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Is Online Property Real? Lawyer Says Sort-Of
Bob the Super Hamste writes "The St. Paul Pioneer Press is reporting on an analysis by lawyer Justin Kwong in the William Mitchell Law Review about virtual property and ownership. Justin Kwong asserts that virtual items are not real items (PDF) and that you do not own them but only have a license. The analysis stems from a 2008 case of a Blaine, MN man who filed a police report for the online theft of approximately $3800 of virtual goods. Justin Kwong compares virtual items to a mug club at a bar where patrons purchase rights to a specific numbered mug but cannot remove the mug from the premises. He does note that if in game items are purchased there needs to be clear language stating: 'the transaction is a license, not a sale, and that traditional consumer protections afforded by sales of goods do not necessarily apply.'"
Justin Kwong also made a weblog entry responding to misconceptions expressed in comments on the St. Paul Pioneer Press article.
Participating in an online came could be taken as an agreement to abide by the rules of that game, including those governing means of taking one's property. In which case it could only be counted as robbery by any stretch if a person used means outside of the game rules - ie, cheating. Plenty of ways to do that, from credential-theft to DoSing the opposing players in PvP. Fraud perhaps as well, but only if it takes place outside of the accepted rules of the game - there are some games (EVE is famous for it) where dodgy dealing is part of the appeal, and in-character con artist considered a perfectly legitimate career choice and endorsed by the game operators.
According to the example given, I'd also have to conclude that land is not real property either. After all, I cannot just take my land and put it elsewhere.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
So I'm playing an FPS and I have an average sniper rifle. I then (virtually) knife my teammate and take his above-average sniper rifle.
Have I just stolen from my teammate? Should our tax money be spent to fund my prosecution for a crime? Should our tax money be spent to enable his lawsuit against me? What remedies do my "property rights" afford me in the law?
Property isn't really property without an enforcement right connected to it.
All the money I have in the bank and my 401K ... is ... well, ... "virtual".
Research shows that 67% of those who use the term "research shows", are just making shit up.
If you lose a virtual item to "virtual theft" you appeal to the people running that game, not the police. There are no virtual police, and likewise, the virtual police can not come into the real world and arrest people for trolling.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. indymedia
Actually you are correct. Because Land is actually not owned by you but by your government. your DEED is not to the land but a use of that land.
Your local city/county/state/country holds true ownership of your land.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Actually you are correct. Because Land is actually not owned by you but by your government. your DEED is not to the land but a use of that land.
Your local city/county/state/country holds true ownership of your land.
As with all hard questions, the answer is actually "it depends".
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That's the reason for "sort of". When the answer is cut and dried there's no need for lawyers.
What are you talking about? Freehold land IS owned by you.
The GP is talking about eminent domain. When the government can decide that your land would be better used as a shopping mall and can force you off, you can't claim that you own your land.
Given the recent SCOTUS decision on Kelo vs City of New London, there is definitely no such thing as private land ownership in the US.
The difference between real property (objects) and intellectual "property" (information) is that physical objects cannot be used by arbitrary people at the same time. Therefore it is of vital importance to have rules telling who has the right to use which object at which time. The concept of property is one, very successful, way to do this. However, intellectual "property" does not share this characteristic. There's nothing stopping some person in China to listen to the very same song you currently listen to at the very same time. Nor is there something stopping some African to use the very same idea to make things as you do. That is, unlike physical objects, information has no intrinsic restrictions on use which need to be regulated.
In your example, if someone takes the book you are currently reading in, you cannot continue reading this specific book. On the other hand he cannot read that very book unless he has it. Thus your interests of reading that specific book conflict, and therefore there have to be rules which tell who has the right to have that book. However, no such restrictions hold for the text in the book. If you can read the text in your book, he can still read another copy of the same text in another copy of the book.
The property concept is made for things with naturally exclusive use, which is why you need exclusive rights for their use. The intellectual property concept tries to use basically the same rules for something which doesn't have the natural property of exclusive use.
And no, the concepts are not the same just because both are legal constructs. Otherwise you could say that capital punishment and community service are the same because they are both punishments.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
According to the example given, I'd also have to conclude that land is not real property either. After all, I cannot just take my land and put it elsewhere.
The point is that the mugs only exist as long as the bar exists, the moment World of Warcraft shuts down all your "virtual property" will cease to exist but your land will not. One of the essential points of a sale as opposed to a license or service or subscription is that the item is permanently transferred into your possession and if the seller should disappear in a puff of smoke immediately afterwards, you still have your item. That is clearly impossible with "virtual property", so how can you really sell it? That doesn't mean it doesn't have value, we have plenty crimes like theft of service that deal with taking non-tangible goods. It's just a matter of what laws would be appropriate to use.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
The difference between real property (objects) and intellectual "property" (information) is that physical objects cannot be used by arbitrary people at the same time.
I'm leasing space on a web server. This server is used by over 1,000 people at once, and at any one time, it's serving pages from several different customer's sites to several viewers. So is a server not property?
The difference between real property (objects) and intellectual "property" (information) is that physical objects cannot be used by arbitrary people at the same time. Therefore it is of vital importance to have rules telling who has the right to use which object at which time. The concept of property is one, very successful, way to do this. However, intellectual "property" does not share this characteristic. There's nothing stopping some person in China to listen to the very same song you currently listen to at the very same time. Nor is there something stopping some African to use the very same idea to make things as you do. That is, unlike physical objects, information has no intrinsic restrictions on use which need to be regulated.
Sorry, but that's not so clear. That's true for a song or idea, but there is in fact a limited number of certain "digital artifacts."
Items in an MMORPG are a clear example: I can copy the bits that make up the representation of a certain object (let's say a sword), but that's not the actual object; it's akin to taking a photography of something.
