Your last paragraph is exactly the point. It is a way of standardizing a particular set of permissions, for people who don't WANT to be asked each and every time. You want to be asked, good for you (and thank you for Action Item!), and you're right, copyright allows you to be discriminatory. However, you're slightly off a bit when you say that copyright gives you absolute and complete control. It doesn't. Once you've made the choice to publish something, that is to "make public", you have given up a significant amount of control over it. Copyright only gives you the rights granted in the copyright law itself. It doesn't, for instance, keep me from saying in a meeting "Now then, to fully own this challenge, I'll need to be goal-oriented and results driven", nor from having everyone in the meeting except the PHB realize I'm making fun of the PHB because they've all seen Action Item as well (probably from the copy posted in several places, which most likely falls under fair use, which is a limitation of the exclusive rights an author has under copyright).
The problem with your "honestly not caring" when people send copies to all their friends is that now people have no idea when it is OK to infringe copyright and when it is not OK. Either they don't care at all (which is bad if you're for strong copyright protection), or they have to guess in each case whether it would be OK to do it. Certainly you don't want several thousand e-mails a day asking you for permission to send a copy to mom, do you?
Now maybe, for you, there isn't a CC license that meets your needs. That doesn't mean that everyone wants or needs the same level of control that you do. A GPL or Creative Commons license actually strengthens copyright law, by making it become more of a habit to NOT violate it - and maybe there should be one that codifies what your level of "that's OK with me" blanket permission would be: "personal copying, not in connection with any business or for commercial purposes" or something like that. Not giving permission, but condoning the copying of it anyway, just reinforces the idea in people that copyright law is something to be generally ignored.
So if that's what you're after, use your own license. No one is forcing you to use a CC license.
Plenty of artists sign up with publishers (music, books, whatever) without realizing that they just lost all control of their work entirely, including how it will be marketed and how it will be priced, yet all expenses will be coming out of their royalties, which they might never see, and they have no way of going somewhere else if they don't like how it's being done. In music, many artists find that not only are they not getting royalties, they're contractually prohibited from trying to sell any of their work any other way, or even from giving it away.
Anyone who looks at a Creative Commons license, decides to apply it to their work, but doesn't understand how it works, would probably have been taken advantage of by some big company and been in much worse shape anyway.
Fortunately, the people railing against Creative Commons licenses are irrelevant. They won't use it, and that's just fine. By their nature, works published under a CC license will tend to propagate more than they would if distributed under a restrictive license - eventually (as with GPL software), the quantity and quality of such works will tend to crowd out others. There will always be room for proprietary works, but they won't be the unquestioned norm that they are now.
Wherever do you get the idea that someone using a CC license (or GPL) is expecting people to donate money to them? And where do you get the idea that someone is going to be "buying Ferraris" by republishing something that was published under such a license? If there's that much money to be made from it, then competitors will pop up and drive the price down (which is easy, since the cost of production is close to zero). Oops, there go those Ferraris!
Taxing monetary gains made through a game is completely different from taxing a virtual economy. You were talking about virtual economies being regulated, and regulation almost always includes taxes. I made several mentions earlier about taxing virtual economies, and you appeared to accept that I was addressing your arguments. If that's not what you're talking about, then we've obviously miscommunicated.
It's clear that if you receive money from the sale of a virtual item, you have a tax obligation. Someone gave you money in exchange for something, and that's income. What you can deduct from that as legitimate expenses will be an interesting area - obviously, game fees should be deductible. What about real money you paid for consumables in the game? Can you deduct "tools of the trade" (i.e. swords and shields and Boots of Elven Cleverness, and depreciate them? Probably you'll only be able to deduct the actual amount of real money you paid in to the game from the actual amount of real money you realized from the game.
The possibilities are so complex that the only way government involvement can occur is to look at real world monetary transactions only.
As for barter exchanges, I'm familiar with them. It was always clear that they were taxable, but that it was easy to hide. Even if you do pay taxes on it, it still has an advantage, as you can declare the value at a wholesale or "professional discount" level. You probably can't push it TOO far, there's still the concept of a "fair market value", but that isn't necessarily the normal retail value.
The day that I can purchase groceries using a debit card drawing directly on my funds in an on-line game is the day I'll know the world has gone crazy.
Money, whether pieces of paper, bars of gold, or shells on a string, has value only because people have agreed to value it. Banks operate only because people trust that the bank will give them their money back when they ask for it. In part, they have that trust because there's a general agreement that if they don't honor that trust, we'll all take collective action which will harm them.
Game companies are not the same as banks. For one thing, they don't represent that they have an obligation to you that virtual property is yours. YOU DON'T OWN IT because you don't have enough rights to it. You only have the illusion of owning it. That may be enough to have value to some people, but they aren't going to own it either.
Real money explicitly is a representation of real resources, and is taxed by real governments in the real world. A virtual economy is not the real world. I can't eat the fish that I catch with the virtual fishing rod that I bought with virtual money. That the fish or the rod or the money may have some value in the real world is irrelevant until I get paid real money to transfer virtual ownership.
