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Online Gamer Wins Virtual Theft Lawsuit
ThePretender writes "A Reuters article details the story of (what I believe is) the first online-gaming lawsuit won regarding virtual theft, with a Chinese court ordering a game company to 'return hard-won virtual property to a player whose game account was looted by a hacker'. Apparently, the article feels the need to throw in that the RedMoon-playing gamer's looted booty included 'a make-believe stockpile of bio-chemical weapons' for some reason... 'I exchanged the equipment with my labour, time, wisdom and money, and of course they are my belongings,' said Li Hongchen (the gamer) and the courts agreed, ordering the game company to restore his bounty." We've covered earlier stages of this lawsuit in the past.
You'd think that theft of virtual property would already be pretty well established as a crime... it shouldn't make any difference whether the property is redeemable for real money or for entertainment. Theft of amusement fair tokens is the same as theft of vegas chips.
i would agree with you for the people that say gain 1 million gold in everquest and sell it on ebay. the article doesn't mention weather he was interested in selling or not or if sold items at all. in which case fine tax him! however he wasn't going after what the items are "worth" in real money he was going after basically a refund. he wasn't even asking for money for his time he spent (Which i believe a lot of americans would do). again the article doesn't mention these things. all it says is he spent approx. $1200 USD on playing the game and he wanted $1200 USD back.
However if you are nice enough to live in the US then the tax law does allow you to make money off your hobbies however i believe it is limited to $500
The guy may have made his(her?) point in a blunt, annoyed manner, but he made a very good point. Where do you draw the line between one set of data that represents a virtual possession, versus another set of data that has real-life value?
while not so much a issue now, It COULD be one in the future, one that could become a very serious issue. By making things legitimate now you advoid the issues that could come later
This is exactly what we have now - with US currency. Its not backed by any metal standard - it only has value because we think it does. I am curious as to what percentage of money used in transactions is "virtual", e.g. credit cards, wire transfers, etc. The only difference between money in a MMORPG and "real" money is that real money is backed up by a government as opposed to a private company with no real guarantees.
Ugh, where to start with this.
So, can a person sue Microsoft to restore all the word processing documents they have lost due to crashes? Can they sue Microsoft for the files lost when a web site is defaced due to an IIS bug?
This is a horrible analogy. If MS was able to restore a document, they would. But they didn't create the document, so if it is lost, how in the world can they bring it back? In an online game, the company creates the objects and therefore is able to restore them.
I think that this is progress. Many years ago, only the very wealthy could enjoy free time. Now a majority of people have free time to do with it what they want. You may not agree with how they use it, but I think you might be a little judgemental in this case. You really don't have the right to tell others what they should do with their free time.
This person chose their free time as being a game. They spend a lot of time getting the character up to a point and they just don't want to lose all that from the negligence of a company or some malicious external party. Just because something is virtual, doesn't mean it it is without value. I didn't think I would need to make that point on Slashdot. So you don't care about video games. You can replace it with anything you value and put a lot of time in to. Let's say you are at work and just finished a program for accounting that took two years. Someone hacks your site and you didn't back it up. The virtual thing with value is lost. I understand that a video game really doesn't effect other people and is not as important as the example above. But to that one person it represents time and money, and that is enough for it to have value. It is unfortunate that this had to go to court, but if it wasn't a valid case, he wouldn't have won (I know that all cases that are won aren't valid, but that is usually when it is someone with money and power, this is just some guy who plays a game).
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I hope to God that this doesn't cross over to any other countries because this sets a very bad precedent for online gaming services. Suddenly, the items in a game aren't an aspect of a [i]service[/i]. This is the court in China saying that the items are, for all intents and purposes, real and that players actually own them. God help the developers if they have to roll back a server and players decide to sue for "lost wages", or if a game is no longer profitable for them and they decide to terminate the service, or if they choose to ban anybody and effectively seperate them from their "property". The courts need to understand that the only group that has a legal reason to sue in these hacking cases (assuming that it was actually a hack and not just some idiot giving his password to the wrong person) is the game provider because the servers that belong to them and the network that belongs to them was compromised. The players have every right to quit and certainly could expect good customer service might restore stolen items, but the items are not real and they have no legal right to anything other than network access. This court ruling frightens me if it makes it to the US.
Regards, Ian
[quote] Just because something is virtual, doesn't mean it it is without value[/quote] No, but the player needs to actually own it and not just subscribe to it in order to have a legal right to that value. If you join a gym, you don't have the right to sell the equipment there. If a particular cycle that you like to ride is out of service one day, you don't have a right to any cash value that you might associate with your usage that day, and if someone steals the equipment in the gym you don't have a right to sue the gym for the value of that equipment. You subscribe to a service, the provider isn't selling you anything other than that service and possibly a client to play it with. Beyond that, they own everything.
Regards, Ian
That's assuming it was his data to begin with. Realistically, all this person pays for is access to a server, with the ability to use database records which are owned by the company who also owns the game. There's no other way to describe this; this person has never owned the character, or the character's items.
Of course, I'm sick of these arguments. They -are- just games, and you pay for the service tu use their servers, their database, and their game mechanics. That's all.