In reality, short of hacking the server (which is illegal by itself, for obvious reasons), there's no way that I can use someone's "digital sword" without depriving the other person of it.
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When de watah rises mon- ye land in the islands will be gone too.
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If I shoot you with a paintball gun to distract you while you're trying to steal a base, is that a criminal matter, or a civil matter, or a gameplay matter?
Why would those be mutually exclusive? If I break your leg in a way totally unrelated to the game I'd expect criminal assault charges, a civil tort and an immediate expulsion from the game.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
What about your money? In principle the government could at any time declare that the bank notes you carry in your bag are no longer money (if you think this is a purely theoretical issue: The Russian government at one time did exactly this with the 100 rouble note in order to fight inflation). Yes, the physical item would still be in your pocket, but it would not be money any more, just a worthless piece of paper (except possibly for collector's value). So do you own that money?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Actually the property (a CPU core) is only being used by one person at a time, it just cycles very rapidly between them.
Hyperthreading.
Same for memory or disk space: each sector can only be used by one person at a time.
The compcache project aims to compress disk cache and swap files, as a modern-day spiritual successor to Connectix's RAM Doubler: "With compcache at hypervisor level, we can compress any part of guest memory transparently - this is true for any type of Guest OS (Linux, Windows etc.). This should allow running more number of VMs for given amount of total host memory." If data from multiple hosting accounts gets compressed into the same sector, then multiple people are using that sector.
Or to put it another way: Multiple people can be watching the same TV set showing the same movie at once. Therefore, a disc with a movie on it is not property. What did I miss?
The same way you do in a real world sport, every game would have its own boundaries based on the rules, normal behavior and context. If you enter a boxing tournament there's different rules from a football or golf tournament. Obviously if burglary or being a pickpocket is part of the game, then stealing your shit is fair game. Hacking your account is clearly not part of the game and illegal. Fraud, well there is no crystal clear line of fraud but there isn't one in the real world either. And yet the world managed to work it out fine before the Internet.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
You can buy a box of pencils and sell them on the street corner one by one.
Not without a permit.
"If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear." - Every fascist, ever
You make it sound easy, but the line can get blurry the more complex the game gets. Take Eve Online, people have been running pyramid schemes and other frauds in that game. Is such a fraud real or just part of the game? Even in sport the line can get blurry, as not every foul, is just a foul, sometimes it might be a case of battery if it gets to extreme to be considered part of the game.
In most cases you will of course have a clear distinction about what is part of the game and what is not, like stealing things from the game character is ok, stilling the account password probably not. But with all the Facebook and Twitter integration I expect the lines between "game-action" and "realworld-fraud" to get a good bit more blurry.
Another interesting thing with these cases: The game developer has an undo switch. So while a fraud might be real, the damage is not and can be undone by the developer without much problems in most cases. But the developer is a third party that neither had the damage nor did commit the fraud, can a law force him to roll back a character or give equipment back?
Try a little experiment for me, please:
1. Commit a serious crime. Make sure everyone knows it was you.
2. Retreat to your freehold land. Order the police not to come in and arrest you. Try to look smug. It's your land, after all.
3. After the police send a swat team in and hit you with a taser in, try to sue the arresting officers or police department for trespass. See how far you can get.
4. Bonus points: When they come to arrest you, defend your land with lethal force. See how that turns out.
Whatever the legal situation says, the true owner of land is always the government - because they have Men With Big Guns to enforce the law. The only exception I can think of would be regions with no functioning government, when the land is owned by whoever can afford the Men With Big Guns to guard it.
It's technically feasible to have a virtual world with property owned by the users. But it's not as profitable.
No one has yet built a distributed virtual world on the scale of Second Life. I'm surprised this hasn't been done in some place like Singapore, where there are a lot of high-bandwidth end users. Conceptually, you could have a system where a DNS-like service handles "land allocation", so that activity relative to some area is sent to the owner of that area of land. Each landowner then runs the server for their area.
Movable objects, including avatars, would be digitally signed by their owners. They could be made unique but transferable, if desired, by using something like the Bitcoin block chain, which catches attempts to "double spend". (Bitcoin is an failed financial system but a useful technology.)
Technically, this could work, but it's not easily monetized. And, technically, a virtual world will work better if all the servers have really high bandwidth server farm backbone connections between them. Distributed, it's going to suffer from lag.
Are we going to devote our tax dollars to litigation over a disupte over whether a person wrongfully put a spell on another player's avatar, thereby causing that other player damage?
Probably not. Police and prosecutors already ignore a lot of petty crime. Just look at the slashdot read example of email hacking. Unless you are someone important, they will probably just take a statement and then not bother looking into it. Same thing with small scale thefts. Even having your car stolen (happened to me a while back) they will take a statement but not actually invest andy resources into it unless, again, you are someone or are part of a group that gets better service.
So within this context, I would wager that they would not do anything with such a case unless there was significant money/publicity involved (such as a tournament) or the victim was someone famous and thus has some political pool.
Your local city/county/state/country holds true ownership of your land.
As with all hard questions, the answer is actually "it depends".
Depends on what? Unless you are one of the rare owners of an alloidal title, which basically doesn't exist in most countries today, your land is ultimately owned by the government, who can confiscate it or restrict its use for a variety of reasons (nonpayment of taxes, etc.).
The vast majority of land in common law countries (like the U.S.) only allows deeds to be granted in fee simple, essentially the way that lower nobility were generally subject to their feudal lords in days gone by. If the lord wants use of your manor, or wants you to pay him taxes or whatever each year, you have to do it, or he takes your land away.
There are some limited alloidal concepts in Texas and Nevada within the U.S., but they are still ultimately subject to the whims of the federal government regarding eminent domain, etc.