If I go to a casino and buy $10,000 worth of chips and go in and start gambling - I won't be taxed on the $500,000 I was up to before I blew it all and dropped down to $5,000. I'll get taxed on my winnings once I convert the chips back to dollars, not before.
The idea of a government saying you can't have a virtual economy in a game unless you cut the government in on some of that virtual cash is ludicrous.
A virtual game doesn't have any obligation to you. Even with the ones that let you buy game money with real money, they probably limit their liability to you to the amount of real-world money that you paid them. If you paid them $20 for some gold pieces, then spent 2 weeks building that up into a nice stash that would be worth $1000 at the same exchange rate, and a programming glitch wipes it all out, I doubt they would be obligated to you for more than $20.
A bank, on the other hand, is heavily regulated, and has regulatory and contractual obligations to you regarding your rights and their obligations to you. The bits in their computer don't represent your money, they merely record it. If the bits get changed by anything other than a legitimate transaction, they still have that same obligation. A game company doesn't. Except where they provide an exchange, the don't even have any control over how it gets converted to real-world money.
The world doesn't have to go Mad Max to have "your" game property go missing. And if the world goes Mad Max, "your" house, "your" car etc. are also likely to be as absent as your bank account. The whole concept of ownership, absent rule of law, is based on rule of force - if you have enough firepower to convince everyone that your house is yours, you probably have enough to say that your bank balance is also good and that people WILL honor your checks.
As for the government treating virtual cash flow in a virtual economy, it seems to me about as likely as them taxing Monopoly money (including an income tax every time you pass Go). Maybe they could charge me sales tax when I pay real money into a game, and maybe charge me income tax (or maybe capital gains) when I convert back to real money. But while it is in the game, it does NOT represent real money. Stock certificates, Certificates of Deposit, etc. do.
And how are you going to get the signed public key to let you talk to the "trusted" part of the system? These systems are designed to be very difficult to modify, the components are tightly controlled. It would take a significant effort to crack just one key, and then you have to keep the results very closely guarded or your key will be revoked when they find out it has been cracked.
Of course, if you only release ripped versions of content, they won't be able to detect which key was compromised, but you have to keep the key secret. One other possibility is to release the content key for each different title.
No, I don't think things have really changed that much. There have always been places like that, and there have always been places the exact opposite. The general level of paranoia (from widely reported virus attacks, web page defacement, stolen credit card info, the general paranoia caused by 9/11 and those darn terrorists and those darn anti-terrorists) may have gone up, and the reaction at the places where they over-react may go over the top even more often, but it hasn't really changed that much.
Your bank account is a record of an obligation. Money itself exists only because there is a general agreement to honor it. A dollar in your bank account and a dollar bill are both virtual in that regard.
Don't confuse an inability to convert a $5,000,000 bank account into cash at a moment's notice with thinking it is somehow virtual. If you want to convert it into gold (which is itself only worth what it is because of a general agreement that it is valuable), write a check (or the on-line equivalent) to a gold depository and buy yourself some gold. Just because the bank won't provide it as gold doesn't mean that the people with the gold don't think your dollars are worth something.
You're right that your money could disappear, but it won't be from virtual acid in the vaults. It will be because the bank foolishly took on obligations to others and gave away your money. They still owe you that money, but will probably get away with never paying you back. That some of it is insured in no way makes part of it more or less virtual than the other part.
If someone pays $26,500 for a virtual item, he damned well better have a contractual agreement with the company that he has an ownership right in it - that is, he has the right to require them to represent to others that he "owns" that item and can control various aspects of it in the game, and to spell out exactly under what circumstances he will no longer "own" it.
I think that people have enough sense that a proposal by any governmental body to tax transactions in a virtual world, or charge property tax for virtual property, would be laughed to death. It would go over about as well as instituting a charge for breathing the air (and then taxing you on it).
Since players aren't allowed to sell items for real-world money, it seems that anyone selling or buying has no claim. The player that was stolen from had no right to sell the items, so they had no real-world value.
If you postulate that they CAN sell the items, then you might be able to make an argument that usage of the bot meant that the perpetrator didn't have a proper legal right to sell the items, leading to a claim of improper conversion or some such (and fraud by the people he sold the items to, when those items get "repossessed").
The dollars in your bank account aren't virtual. The bank is regulated, it isn't allowed to arbitrarily change the amount in your account. What it stores in those bits are records, not dollars - it records how much they owe me. Illicitly changing those records is a crime regardless of whether they're written in a ledger book or stored on a computer.
In a game, the records are of virtual items and money. That there's an exchange rate between the virtual and the real shows that they do have value, but there's no accountability unless the exchange rate is determined by the owner of the game itself. Even then, you probably have no actual rights to the virtual items that you "own" - you can control them only as long as the game allows you to. If a Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal eats your Codpiece of Desire, you no longer "own" it. If a bank tried to tell you that some virtual acid crept into the vault last night and all your money is gone, you'd probably be able to have something done about that.
In the real world, if I kill you it's also illegal. It's a virtual world, the rules you have to follow are virtual, and the penalties should be virtual. If it is part of the game to disguise yourself and try to con someone out of an item, what's wrong with that? It's in the real world where it becomes illegal - if I somehow find out your phone number, call you up and say "Hi, I'm Tremendously Studly, you know that Condom of Virility I loaned you? You can return it to my friend, Rabbit Humper, thanks!", THEN you're guilty of fraud.
