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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.
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.
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.