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Dutch Supreme Court Sees Game Objects As Goods
thrill12 writes "The Dutch Supreme Court ruled on January 31st that the taking away of possessions in the game Runescape from a 13-year-old boy, who was threatened with a (real) knife, was in fact theft because the possessions could be seen as actual goods. The highest court explained this not by arguing it was software that was copied, but by stating that the game data were real goods acquired through 'effort and time investment,' and 'the principal had the actual and exclusive dominion of the goods' — up until the moment the other guy took them away, that is."
They left out an important fact in the summary... he didn't lose the things under the rules of the game, he lost them because the suspect threatened him with a knife. This puts it in the same category as "give me your password or else" threats. Maybe robbery might be the wrong charge to give him, but there's got to be something illegal about gaining game objects by real-world threats.
OK, what happens when a game company decides to shut down their MMO server and remove all your objects of "value"?
The knife threat and kicking were obviously a form of assault/ bodily harm and should have easily swamped in terms of sentencing any charges for a very minor act of theft.
I am very surprised that the Supreme Court simply didn't say that the issue of whether virtual items are real property or not was moot in view of the more serious offences committed by the defendants.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
Jail time for ninjas?
Import tariffs for overseas gold farmers?
Sales tax on the WoW auction house?
Income tax on raid loot?
Check your premises.
Sheldon would be very happy with this ruling.
Take what ye can. Give nothing back!
You don't seem to understand my point, this is not about sovereignty, the reason you can't apply American law to European courts is because the systems are vastly different. It's like using Imperial measurements in a Metric country, or even better like speaking Russian in China.
For example the Common Law principle of caveat emptor, "buyer beware", does not work the same in most European systems, where there are other balances, duties and rights for both seller and buyer. The equations are different, therefore different results.
Laws and their interpretations are not formed in a vacuum, international sources are considered, but not applied directly in most countries. They can function as guidance or useful examples. After all the UK is the original source of your legal system, laws, methods, rights and oldest precedents. You don't seem to mind those? Never mind the international treaties and conventions on trade and standardization.
Now, who's pushing that ACTA set of laws on Europe?
If the license isn't valid, then you're truly fucked, because the default copyright terms are even more restricted. I don't know if you want to argue for that...
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It is a reasonable position for the court to take, but I don't think it's completely correct.
The difference between this and your bank account is that this is an unregulated account directly controlled by a company that the victim has a direct contract with. A bank account is not controlled to the same extent; a bank cannot just increase the numbers in the account without decreasing another or getting into a lot of trouble.
It is reasonable for the court to take measures to get this transfer reverted or corrected. Whereas a bank transfer is likely to have been converted into physical cash and so be very difficult to reverse.
It all comes down to real world consequences. Does the victim have a reasonable chance of recovering the objects of value that were given to the attacker. If the objects had no value (eg: they can be recreated or recovered on demand) it becomes an attempted robbery or just threats/assault. If the objects have value, (eg: acquired through 'effort and time investment,') but the victim can obviously get the things back it's a really dumb attempted robbery. Only if the attacker takes something of value away is it a robbery.
So in this case we have a foreign company in an industry that's notoriously unresponsive, so yes it looks like something of value that they couldn't get back and I too think a full robbery charge may well be justified in this case. But definitely not in general.
One of the really interesting things in this verdict is that the judge explicitly said that forcing something to give you "software, computer data or a PIN code" cannot be seen as theft, because it doesn't leave the 'power of disposal' of the original owner, but instead also becomes at the disposal of somebody else in an unwanted manner. There are other laws that deal with that though.
So in in this verdict the judge explicitly said that illegal copying is *not* theft, because for theft something needs to be taken away from somebody, and that doesn't happen when something is copied.
In interesting argument that organizations like RIAA and MPAA that throw around extremely harsh words such as 'piracy' and 'theft' as if it was candy, probably do not want to hear.