But that's a REAL mugging, and what was stolen were REAL dollars at the actual time of the crime. If the person who had the virtual items "stolen" had bought them somewhere, he was also violating the agreement made with the company. You don't own the bits - if the company decided to change your Sword of Ultimate Conquest into a Daisy of Appeasement, it wouldn't matter one lick that you just spend $12,000 on eBay for it.
"If the game lets you do it, it's a feature" has a lot of truth to it. There's a line between that and actually breaking into the server to directly change things, and that line can be hard to define.
You're saying that the client can tell the server "Xyzzy just gave me his sword" and it does it, without checking with Xyzzy's client? That's just stupid.
From what I read in TFA, the only two issues would really be that he used a bot that could fight better than a person, so usually or always won, and that by letting the bot do it, he could do it 24/7 without having to do anything else.
The server should NEVER allow a client to do something that it isn't allowed to do. It may, because of sloppy coding or an ill-conceived optimization, send too much data to the client, allowing a modified client/bot to have an edge by knowing things it shouldn't be able to know, but it should never just let the client set things any which way it wants. The only other advantage a bot would have is faster reaction speed - but that is actually something that should be able to be tested for automatically pretty easily, and in a way that can't be avoided (except by slowing down reaction speed, in which case it is no longer an insurmountable advantage - it drops the bot to merely about as good as the best human player). A game should be designed to require a fair bit of intelligence to be effective, so the reaction speed advantage should be able to be overcome by a real person, at least if the bot is running fully automatic.
According to what other people have said, purchasing items in this game for real money is not allowed by the company. Given that, it seems to me unlikely that any claim of harm would be supportable, at least beyond whatever fees are paid to play the game ("he ruined my game, I want my money back!").
You might be able to get him on "computer tampering" laws of some sort, since he was using their server without permission (since he had violated the Terms of Use). It isn't like hacking a bank and changing balances - that's interfering with/modifying financial transaction records, it doesn't matter if they're written down on a piece of paper or stored in a computer, it is an area well covered already. Using the game "sort of" as intended has a lot more problems, for instance you could liken it to accessing your account on the bank's web site using Firefox, even though the bank says that you have to use Internet Explorer. They'd have a hard time convicting you of theft just because you made a payment from your account using the wrong browser.
Overall, I think the company should restore the items, ban the mugger, and sue him for damages for hurting the reputation of the game. They should also delete the items he sold to others, and let them sue him for selling him something he didn't own.
Well, I was going along killing rats, one of 'em dropped some gold and then this guy came up to me and cut off my head! Do something about it!
Sir, do you have a rat disposal permit? I need to put that down in the report.... Ok, go ahead, can you describe the killer, please?
Yeah, he's an Orc Dark Knight swinging a Two-Handed Sword of Virginity. The loser doesn't even have a One-Handed Sword, how's he going to, um, handle things when he runs into the Sweet Slut of Desire, or a roving band of Forest Babes? I mean, he's not even wearing an Amulet of Chastity!
We'll get right on that! Hope your neck is feeling better. *click* Hey, Murphy, better go round up the Forest Babes and see if they've seen a horny Orc with a big sword recently.
So as long as he did the mugging himself, instead of by proxy, it would then be totally legal, right? I'm not sure I can see that using a bot could be considered fraud, though. He didn't have a contract with the victim saying he wouldn't use a bot, the bot didn't pretend to be someone else. I think the proper course is for the game company to restore the lost items, and then pursue legal remedies against the perpetrator for violating their contract (no bots, no selling items for money).
Now, if it was a case of selling an item to someone and they refused to hand it over in the game, you might have a case of real-world fraud, since there is now a real-world transaction between the two.
There's one way to make the client hack proof: explicitly allow bots, and don't send data to the client that the client shouldn't get. Build in bot-building tools and make it part of the game play. Allow players to trade bots (and the game bots would be built in to the server, so you could "protect" the code and keep a good trade in bot-building going - could even get a good Open Source movement going and see how it does against proprietary bots). Allow for modified clients, in pretty much any way you want, and there's no way to "hack the client". Sure, there can still be bugs on the server side, but that can be dealt with in the usual way.
Huh? I wasn't reading anything regarding evolution into your reply, and mine had nothing to do with that either (other than poking fun at legislators - I happened to pick evolution and pi). I was commenting on the idea that our current level of knowledge is somehow similar, from an "advanced" future viewpoint, to "turtles all the way down".
You also don't need a CA if you're trying to establish an identity - I may not know who you are, but I know you're the same person who sent the previous message. I don't know that you're NOT the same person who sent a different message, so it's easy for you to establish multiple identities. You can disguise yourself much more easily than in real life. A CA attempts to prevent that by linking a certificate to a supposedly one-to-one mapping of "person" to "identity".
Given history and consensus, you can establish a "web of trust" without ever physically meeting anyone, indeed without any contact except through encrypted/signed e-mail. Your reputation is built by your behavior, just as it is in real life.
