to develop the theoretical foundations for the transformation of property law in post-apartheid South Africa. Covering topics that...

Originating as a submission made to the Department of Rural Development and Land Reform by the Centre for Constitutional Rights in 2011, this paper provides an overview of some of the main aspects and key features that stem from the Green Paper on Land Reform, 2011. Following the framework of the Green Paper, this article provides a brief commentar...

South African law draws a distinction between offers and invitations to treat. Although the intention with which a statement is made is usually cited as a controlling factor in determining its proper classification, there are a few cases in which the classification of a declaration into either an offer or an invitation to treat is done by rules of...

Elsewhere in "Rethinking Terra Nullius and Property in Space", I have argued that due to the changing circumstances of access to space by private entities rather than governments, the current legal situation with regard to ownership in space should be reconsidered. As it stands, ownership in space is governed by international law and currently priv...

Traditionally, objects were classified according to their relation to man or according to their own nature. The classical division according to their relation to man relates to the question of whether something is susceptible to private ownership or not. This aspect is of cardinal importance when it comes to objects in space. This results in the ne...

The fields of virtual property and property in space are both new areas of property law that could not have been envisaged a hundred years ago. In both of these new fields, things and other objects of property are located in places that have not previously been considered capable of harbouring property in the traditional sense. New technological an...

There you are at work / school / home / library / church (replace with anyplace else) trying to relax / sleep / concentrate / work / pray / think / mind your own business etc. and you hear either the Doppler effect of a car blaring its music and thumping its way past, or - even worse - trying to relax at home and some person in your neighbourhood s...

Elsewhere in "Rethinking Terra Nullius and Property in Space", I have argued that due to the changing circumstances of access to space by private entities rather than governments, the current legal situation with regard to ownership in space should be reconsidered. As it stands, ownership in space is governed by international law and currently priv...

This article serves as an introduction to the concept of virtual property and also to very briefly note the relevance of virtual property in modern society. A universally accepted definition of virtual property is hard to come by, but the paper will aim to provide some clarity on the issue. Virtual property is still property, and it still exists ev...

With a new era dawning with regard to access to space and an increase in the number of nations capable of reaching and exploiting space, the field of space law as a whole needs to be re-evaluated. One such area where current legal thinking needs to be examined is with regard to the property rights to objects in space. While it was sufficient in the...

There are a number of ways to explain how the property system in a virtual world works. Various explanations are proposed in this paper to explain this phenomenon. Some people argue that property in virtual worlds is purely based on contract and as such can be explained as merely licensing players to use the virtual worlds. Other explanations inclu...

This article serves as an introduction to the concept of virtual property and also to very briefly note the relevance of virtual property in modern society. A universally accepted definition of virtual property is hard to come by, but the paper will aim to provide some clarity on the issue. Virtual property is still property, and it still exists ev...

Originating as a submission made to the Department of Rural Development and Land Reform by the Centre for Constitutional Rights in 2011, this paper provides an overview of some of the main aspects and key features that stem from the Green Paper on Land Reform, 2011. While the Green Paper contains some excellent proposals and ideas, it is also extr...

In this paper I discussed a number of ways in which ownership of virtual property can be acquired inside of a virtual world and illustrated these with a number of examples from virtual worlds. In order to understand the procedure of acquisition of virtual property I briefly discussed how virtual world property based systems operate when they deal w...

In this article, I discuss the similarity between real (existing tangible) objects that one would buy and use such as books, CDs and DVDs, and their intangible counterparts found in digital form. For reasons more to do with vested interests, greed or a misapplication of intellectual property concepts – the natural development of and change in the m...

Many virtual worlds tend to mimic the real world when it comes to matters of dealing with governance of virtual worlds, power relations between government (developers) and subjects (users) as well as the property systems therein. This chapter investigates how this affects legal relations inside a virtual world, as well as outside - with special ref...

This work is a dissertation. However, it was written with the intention of disseminating it to the broad public and to be of use to academics, judges, legal practitioners, as well as the broad public. In due course a published book version will follow. This dissertation analyses and investigates how virtual property functions inside virtual world...

While the de facto situation in the past has been that online accounts are normally anonymous, or else possibly verifiable at the whim of the account creator; there has been no real need for, or attempt to be able to link an online identity to the identity of its creator in the real world. However, this has now changed and we are seeing that it is...

Before dismissing virtual worlds as ‘just games’, consider the fact that the trade in virtual property is estimated to run into billions of US Dollars every year. This is increasing at an almost exponential rate.

This paper was delivered as the introductory summary of the LLD thesis preceding the oral defence of his doctoral thesis Property in Virtual Worlds on 31 October 2012, in Stellenbosch, South Africa. The paper deals with the concept of property as applied in a virtual world as well as both the dogmatic and doctrinal questions that surround the accep...

The aim of this paper is to take an introductory look at acquisition of ownership inside a virtual world. A brief summary of the methods of acquisition of property in South African property law will provide the background against which to discuss the new field of virtual property and give it some real world context. In most instances ownership will...

This is a draft version of the paper and will be expanded on in due course. With a new era dawning with regard to access to space and an increase in the number of nations capable of reaching and exploiting space; the field of space law as a whole needs to be re-evaluated. One such area where current legal thinking needs to be examined is with regar...

Talle mense het al gehoor van speletjies soos World of Warcraft of die virtuele wêreld Second Life wat op die internet gespeel word. Min mense besef egter dat eiendom binne in sulke wêrelde besit kan word en dat daardie eiendom regte (geld) waarde in die regte wêreld het. Hierdie artikel poog om ʼn kort oorsig oor virtuele eiendom, sowel as die virt...

The article discusses virtual property in general and more specifically, the Dutch Runescape case. An argument is made that this case points to the beginning of legal acceptance of virtual property by Western courts as well as an illustration of the courts willingness to accept that virtual property could be classified as being a protectable object...

This paper gives a very brief introduction to the field of virtual property law and is aimed as informative help for the students who attended the lecture.Guest lecture given at the University of Maastricht, for the Masters’ level students in European property law on 12 October 2009. Please take further note that this is not a complete academic art...

This paper gives the reader a very quick oversight of the life of St. Augustine. It looks very briefly at the effect that his legacy has had on modern society. It attempts to help the student of St. Augustine find their way to some of the more well-known sources who deal with his life in the forms of biographies, and discuss their various methods a...

This research paper considers the general enforceability of Alternative Dispute Resolution Clauses (ADR) particularly in the context of Multi-Tiered Dispute Resolution Clauses (MTDRC) by courts in selected jurisdictions. It looks at the problem of enforceability in a legal-comparative perspective by comparing cases from various civil- as well as co...