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Julian Dibbell has a piece on the LegalAffairs site exploring the possibility that MMOG transactions could be taxed. From the article: "June 2003. I set myself the following challenge, posting it on my web log for the world to see: 'On April 15, 2004, I will truthfully report to the IRS that my primary source of income is the sale of imaginary goods--and that I earn more from it, on a monthly basis, than I have ever earned as a professional writer.' In the course of this project, I made a total of $11,000 selling on eBay the items I won playing a game called Ultima Online, $3,900 of which was in the final, most profitable month. I reported my profit to the IRS, and I paid the requisite taxes. But after I did so, a troublesome set of questions continued to nag at me--for which even IRS publication 525, entitled 'Taxable and Nontaxable Income,' couldn't provide answers."

nicholast writes "There's a really smart story in the current issue of Legal Affairs Magazine about granting legal recognition to computers: when that might happen, why it could happen, and what a discussion about it will teach humans about themselves."

Jonathan Zittrain, director of Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet & Society, takes an unusual approach to critiquing copyright in this Legal Affairs article. He explains with an analogy to the bizarre patchwork of United States tax codes a reason that (in the words of one of Zittrain's colleagues) "all the cyberprofs hate copyright." It goes beyond simple indignation that current copyright laws often grant seemingly unfair monopoly powers, and into the tangled minutia of the laws themselves.

Thanks to Legalaffairs.org for their new article called 'To Kill An Avatar', discussing lawmaking in online worlds. Although this is an often-explored subject, some interesting examples come up, such as a case in which "..an avatar [in virtual world There] put up a 'For Sale' sign in front of a house that he didn't own.. the scam artist collected some serious Therebucks (the currency of There) before the creators of the world discovered what was afoot and took corrective action." The article concludes without much hope of resolution: "You could make a virtual world without the possibility of crime - but it would probably be about as dynamic as Pong or Tetris.. by creating virtual lives, investments, and freedoms, we create the conditions for virtual crime."