Some of our theories are undoubtedly "mostly correct", to the point that no one is going to laugh at them. In fact, I'd bet that most of them are at least "mostly correct".
We don't laugh at the idea of "atoms", although a lot of the details were wrong. We understand some of the details of the human genome, and recognize that there is much more to know. A lot of things like string theory are looked on as predictive, but not necessarily descriptive, with the underlying mechanism still totally unknown.
A lot of things in mathematics, chemistry and physics have withstood the test of time quite well. No one laughs at Newton, even though in extreme cases things are more complicated than he figured. No one laughs at Galileo, Dirac, Hilbert, Turing, Church, Bell, Fermat, Einstein, Feynman, Laplace, Faraday, Maxwell, Hubble, Gödel, von Neumann, or even poor old Babbage. No one is laughing at the builders of Stonehenge. It seems unlikely that Stephen Hawking will be laughed at in the future (even if some things turn out to be wrong). It remains to be seen whether Stephen Wolfram will be seen as a visionary or misguided, but it is unlikely he will be laughed at either.
We already are, and will continue to laugh at the State Board of Education in Kansas (and various other legislators and school boards, e.g. Dover, PA), along with legislators who try to dictate the value of pi (which didn't happen in Alabama, but almost did in Indiana).
Yes, Carl's Jr. and Hardee's are pretty much the same. The "Six Dollar Burger" is the original Thick Burger. They still sell that one as a Six Dollar Burger. Six Dollar Burger is 1/2 lb. with cheese, tomato, lettuce, onion, mustard, ketchup, pickle I think. I tend to go for the Sourdough Thick Burger myself. It looks like Carl's Jr has most of the same combinations, but they call them all "Six Dollar Burger". Pretty much the same menu, just calling them different things.
As for mayonnaise, there actually is a difference from coast to coast. In the midwest, it is made to be sweeter (lots of people here like Miracle Whip instead, you have to be careful in restaurants when they say they're using "mayonnaise"), not sure what the difference is between east and west coast. There's probably a difference between north and south as well (if you remember the discussion on "fry sauce", there's some really different notions of what's proper to put on food depending on where you're from).
I didn't realize that the Wienerschnitzel here in town was the only one in Illinois!
You should probably still care about the type of fat you eat. All that stuff about Omega-3 vs. Omega-5, trans-fatty acids and saturated/poly-/mono-unsaturated fats still probably can have health implications for you, even if you're not calorically gifted.
"Hamburger" is not a McDonalds trademark. Nor is "Cheeseburger". Just go to their web site and look at their nutrition list, for example, and you'll see lots of Registered Trademarks, and hamburger ain't one of 'em. They have Quarter Pounder, Big Mac, Big 'N Tasty, Filet-O-Fish, McChicken, McNuggets, Chicken Selects, McMuffin, McGriddles, Big Breakfast, McFlurry, Triple Thick, and McDonaldland. But not hamburger.
Go to the supermarket and you can buy "hamburger meat" and "hamburger buns". Plenty of restaurants sell "hamburgers". Fast food restaurants use the term "hamburgers". Hell, just freakin' go to Wendy's menu page and it says "Hot 'n Juicy Hamburgers" right there. They do have a trademark on "Wendy's Old Fashioned Hamburgers", but that's reasonable, don't you think? Check your facts next time.
BTW, a Hardee's "Thick Burger" tastes pretty good; nutritionally, it won't be any worse than your meal, except possibly the lack of avocado and too much salt (depends on how much salt you put in yours). Yours will probably have more calories than, say, a Bacon Cheese Thick Burger (at 910 calories (62% from fat), 24g saturated fat and 1490mg sodium) (compare with the "Monster Thickburger" at 1410 calories (68% from fat), 45g saturated fat, and 2740 mg sodium).
You are allowed to use a competitor's trademark in advertising, as long as you're truthful and not using their name in a misleading way. It doesn't require any sort of agreement. There are various rules that you have to follow when making statements such as "four out of five dentists choose..." under false advertising laws, but that doesn't mean you can't name names.
No, a true free market doesn't account for externalities (by definition). To eliminate externalities, you have to regulate and/or tax. Tragedy of the commons/freeloader. A true free market would also be immune to things like cornering the market - in the real world, things are limited, there can be high barriers to entry, there can be natural monopolies, thus you need regulations to prevent abusive monopolies and cartels.
Consumption tax as I'm talking about is only to recover the cost to "society" that isn't represented in the actual cost of making it, it would be charged to the manufacturer. I'm actually in favor of a flat tax with a large exclusion, rather than a sales tax, with no gift tax, no estate tax. Tax dividends (but dividends are excluded from net income to the corporation). Don't tax interest.
Exclusion of initial portion of income done by annual payment to everyone, e.g. $10,500 payment if tax rate is 35% on everything over $30,000. Add additional payment for dependent children (e.g. half of that per child). Tax all income at 35% through corporate payroll tax. Tax independent contractor as a company, not an individual (possibly being able to treat net income as "dividends" taxed at personal rate).
