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Virtual Land, Real Court, Real Money
Wired is reporting on what may be a first: a real world court appearance over a virtual land claim. From the article: "The attorney, Marc Bragg of West Chester, Pennsylvania, says game developer Linden Lab unilaterally shut down his Second Life account, cutting off his access to a substantial portfolio of real estate and currency in the virtual world. He's demanding $8,000 in restitution. Bragg claims Linden Lab froze his account after a land deal went bad. The attorney said he found a legitimate way to purchase land at prices far below market rates, using an online auction on the Second Life website."
So, my wife just heard about second life last night... and wants to get online playing it. I have started researching it a bit today. Second life is very different than the MMORPGs I have played in the past. Second life encourages you to buy land and buy money, with real currancy. Interestingly enough, they also seem to respect your IP rights, for items you bring into the game. I think that the fact that you can convert real money into virtual assets will put this guy in the winner's circle... assuming the judge will understand any of it. :-)
I think THIS is the reason that the other MMORPGs keep you FROM buying items with real money.
That ignores the real issues.
The issue at hand is whether crafting a URL is "hacking" or if the subsequent results of typing a hand crafted URL that the creator didn't intend you to type can form the basis of a binding contract or not.
(BTW- Second life isn't a MMORPG, it's a 3D development platform in the form of an interactive social world)
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
How is this hacking? He merely changed the URL, which is somthing I do every day because I come accross broken links and stuff.
An equivalent real world scenario is that an action house was setting up for an auction in an unmarked building. A person heard that they were setting up for an auction and went there to see if he could get in on the action early. The auctioneer is an idiot, and starts the auction even tho only 1 person is in the room and sells stuff to him for stupid low prices.
This guy was being sneaky, but it looks to me like he did nothing wrong to obtain this land. I think at most they should have taken away the land and refunded him the price, NOT frozen his account and taken all his other money.
What if one of the bank's ATMs was giving out extra money whenever someone used it, and because you realized that and used it over and over again they take ALL your money, not just the money it gave you in error.
changing price tags at Home Depot and then being like "well, the price tags come off, so you need to sell me this $1299 BBQ for $199."
Seems more like taking the the price tags off, then going to the cashier and saying - "I think this should cost $199 - do you agree?" and the cashier agrees, rings it up and lets you leave with the BBQ. Then a week later Home Depot comes by your house and tries to reposses the BBQ.
It takes two to tango, in this case the seller agreed to the selling price. They have a responsibility to refuse transactions that they don't want to accept. Saying that the sale was automated and thus not subjected to sanity checks ought not be a sufficient defense.
If you want the benefits of automated sales without the risks, it ought to be up to the seller to implement effective precautions. No e-commerce developer with even half a claim to competence would allow the price of a product to be determined by the contents of the URL submitted to the webserver - unless they wanted to on purpose (c.f. cd-wow, they've got a bunch of different URL's to their site and depending on which one you use, you'll see variations of up to a couple of dollars in their prices).
They do have PVP, sort of. There are certain areas of the world where you can die.
Part of the problem, though, is that you can create your own objects. So you can build missiles that never miss, and the like, for little to no cost.
I happen to know someone who created an object that warped to a random location in the zone it was deployed in, sprayed a hundred 'grenades' in every direction, and warped to another point in the zone, and did the same, over and over again, about once a second. Everyone in the zone was dead in under a minute, and the zone server came to its knees.
People were pretty pissed.
Since they're saying the plots of land have a "for sale" sign posted in game with the lot's ID, it would seem to me to be more like you are having a garage sale. You start writing a sign for the monitor, "For Sale $1" when you are called away by the spouse to kill a spider. You intended to finish writing "$100." And the monitor is sitting in the foyer connecting your garage to the house. You left the door open when you went on the spider job.
Someone comes along, sees the sign (not exactly in the garage), leaves a dollar, and grabs the monitor. The sign is there. It is viewable by the public indirectly. This guy just got in on the sale early. Thoughts?
I think sirwired hit it for the analogy. The normal procedure was bypassed to complete the sale. Though, the counter argument to this would be that the guy in the article did, in a manner of speaking, use the normal procedure (This is where the analogy starts to break down). So the question becomes, is it valid to utilitze an automated system to buy something, before the seller intends for that system to be used? Since there was not a public posting of the sale, I think it would be a safe assumption that there was no intention to sell, at that time, and so that invalidates the claim that the seller had made an affirmative action to sell something. Of course, that is going to hinge on the question of, if they had set the item to auctionable in their database, is that an affirmative action? I have a feeling that this is probably going to be one of those times were the courts are going to have to look at the implications of both answers and try to rule in a way to protect society from the consequences. If we allow this type of action it is going to create a huge burden on sellers to make sure that everything is completly locked down. On the other hand, invalidating sales where the buyer figured out the system and circumvented it does not seem to create a burden.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Laziness is the father.
I tend to have balanced views on most things, and this is no exception.
Being 'balanced' in saying something banal like "both sides were at fault" doesn't make your assertion correct.
If I create a virtual world and I give you permission use it, and - if you want to - to resell items created in it for real money and make it clear I can take it all away if I feel like it at any time, that's my right and I've done nothing wrong. If you don't like it, take your business elsewhere and should not use the software. That is the stance LL take and it's made very clear.
How US law might view this is completely irrelevant to whether it was actually right or wrong, because ethically it was 100% wrong.
No it's not, LL can do this at any time they feel like it and customers are informed before they signup, in fact they are required to indicate they have specifically read and accepted the terms of service before they use the software. You did read Section 2.6 didn't you?