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Gamer Killed For Virtual Property
The BBC has the story of a young Chinese man who was slain over a virtual property dispute. His killer has been sentenced to life imprisonment. The Guardian Gamesblog has a deeper look at the situation with Terra Novan Ren Reynolds. From the article: "We're becoming a service property marketplace. Is this as good as a manufacturing economy? It doesn't have the moral solidity in a way. You can kind of see that shift in ethical terms. People would think that stealing an album in a shop is immoral, but stealing an mp3 isn't. The idea of property has become more intangible."
"People would think that stealing an album in a shop is immoral, but stealing an mp3 isn't. The idea of property has become more intangible."
The key difference here is that the MP3 is copied, not removed. The original owner didn't lose his copy of the file / song when the other person took it, whereas in the case of the shop, the owner can no longer sell that physical media. The first is not viewed as theft becasue the owner doesn't lose it, where the second involves actually losing something. (Of course, if the MP3 was erased after it copied, that would be a different story.)
It was only a matter of time before a gsamer escalated and arguement to reality, and took it too far.
This guy had to have other issues besides just gaming, if he was willing to kill a man.
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>The idea of property has become more intangible.
er, no thanks.
this is about someone who killed someone else. the reason isn't too relevant and certainly doesn't demand redefining property.
The problem I have with this concept is that it doesn't have any firm basis, as far as I can tell. Manufacturing creates real value in the economy by mining raw materials or farming and providing for essential needs. Entertainment is completely tenuous and everyone can drop it as soon as money gets tight or as fashion dictates. It just seems that service economies could hit bigger highs but much more massive recessions, but I am not an economist and this is all just my impression of the whole thing.
How did a murder morph into a moral arguement on if digital "property" is as good as solid property? Dude's dead. Someone murdered him. That someone should get serious time or death for it.
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Neighbours shoot each other over fence posts , Wives kill husbands for working too much ,People kill each other over football games ,people kill themselves over exams ...
people some times take things far too seriously , so lets just hope people realise this and don't call for the banning of games due to the lunatic fringe who can't grasp reality
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
I imagine killing a man over an imaginary object makes the insanity plea a little easier.
I can only imagine the online chat for this...
OMG U stole my LEWTS!
No I didn't, you never gave me the full amount
I am going to PWN U
*BANG BANG*
what pisses me off about all the coverage of this that I've read...
I can't find ANYONE who'll say what the stats are on the damn sword. This is obviously the most critical bit of information about the story, and no one will report it.
1h? 2h? +9 for ogres? What?? GAH!
Obviously, there are some circumstances where such a killing would be perfectly understandable. Without the stats, how will we ever know?
m-
You catch enchiladas by picking them up behind the head and holding them underwater until they don't kick anymore -VeGas
Interestingly, "virtual" property seems to only be traded between someone in an economy with low wages to someone in an economy with high wages.
The value of the theft was about $850-900 USD. Guessing that you have to play for 40 hours to acquire the weapon, that makes the "wage" about $22 an hour (before taxes). For a buyer in a major American market (LA, New York Chicago) that could be easily be below his hourly earings; I imagine that Japan would be similar. For someone in China - even a major city like Shanghai - that is a significant sum of money. Average household income in Shanghai is less than $1,500 USD (11,718 Yuan in 2000). 40, 80 or even 160 hours of play for over a half year's income would be an incredible opportunity.
So the game item has no value. However, the difference in labor costs creates a value in the time spent to produce the item.
That's because stealing an album in a shop is immoral, but stealing an mp3 isn't. An album is a physical good; if I steal it from you you can no longer use it. An mp3 is what economists call a non-rival good; if I 'steal' it from you you may never notice and have not been harmed in any way, unless of course you believe in Marx's labor theory of value.
That last gives rise to my personal IP motto - 'intellectual property is Communism.'
"My son was only 26 when he died. He was sleeping when Qiu broke into his home. He was barely able to put his pants on before Qiu stabbed him," said his father, Zhu Huimin.
Well, thank god I sleep with my pants ON
1) Your analysis is based on bad assumptions so your result is way off. 2) You're a sick bastard for fucking a horse.
The article failed to mention that Qiu Chengwei scored a +5 critical hit when he stabbed Mr. Zhu in the chest.
It should also be mentioned that while Mr. Zhu's death was of course due to stabbing -- other factors included his low armor class and a failed saving throw.
Rumours are currently spreading that Mr. Chengwei was wearing +3 boots of stealth when he broke into Mr. Zhu's apartment giving him a distinct melee advantage.
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...We smoke'um Peace Pipe.
You insensitive clod! My grandmother died of lung cancer. No I will sue you and your casino owning relatives for introducing tobacco to the europeans.
I laughed at the weak who considered themselves good because they lacked claws.