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Your last paragraph is exactly the point. It is a way of standardizing a particular set of permissions, for people who don't WANT to be asked each and every time. You want to be asked, good for you (and thank you for Action Item!), and you're right, copyright allows you to be discriminatory. However, you're slightly off a bit when you say that copyright gives you absolute and complete control. It doesn't. Once you've made the choice to publish something, that is to "make public", you have given up a significant amount of control over it. Copyright only gives you the rights granted in the copyright law itself. It doesn't, for instance, keep me from saying in a meeting "Now then, to fully own this challenge, I'll need to be goal-oriented and results driven", nor from having everyone in the meeting except the PHB realize I'm making fun of the PHB because they've all seen Action Item as well (probably from the copy posted in several places, which most likely falls under fair use, which is a limitation of the exclusive rights an author has under copyright).
The problem with your "honestly not caring" when people send copies to all their friends is that now people have no idea when it is OK to infringe copyright and when it is not OK. Either they don't care at all (which is bad if you're for strong copyright protection), or they have to guess in each case whether it would be OK to do it. Certainly you don't want several thousand e-mails a day asking you for permission to send a copy to mom, do you?
Now maybe, for you, there isn't a CC license that meets your needs. That doesn't mean that everyone wants or needs the same level of control that you do. A GPL or Creative Commons license actually strengthens copyright law, by making it become more of a habit to NOT violate it - and maybe there should be one that codifies what your level of "that's OK with me" blanket permission would be: "personal copying, not in connection with any business or for commercial purposes" or something like that. Not giving permission, but condoning the copying of it anyway, just reinforces the idea in people that copyright law is something to be generally ignored.
So if that's what you're after, use your own license. No one is forcing you to use a CC license.
Plenty of artists sign up with publishers (music, books, whatever) without realizing that they just lost all control of their work entirely, including how it will be marketed and how it will be priced, yet all expenses will be coming out of their royalties, which they might never see, and they have no way of going somewhere else if they don't like how it's being done. In music, many artists find that not only are they not getting royalties, they're contractually prohibited from trying to sell any of their work any other way, or even from giving it away.
Anyone who looks at a Creative Commons license, decides to apply it to their work, but doesn't understand how it works, would probably have been taken advantage of by some big company and been in much worse shape anyway.
Fortunately, the people railing against Creative Commons licenses are irrelevant. They won't use it, and that's just fine. By their nature, works published under a CC license will tend to propagate more than they would if distributed under a restrictive license - eventually (as with GPL software), the quantity and quality of such works will tend to crowd out others. There will always be room for proprietary works, but they won't be the unquestioned norm that they are now.
Wherever do you get the idea that someone using a CC license (or GPL) is expecting people to donate money to them? And where do you get the idea that someone is going to be "buying Ferraris" by republishing something that was published under such a license? If there's that much money to be made from it, then competitors will pop up and drive the price down (which is easy, since the cost of production is close to zero). Oops, there go those Ferraris!
Taxing monetary gains made through a game is completely different from taxing a virtual economy. You were talking about virtual economies being regulated, and regulation almost always includes taxes. I made several mentions earlier about taxing virtual economies, and you appeared to accept that I was addressing your arguments. If that's not what you're talking about, then we've obviously miscommunicated.
It's clear that if you receive money from the sale of a virtual item, you have a tax obligation. Someone gave you money in exchange for something, and that's income. What you can deduct from that as legitimate expenses will be an interesting area - obviously, game fees should be deductible. What about real money you paid for consumables in the game? Can you deduct "tools of the trade" (i.e. swords and shields and Boots of Elven Cleverness, and depreciate them? Probably you'll only be able to deduct the actual amount of real money you paid in to the game from the actual amount of real money you realized from the game.
The possibilities are so complex that the only way government involvement can occur is to look at real world monetary transactions only.
As for barter exchanges, I'm familiar with them. It was always clear that they were taxable, but that it was easy to hide. Even if you do pay taxes on it, it still has an advantage, as you can declare the value at a wholesale or "professional discount" level. You probably can't push it TOO far, there's still the concept of a "fair market value", but that isn't necessarily the normal retail value.
The day that I can purchase groceries using a debit card drawing directly on my funds in an on-line game is the day I'll know the world has gone crazy.
Money, whether pieces of paper, bars of gold, or shells on a string, has value only because people have agreed to value it. Banks operate only because people trust that the bank will give them their money back when they ask for it. In part, they have that trust because there's a general agreement that if they don't honor that trust, we'll all take collective action which will harm them.
Game companies are not the same as banks. For one thing, they don't represent that they have an obligation to you that virtual property is yours. YOU DON'T OWN IT because you don't have enough rights to it. You only have the illusion of owning it. That may be enough to have value to some people, but they aren't going to own it either.
Real money explicitly is a representation of real resources, and is taxed by real governments in the real world. A virtual economy is not the real world. I can't eat the fish that I catch with the virtual fishing rod that I bought with virtual money. That the fish or the rod or the money may have some value in the real world is irrelevant until I get paid real money to transfer virtual ownership.
If I go to a casino and buy $10,000 worth of chips and go in and start gambling - I won't be taxed on the $500,000 I was up to before I blew it all and dropped down to $5,000. I'll get taxed on my winnings once I convert the chips back to dollars, not before.
