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Dutch Court Punishes Theft of Virtual Property
tsa writes "Last week, the Dutch court subjected two kids of ages 15 and 14 to 160 hours of unpaid work or 80 days in jail, because they stole virtual property from a 13-year-old boy. The boy was kicked and beaten and threatened with a knife while forced to log into Runescape and giving his assets to the two perpetrators. This ruling is the first of its kind for the Netherlands. Ars Technica has some more background information." In Japan, meanwhile, a woman has been arrested for "illegally accessing a computer and manipulating electronic data" after (virtually) killing her (virtual) husband.
I know I'll be taking an unpopular stance on Slashdot in saying this, but I think it needs to be said (not to say I'm correct, but rather that it's another view point).
I don't believe in imaginary property, but I do believe in virtual property. The distinction is, imaginary property is infinitely reproducible, like an mp3 file. When you can sell the infinitely reproducible, you have a license to print money. It probably would have much larger implications for the economy if all movies and music were suddenly digitally distributed. No physical media costs, no transport costs, no staff costs in shops. All of those people suddenly get cut out of the chain and have to find a new source of income. I'm not an economists, so I can't see the full effect of this ripple effect.
On the other hand, in an online game, you use a currency, and the items you possess have value. An admin of a game could infinitely reproduce these items, but to the player they still have a quantifiable cost and amount of work that went into obtaining or producing it.
This isn't a simple case of in-game theft; I think the lion's share of the verdict was more to do with the assault than the theft. The thing that bothers me most about this though isn't that it recognizes virtual property as real, but that it sets a very small precedent (I say small because the verdict wasn't entirely about the theft, but the assault) for national laws extending into online games. What next? Animal cruelty laws begin to extend to in-game creatures? People being charged with assault in the real world for attacking in a PvP area?
For legal purposes, I think online games should be defined as a foreign nation. No actual property or currency crosses the border into your real country of residence, since it all exists in game, and the Rules of Conduct or Terms of Service or whatever the game wants to call them should contain some clear-cut "laws" for that "nation".
Admit it. You post strawman arguments as AC so you get modded Insightful for refuting them, rather than Troll
Under this new Dutch ruling, I don't know. I hope they'll make an exception for when the game mechanics allow you to. In the Dutch case, the steal was not done by any programmed means for stealing, but just by putting a knife to someones body part and force them to use in-game give or drop. However, I'm not sure. We certainly have our share of I-don't-understand-the-internet-and-computers, Ted Stevens style judges.
Its not as if real money is any more tangible when its sitting in a bank account.
Good point.
Are things like wow gold really anything more than the electronic equivalent of gift certificates nowadays or banks that printed their own bank notes way back when?
Not "more". LESS.
Surely the theft of either of those would be taken seriously - I don't see why this should be any different.
Because you don't "own" your WoW account. Its not your "property" to start with. You are paying Blizzard for access to THEIR GAME. And according them, everything in your account is THEIRs.
So if blizzard decides X is too powerful or valuable or whatever they can, at their option, simply remove them from the game, or substitute another item, or change the parameters of the item, etc, etc. And you can't say squat. They can also simply 'ban' you.
The same simply isn't true of your bank account. Your bank can't just decide you aren't a customer, and close your account. Transfering your funds to another account, or perhaps even just "deleting" them.
So while we EXPECT the contents of our bank account to be treated as real property. We don't really expect the contents of our WoW account to be held to the same legal standard. And I'm not sure we WANT to.
If Blizz catches you cheating, and bans you, should you be allowed to sue them for "damages"?
so the kid was physically assaulted with a deadly weapon, but the court decided to charge the perpetrators for stealing the victim's Runescape items? is it just me or are the court's priorities just a little screwed up?
i'd much rather lose some virtual money/items than get stabbed or beat up. christ, the company that runs Runescape can just restore the the items back to the kid who was robbed. heck, they could just create new items to give to him. it's not like it costs them anything to make those items.
Thus spake Wikipedia -
Ooka Tadasuke (1677 - 1752) was a Japanese samurai in the service of the Tokugawa shogunate. During the reign of Tokugawa Yoshimune, as a magistrate (machi bugyo) of Edo, his roles included chief of police, judge and jury, and Yamada Magistrate (Yamada-bugyo) prior to his tenure as South Magistrate (Minami Machi-bugyo) of Edo. With the title Echizen no Kami (Governor of Echizen or Lord of the Echizen), he is often known as Ooka Echizen. He was highly respected as an incorruptible judge. In addition, he established the first fire brigade made up of commoners, and the Koishikawa Yojosho (a city hospital). Later, he advanced to the position of jisha bugyo, and subsequently became daimyo of the Nishi-Ohira Domain.
One of the most famous stories is called "The Case of the Stolen Smell" where he heard the case of a paranoid innkeeper who accused a poor student of literally stealing the fumes of his cooking by eating when the innkeeper was cooking to flavour his dull food. Although his colleagues advised Ooka to throw the case out as ridiculous, he decided to hear the case. The judge resolved the matter by ordering the student to pass the money he had in one hand to his other and ruling that the price of the smell of food is the sound of money.
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
In that case, perhaps we don't make "theft" of online property a crime, but we allow people to sue in tort for it. Tort has always been the great, equitable equalizer throughout history. Why not permit a suit to be filed in this case, too?
Be careful of slippery slope arguments here. I saw someone above say that treating WoW gold as real could lead to treating avatars as real people. Sure, it could conceivably lead to that result. However, consider this:
Coveting your neighbor's wife is not illegal. However, murder is. Are we not worried that allowing the ninth commandment of the Christian Bible to be broken will lead to allowing the seventh commandment (prohibition on murder) to be broken. It's silly, but conceivable. In fact, I think it is equally conceivable compared with the theft-and-avatar-murder analogy of the person above.
