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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."
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).
I think a better example using your ATM motif would be what if you took your ATM card and changed the mag-strip to give it a new account number and due to an oversight in the system it allowed you to take money out anyway. Should you be able to sue the bank when they freeze your account? Or should you be going to jail for fraud?