The idea of a government saying you can't have a virtual economy in a game unless you cut the government in on some of that virtual cash is ludicrous.
A virtual game doesn't have any obligation to you. Even with the ones that let you buy game money with real money, they probably limit their liability to you to the amount of real-world money that you paid them. If you paid them $20 for some gold pieces, then spent 2 weeks building that up into a nice stash that would be worth $1000 at the same exchange rate, and a programming glitch wipes it all out, I doubt they would be obligated to you for more than $20.
A bank, on the other hand, is heavily regulated, and has regulatory and contractual obligations to you regarding your rights and their obligations to you. The bits in their computer don't represent your money, they merely record it. If the bits get changed by anything other than a legitimate transaction, they still have that same obligation. A game company doesn't. Except where they provide an exchange, the don't even have any control over how it gets converted to real-world money.
The world doesn't have to go Mad Max to have "your" game property go missing. And if the world goes Mad Max, "your" house, "your" car etc. are also likely to be as absent as your bank account. The whole concept of ownership, absent rule of law, is based on rule of force - if you have enough firepower to convince everyone that your house is yours, you probably have enough to say that your bank balance is also good and that people WILL honor your checks.
As for the government treating virtual cash flow in a virtual economy, it seems to me about as likely as them taxing Monopoly money (including an income tax every time you pass Go). Maybe they could charge me sales tax when I pay real money into a game, and maybe charge me income tax (or maybe capital gains) when I convert back to real money. But while it is in the game, it does NOT represent real money. Stock certificates, Certificates of Deposit, etc. do.
And how are you going to get the signed public key to let you talk to the "trusted" part of the system? These systems are designed to be very difficult to modify, the components are tightly controlled. It would take a significant effort to crack just one key, and then you have to keep the results very closely guarded or your key will be revoked when they find out it has been cracked.
Of course, if you only release ripped versions of content, they won't be able to detect which key was compromised, but you have to keep the key secret. One other possibility is to release the content key for each different title.
No, I don't think things have really changed that much. There have always been places like that, and there have always been places the exact opposite. The general level of paranoia (from widely reported virus attacks, web page defacement, stolen credit card info, the general paranoia caused by 9/11 and those darn terrorists and those darn anti-terrorists) may have gone up, and the reaction at the places where they over-react may go over the top even more often, but it hasn't really changed that much.
Your bank account is a record of an obligation. Money itself exists only because there is a general agreement to honor it. A dollar in your bank account and a dollar bill are both virtual in that regard.
Don't confuse an inability to convert a $5,000,000 bank account into cash at a moment's notice with thinking it is somehow virtual. If you want to convert it into gold (which is itself only worth what it is because of a general agreement that it is valuable), write a check (or the on-line equivalent) to a gold depository and buy yourself some gold. Just because the bank won't provide it as gold doesn't mean that the people with the gold don't think your dollars are worth something.
You're right that your money could disappear, but it won't be from virtual acid in the vaults. It will be because the bank foolishly took on obligations to others and gave away your money. They still owe you that money, but will probably get away with never paying you back. That some of it is insured in no way makes part of it more or less virtual than the other part.
If someone pays $26,500 for a virtual item, he damned well better have a contractual agreement with the company that he has an ownership right in it - that is, he has the right to require them to represent to others that he "owns" that item and can control various aspects of it in the game, and to spell out exactly under what circumstances he will no longer "own" it.
I think that people have enough sense that a proposal by any governmental body to tax transactions in a virtual world, or charge property tax for virtual property, would be laughed to death. It would go over about as well as instituting a charge for breathing the air (and then taxing you on it).
Since players aren't allowed to sell items for real-world money, it seems that anyone selling or buying has no claim. The player that was stolen from had no right to sell the items, so they had no real-world value.
If you postulate that they CAN sell the items, then you might be able to make an argument that usage of the bot meant that the perpetrator didn't have a proper legal right to sell the items, leading to a claim of improper conversion or some such (and fraud by the people he sold the items to, when those items get "repossessed").
The dollars in your bank account aren't virtual. The bank is regulated, it isn't allowed to arbitrarily change the amount in your account. What it stores in those bits are records, not dollars - it records how much they owe me. Illicitly changing those records is a crime regardless of whether they're written in a ledger book or stored on a computer.
In a game, the records are of virtual items and money. That there's an exchange rate between the virtual and the real shows that they do have value, but there's no accountability unless the exchange rate is determined by the owner of the game itself. Even then, you probably have no actual rights to the virtual items that you "own" - you can control them only as long as the game allows you to. If a Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal eats your Codpiece of Desire, you no longer "own" it. If a bank tried to tell you that some virtual acid crept into the vault last night and all your money is gone, you'd probably be able to have something done about that.
In the real world, if I kill you it's also illegal. It's a virtual world, the rules you have to follow are virtual, and the penalties should be virtual. If it is part of the game to disguise yourself and try to con someone out of an item, what's wrong with that? It's in the real world where it becomes illegal - if I somehow find out your phone number, call you up and say "Hi, I'm Tremendously Studly, you know that Condom of Virility I loaned you? You can return it to my friend, Rabbit Humper, thanks!", THEN you're guilty of fraud.