Property rights are, fundamentally, the right to exclude. If you own something, you can exclude others from its use, if you can exclude others from something's use you own it. Laws which control the right to copy or transmit information, which is a prerequisite for using it, do indeed confer ownership over the information under any rational interpretation of "ownership" which is not a quasi-spiritual "Information must be free!" hacker aesthetic.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
It was a piece of virtual property, yes, but it was worth (and actually sold for) nearly $1000. By Chinese standards that's more than a family can save in a year.
The fact that it's just bits on a hard drive is irrelevant. Let's say that you wrote a novel on your laptop. Then let's say I copy it off your laptop (e.g., while you're in a meeting at work), put my name on it, and sell the rights to it for some $50,000. (So the monetary value is sorta in the same proportion to what you earn, as that virtual sword was for the Chinese guy.)
Wouldn't you think: "WTF? It was _mine_, not his! Who the fuck gives him the right to take and sell _my_ stuff?"
Now say you came to talk to me about it, and I basically told you "fuck off, sucks to be you, the money is mine now." Because that's what happened between those two people.
Now maybe you'd just gnash your teeth, decide to just hate me now and avoid the christmas rush, and control yourself enough to not commit manslaughter. But then realize that a lot of people don't have _that_ kind of self-control. People get into a homicidal rage for a lot less money every day.
And anyway, the fact remains, virtual or not, Person A took something owned by Person B, sold it, and pocketed the money. A lot of money. Very _real_ money. It wasn't over virtual property, it was over _real_ _money_. Period.
Now I can see how two-bit hack journalists would love to hammer on the "man killed over virtual sword in a game" idiocy. That's the kind of a crap sensationalist headline that sells subscriptions. Whereas "man killed over a shitload of real money" doesn't quite have the same edge.
But seeing the number of responses that treat it like some continuation of an in-game feud, completely ignoring the amount of _real_ _money_ involved, gets depressing at times.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
If the killer could have copied the virtual sword his friend "stole", he probably wouldn't have killed the guy. Having backups makes such thefts less damaging, so probably will reduce the violence associated with propery transfers. People get violent upon property loss, which is less necessary with virtual items. But of course no mass media corporation is going to use an event like this to evaluate our disporportionate value of property over human life. Even when the theft and murder are committed in Communist China.
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make install -not war
Cutting hair and painting houses are services, not objects. If you don't pay for a service, the barber or the painter are deprived of the time they could have been working for someone else.
If you must moderate, please moderate as irrelevent, not something bad, because I'm sure someone will find this interest
FALSE.
You'll find court cases cited in the second half of my post, but first I'll just give general coverage of the subject in my own words.
Whether we look at copyright or patents or trademarks, the law NEVER grants "ownership" of the information entity itself. It is the legal copyright rights which are owned, not the work itself. It is the legal patent rights which are owned, not the invention itself. It the legal trademark rights which are owned, not the word or mark itself. And in every case the law only grants limited monopoly rights, never complete and exclusive control.
All such rights initially and fundamentally lie with the public. To the extent you can call information "property", it is fundamentally public property.
Copy rights, patent rights, and trademark rights are NEVER granted for the rights-holders benefit. They CANNOT be cranted for the rights-holder's benefit. The public collectively chooses to LOAN those rights to the rights-holder for the public's own benefit. The Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that any benefits or profits to the rights-holder is merely a means to an end, merely a side effect. That the only legally valid purpose for taking such rights from the public and giving them to the rights-holder is for the public's own benefit. Copyrights are a temporary limited bundle of rights as an incentive for an author to create and publish. Patents are a temporary limited bundle of rights as an incentive for an inventor to create and public. Trademarks exist so that the public will not be decieved about who they are doing business with, to encourage businessed to develope a good reputation and for the public to be able to rely on that reputation. Trademarks do not have a time limit, but they only remain valid so long as they actually *are* valid, unique, and useful identifiers in the mind of the public.
There are many many court cases I could cite backing all of this up. One of the best explanations of copyright law and the history of copyright law and the specific issue of "ownership of the information" vs "ownership of the copyright" can be found in SUNTRUST v HOUGHTON MIFFLIN, 2001. I encourage you to read the entire ruling, but I'll paste the most signifigant portion below:
The natural law [theory of] copyright, which is not a part of our system, implied an ownership in the work itself...
This has an important impact on modern interpretation of copyright, as it emphasizes the distinction between ownership of the work, which an author does not possess, and ownership of the copyright, which an author enjoys for a limited time. In a society oriented toward property ownership, it is not surprising to find many that erroneously equate the work with the copyright in the work and conclude that if one owns the copyright, they must also own the work. However, the fallacy of that understanding is exposed by the simple fact that the work continues to exist after the term of copyright associated with the work has expired. "The copyright is not a natural right inherent in authorship. If it were, the impact on market values would be irrelevant; any unauthorized taking
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.