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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."
The guy exploits a bug, gets his account shut out, and is expecting money?
"Without merit" indeed.
I'm so glad. So very glad my life doesn't amount to caring about virtual land. It's so nice out today.
"It'll destroy you if you try to make it mean anything to anyone but yourself." - Henry Rollins
In short, dude doesn't have a case. But he does have a great deal of free publicity.
Dude, I think I can see my house from here.
Use an exploit in the real world and they don't shut down any accounts, they shut down your LIFE. You don't have the right to sue for damages or loses while you're in prison either. He should consider himself lucky he isn't being criminally prosecuted for electronic fraud or something like that.
Here's how it worked.
You could find land in-world that was marked for auction but hadn't gone up for auction yet. It had the auction ID on the parcel info.
You could then go to the auction web site and change the GET variable in an auction URL to point to the not-yet-existing auction, which would come up with a minimum bid of $0, rather than the normal $1000.
His case hinges on one you hand typed this crafted URL, it says "Be the first to bid in this auction, bid at least $1"... he claims that this formed a binding offer of sale.
The "exploit" was trivial, but it was obviously not the intent of Linden Lab to sell the land for a minimum bid of $0.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
I don't know much about Second Life (still trying to figure out the first one) but if it's already a video game, Linden should be able to put together a little PVP system that lets anyone with a dispute like this take it into the Thunderdome. Two avatars enter, one avatar gets deleted.
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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).
Sure, they DO respect your IP rights. But you have to abide by the terms of service. He exploited the system and violated those terms. He won't win this one. Same as if he cheated a real auction.
BTW, this is off-topic, but if you wife is even a little squeemish on the porn front, she's going to want to join the teen server. It's porn/bdsm heaven out there in the rest of the world. (I didn't join the teen server, but I hear they are pretty serious about keeping it clean.)
I was also very interested in creating items in game, but just like real life, having a storefront is location, location, location and getting your items in front of people that will buy them isn't all that easy.
In short: Don't invest much money until you are SURE you have a handle on the whole business.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
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?
Linden may be morons for making their auction system easy to exploit, but in the same way companies aren't liable for misprints in ad fliers, and companies can cancel obviously broken sales (like when an airline website accidently sells flights for $.02; the airline can cancel those sales, though usually they don't for PR reasons), Linden isn't obligated to honor a contract which the guy games the system to secure.
Dude, I think I can see my house from here.
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.
Nope. Linden Labs can take the property back, no problem, or at least have the virtual "contract" voided. This is because there was no "meeting of the minds" when the contract was executed. If I, by mistake, offer to pay $1000 for a Billy Joel CD, when really I left out the decimal point and meant to offer $10.00, there is no obligation for me to actually pay that much money for something clearly worth much less.
They go over this in Business Law 101.
In this case, Linden Labs didn't mean to have the land up for sale at all, so no contract to buy it can possibly be valid, even if it was possible to trick Linden's computer systems into thinking it was up for sale. Now, if Linden Labs had taken some affirmative step to place the land up for sale, there might be an argument, since the value of the "land" is so difficult to determine.
If we want to torture the "Home Depot" analogy some more: The guy grabbed $3000 worth of lumber, got a cashier drunk, and then convinced him to ring it all up for $30. That's theft, no matter how you slice it.
SirWired
I am a lawyer, but this isn't legal advice.
In this case, there pretty clearly isn't a contract with offer and acceptance. The offer is made when the land is actually put up for auction *by the seller*.
The case is a clear enough loser (and a good example of the "fool for a client" principle) that the only way that a lawyer *could* take it would be in a "good faith effort to *change* the law."
hawk, esq.
Bad example. Are you really familiar with the details of case or just the strawman version popular among those in favor of tort reform? McDonald's sold the woman a beverage that, by their own admission is "not fit for consumption" when handed it to a customer. They sold their coffee far hotter than just about anyone else. They had been repeatedly warned about their coffee and serious burns had happened before. This wasn't a woman dangerously mixing drinking coffee and driving; she was a passenger in the vehicle in question. The woman originally contacted McDonald's and only asked for McDonald's to cover her medical expenses. Only when McDonald's refuse did she turn to a lawsuit. Even then she asked for a relatively small amount of money (on the order of $200,000; a reasonable amount considering she had many thousands of dollars of medical bills and now a lawyer's bills). The rest of the judgement was punitive damages assigned by the jury when they learned that how negligent McDonald's was. This wasn't someone greedily trying to get free money. This was a 79-year-old woman trying to cope with sudden large medical bills because McDonald's had sold her a dangerously hot beverage.
A good summary of the facts of the case.
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