But that's a REAL mugging, and what was stolen were REAL dollars at the actual time of the crime. If the person who had the virtual items "stolen" had bought them somewhere, he was also violating the agreement made with the company. You don't own the bits - if the company decided to change your Sword of Ultimate Conquest into a Daisy of Appeasement, it wouldn't matter one lick that you just spend $12,000 on eBay for it.
"If the game lets you do it, it's a feature" has a lot of truth to it. There's a line between that and actually breaking into the server to directly change things, and that line can be hard to define.
You're saying that the client can tell the server "Xyzzy just gave me his sword" and it does it, without checking with Xyzzy's client? That's just stupid.
From what I read in TFA, the only two issues would really be that he used a bot that could fight better than a person, so usually or always won, and that by letting the bot do it, he could do it 24/7 without having to do anything else.
The server should NEVER allow a client to do something that it isn't allowed to do. It may, because of sloppy coding or an ill-conceived optimization, send too much data to the client, allowing a modified client/bot to have an edge by knowing things it shouldn't be able to know, but it should never just let the client set things any which way it wants. The only other advantage a bot would have is faster reaction speed - but that is actually something that should be able to be tested for automatically pretty easily, and in a way that can't be avoided (except by slowing down reaction speed, in which case it is no longer an insurmountable advantage - it drops the bot to merely about as good as the best human player). A game should be designed to require a fair bit of intelligence to be effective, so the reaction speed advantage should be able to be overcome by a real person, at least if the bot is running fully automatic.
According to what other people have said, purchasing items in this game for real money is not allowed by the company. Given that, it seems to me unlikely that any claim of harm would be supportable, at least beyond whatever fees are paid to play the game ("he ruined my game, I want my money back!").
You might be able to get him on "computer tampering" laws of some sort, since he was using their server without permission (since he had violated the Terms of Use). It isn't like hacking a bank and changing balances - that's interfering with/modifying financial transaction records, it doesn't matter if they're written down on a piece of paper or stored in a computer, it is an area well covered already. Using the game "sort of" as intended has a lot more problems, for instance you could liken it to accessing your account on the bank's web site using Firefox, even though the bank says that you have to use Internet Explorer. They'd have a hard time convicting you of theft just because you made a payment from your account using the wrong browser.
Overall, I think the company should restore the items, ban the mugger, and sue him for damages for hurting the reputation of the game. They should also delete the items he sold to others, and let them sue him for selling him something he didn't own.
Police emergency, go ahead.
I'd like to report a murder!
Ok, can you describe what happened?
Well, I was going along killing rats, one of 'em dropped some gold and then this guy came up to me and cut off my head! Do something about it!
Sir, do you have a rat disposal permit? I need to put that down in the report.... Ok, go ahead, can you describe the killer, please?
Yeah, he's an Orc Dark Knight swinging a Two-Handed Sword of Virginity. The loser doesn't even have a One-Handed Sword, how's he going to, um, handle things when he runs into the Sweet Slut of Desire, or a roving band of Forest Babes? I mean, he's not even wearing an Amulet of Chastity!
We'll get right on that! Hope your neck is feeling better. *click* Hey, Murphy, better go round up the Forest Babes and see if they've seen a horny Orc with a big sword recently.
So as long as he did the mugging himself, instead of by proxy, it would then be totally legal, right? I'm not sure I can see that using a bot could be considered fraud, though. He didn't have a contract with the victim saying he wouldn't use a bot, the bot didn't pretend to be someone else. I think the proper course is for the game company to restore the lost items, and then pursue legal remedies against the perpetrator for violating their contract (no bots, no selling items for money).
Now, if it was a case of selling an item to someone and they refused to hand it over in the game, you might have a case of real-world fraud, since there is now a real-world transaction between the two.
There's one way to make the client hack proof: explicitly allow bots, and don't send data to the client that the client shouldn't get. Build in bot-building tools and make it part of the game play. Allow players to trade bots (and the game bots would be built in to the server, so you could "protect" the code and keep a good trade in bot-building going - could even get a good Open Source movement going and see how it does against proprietary bots). Allow for modified clients, in pretty much any way you want, and there's no way to "hack the client". Sure, there can still be bugs on the server side, but that can be dealt with in the usual way.
Huh? I wasn't reading anything regarding evolution into your reply, and mine had nothing to do with that either (other than poking fun at legislators - I happened to pick evolution and pi). I was commenting on the idea that our current level of knowledge is somehow similar, from an "advanced" future viewpoint, to "turtles all the way down".
You also don't need a CA if you're trying to establish an identity - I may not know who you are, but I know you're the same person who sent the previous message. I don't know that you're NOT the same person who sent a different message, so it's easy for you to establish multiple identities. You can disguise yourself much more easily than in real life. A CA attempts to prevent that by linking a certificate to a supposedly one-to-one mapping of "person" to "identity".
Given history and consensus, you can establish a "web of trust" without ever physically meeting anyone, indeed without any contact except through encrypted/signed e-mail. Your reputation is built by your behavior, just as it is in real life.
I predict that about 45% of your predictions will be correct.
Some of our theories are undoubtedly "mostly correct", to the point that no one is going to laugh at them. In fact, I'd bet that most of them are at least "mostly correct".
We don't laugh at the idea of "atoms", although a lot of the details were wrong. We understand some of the details of the human genome, and recognize that there is much more to know. A lot of things like string theory are looked on as predictive, but not necessarily descriptive, with the underlying mechanism still totally unknown.
A lot of things in mathematics, chemistry and physics have withstood the test of time quite well. No one laughs at Newton, even though in extreme cases things are more complicated than he figured. No one laughs at Galileo, Dirac, Hilbert, Turing, Church, Bell, Fermat, Einstein, Feynman, Laplace, Faraday, Maxwell, Hubble, Gödel, von Neumann, or even poor old Babbage. No one is laughing at the builders of Stonehenge. It seems unlikely that Stephen Hawking will be laughed at in the future (even if some things turn out to be wrong). It remains to be seen whether Stephen Wolfram will be seen as a visionary or misguided, but it is unlikely he will be laughed at either.
We already are, and will continue to laugh at the State Board of Education in Kansas (and various other legislators and school boards, e.g. Dover, PA), along with legislators who try to dictate the value of pi (which didn't happen in Alabama, but almost did in Indiana).
Yes, Carl's Jr. and Hardee's are pretty much the same. The "Six Dollar Burger" is the original Thick Burger. They still sell that one as a Six Dollar Burger. Six Dollar Burger is 1/2 lb. with cheese, tomato, lettuce, onion, mustard, ketchup, pickle I think. I tend to go for the Sourdough Thick Burger myself. It looks like Carl's Jr has most of the same combinations, but they call them all "Six Dollar Burger". Pretty much the same menu, just calling them different things.
As for mayonnaise, there actually is a difference from coast to coast. In the midwest, it is made to be sweeter (lots of people here like Miracle Whip instead, you have to be careful in restaurants when they say they're using "mayonnaise"), not sure what the difference is between east and west coast. There's probably a difference between north and south as well (if you remember the discussion on "fry sauce", there's some really different notions of what's proper to put on food depending on where you're from).
I didn't realize that the Wienerschnitzel here in town was the only one in Illinois!
You should probably still care about the type of fat you eat. All that stuff about Omega-3 vs. Omega-5, trans-fatty acids and saturated/poly-/mono-unsaturated fats still probably can have health implications for you, even if you're not calorically gifted.
"Hamburger" is not a McDonalds trademark. Nor is "Cheeseburger". Just go to their web site and look at their nutrition list, for example, and you'll see lots of Registered Trademarks, and hamburger ain't one of 'em. They have Quarter Pounder, Big Mac, Big 'N Tasty, Filet-O-Fish, McChicken, McNuggets, Chicken Selects, McMuffin, McGriddles, Big Breakfast, McFlurry, Triple Thick, and McDonaldland. But not hamburger.
Go to the supermarket and you can buy "hamburger meat" and "hamburger buns". Plenty of restaurants sell "hamburgers". Fast food restaurants use the term "hamburgers". Hell, just freakin' go to Wendy's menu page and it says "Hot 'n Juicy Hamburgers" right there. They do have a trademark on "Wendy's Old Fashioned Hamburgers", but that's reasonable, don't you think? Check your facts next time.
BTW, a Hardee's "Thick Burger" tastes pretty good; nutritionally, it won't be any worse than your meal, except possibly the lack of avocado and too much salt (depends on how much salt you put in yours). Yours will probably have more calories than, say, a Bacon Cheese Thick Burger (at 910 calories (62% from fat), 24g saturated fat and 1490mg sodium) (compare with the "Monster Thickburger" at 1410 calories (68% from fat), 45g saturated fat, and 2740 mg sodium).
You are allowed to use a competitor's trademark in advertising, as long as you're truthful and not using their name in a misleading way. It doesn't require any sort of agreement. There are various rules that you have to follow when making statements such as "four out of five dentists choose ..." under false advertising laws, but that doesn't mean you can't name names.
Well, one thing you can do with the hard drive in the PS2 is save and restore game save files from/to a memory card...
No, a true free market doesn't account for externalities (by definition). To eliminate externalities, you have to regulate and/or tax. Tragedy of the commons/freeloader. A true free market would also be immune to things like cornering the market - in the real world, things are limited, there can be high barriers to entry, there can be natural monopolies, thus you need regulations to prevent abusive monopolies and cartels.
Consumption tax as I'm talking about is only to recover the cost to "society" that isn't represented in the actual cost of making it, it would be charged to the manufacturer. I'm actually in favor of a flat tax with a large exclusion, rather than a sales tax, with no gift tax, no estate tax. Tax dividends (but dividends are excluded from net income to the corporation). Don't tax interest.
Exclusion of initial portion of income done by annual payment to everyone, e.g. $10,500 payment if tax rate is 35% on everything over $30,000. Add additional payment for dependent children (e.g. half of that per child). Tax all income at 35% through corporate payroll tax. Tax independent contractor as a company, not an individual (possibly being able to treat net income as "dividends" taxed at personal rate).
Well, that's getting pretty off topic!