The only reason this presents any novel issue of law is the fact that this is done in a virtual world. We must determine what the nature of the virtual world is (i.e., whether actions in the virtual world count as "real" actions, where actions in the world take place in the real world, if they in fact take place at all, etc.).
Who would have jurisdiction in a case where someone from China plays WoW (say, a server in the US) and kills a Russian player. Which court has jurisdiction? The US, Russia, or China? I would posit that, as the old legal principle of equitable justice says, we should go with what is fairest to all parties involved.
In this case, we have a corporation that (likely) doesn't give a shit about what happened on their servers from a legal standpoint. Thus, we have a Chinese and a Russian player. Well, we (the US, and presumably most other countries) already have legal doctrines that determine where trials take place in international disputes.
I'm perfectly happy with a "theft of WoW gold" offense being merely a tort, not a crime.
If the contract/license you enter into with Blizzard when setting up the account doesn't waive your right to sue them for such an act (i.e., through a "revocation of service" or "waiver of claims in tort" clause), then you ought to be able to sue them.
Can you give me a good reason why you shouldn't be able to? Don't give me the hogwash about "it's their world." Without a license provision, estoppel should give you the right to sue them. The elements of estoppel are:
It seems to me that in this case, absent a license/contract provision, this would be a textbook example of estoppel.
i think that shows how skewed our culture's value system is.
it's considered worse for a teenage computer geek to hack into a business network our of curiosity, unintentionally impeding commerce for a few days (which the company analysts will claim has cost tends of millions of dollars in damages), than it is for someone to rape or murder another person. the legal punishment for non-malicious curiosity-motivated computer crimes are far worse than the sentences given to violent offenders.
this seems completely unbalanced to me. do most people really think non-malicious computer crimes (i'm not talking about spamming, spreading viruses, DDoS, etc.) are worse than things like rape/murder/assault/etc? it also seems like the courts treat financial damages to the corporate sector far more severely than murder & rape, the victims of which are usually the poor. what do other think about the relative severity of these different types of crimes?
It seems to me that if someone has given you their username and password, then you implicitly are entrusted with the authority to login and do the things that person can do. Including things like routine maintenance; creation and deletion of avatars.
Deleting someone's avatar when they don't want it to be done may be despicable, but if they gave the credentials, and failed to explicitly revoke the authorization, it seems the person's access was authorized...
C++ programmers (MMORPG programmers) will now have to think twice before they "delete" that person object.
Next thing we'll hear is about game operators being charged with a crime, due to deleting a character, or due to gold msysteriously disappearing from a player's inventory.
Not to mention the crime of failing to report amounts paid/exchanged in barter with the player on a 1099, when a player obtains or trades item with shops in the game.
Well, I didn't read the FA, but it sounds like this is probably more about the fact that these two assholes beat and robbed another boy. Even minus the theft, they'd still have been in trouble for assaulting someone, and virtual or not, they took that which did not belong to them.
It's a bit of a stretch to say, well, it should be taxed because a couple of bullies got charged with stealing it. And the actual crime here occurred in meatspace, not in the virtual environment.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
The typical legal standard for answering a question like that is "reasonability." I.e., would a reasonable person be induced?
In your soccer case, a reasonable person would not be induced. In the WoW case, it may actually be true that a reasonable person would be induced. That is precisely the reason we have a jury of peers--to answer as to what is reasonable.
The answers to the rest of your questions follow straight from this legal theory. I.e., would a reasonable person think a soccer ball kicked to them was theirs? Would a reasonable bridge player think the cards now belonged to them?
I mean, shit, I didn't even change the legal doctrine at all! You're proposing questions that have been answered by my estoppel doctrine for hundreds of years. Did you think the law never addressed these issues before? My extension into WoW doesn't rely on any modification of the estoppel doctrine.
As for your analogy to other games, it is possibly distinguishable on the same reasonability issue. I feel pretty safe saying that a reasonable person (as determined by a jury) would not think the tiles in Scrabble are theirs.
The issue is, as always, Would a reasonable person think that gold won in WoW belongs to them?
What do you mean no presence? And why would you focus on the virtual goods or currency itself? Why ignore the context?
Would you tell thousands of players of MMOs that their sense of fair play is misguided because players that use gold farming services and items bought with "real" currency don't have a "presence" in the real world?
What about how these gold farming services are provided? Does anyone actually know how its done? How do we know there isn't some sort of sweatshop set-up in some neighbourhood in Guangdong where the "farmers" toil at a desk with no worker's rights and no health plans of any sort and being paid a pitiful percentage of what's charged?
real money can buy real things
What does "real money" represent? It's a unit representation of our time and labour which we then exchange for goods and services. So just what do you think people going to gold farming services are buying? They are paying for time and labour of course! Just so they don't have to invest their own. How is the time and labour invested to get that certain mount or special weapon in an MMO "not real" in meatspace? Isn't it obvious why honest players are in uproar and how some brat teen doesn't want to work that hard?
As VoidCrow says, if you have a huge surplus of virtual currency, you can sell it for real currency. I'd say that qualifies for presence beyond the game itself. If it didn't, gold farming services wouldn't be profitable. I don't understand why you were modded up at all.
Most countries have (often quite recently) added hacker paragraphs to their criminal law which make deletion, manipulation or even plain access to somebody else's (private) data against their will an offense. Even if he gave her the password, he didn't want her to access his account anymore. Yes, it was stupid not to change the password (just like it is stupid to break up with a girlfriend and tell her to simply leave the key to your apartment you gave her in the mail box) - but stupidity is not a crime nor is the stupidity of the victim a good defense.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck