On the other hand, if you are paying a subscription (aka World of Warcraft is a monthly fee service), it could be argued that you are paying "rent" on the physical server and memory chips where this data is being stored and that it in fact does belong to you, the player/consumer.
No you can't argue that because you don't have a rental agreement with Blizzard. Its that simple.
You clearly have a subscription agreement for a service not a rental agreement for some some undefinable fraction of their infrastructure. No court is going to entertain your attempt to contort your clear subscription agreement into a rental agreement that gives you a claim to some fraction of their hardware.
That's the same level of absurdity as telling a judge sentencing you for a crime that he should let you go since you are his boss because you pay the taxes that pay his salary. That is simply not how it works.
Sure its 'arguably' true in some highly abstract sense, but not in any practically meaningful one.
Does it support non-English texts? If I want to read a PDF with heavy use of diacritics, or even completely different alphabets, will those display correctly on Kindle?
I know there are french and spanish books available for Kindle, so it will support at least basic stuff like c-cedilla, n-tilde, circumflexes, accents, umlauts, thorn, etc. I read somewhere the first version only supports latin-1, but that later versions allow some sort of font embedding...
I also couldn't say whether any current existing pdf-kindle software will be able to take advantage of that though... and I wouldn't put high hopes on doing an asian or arabic language on it.
Web based makes sense since you could possibly transition to some other technology, or, more likely, a mobile device's web access will only get better making it in-place upgradable for a long time.
I'd teir it. A web service tier that does all the actual work. A web based front end, lowest common denominator UI for any device including a laptop, it uses the web service to get things actually done.
Then you can just build a phone UI directly against the web service for any device you want a more 'slick mobile application' for than accessing it via the web.
As for physical 'scrabble tiles', there isn't a judge in the land who is going to side with your legal ownership of the tiles. If you walk into a scrabble tournament, draw your tiles, and then declare they are now legally yours due to possession being 9/10s of the law, and try and walk out, you will laughed out on your ass. Its that absurd.
And its doubly absurd in the case of WoW items because you don't meaningfully possess anything ever.
The virtual items are all always on WoW's servers, they can't meaningfully be removed from them, Blizzard also asserts they own them, you have to click you agree before logging in. And they can, at their whim, reverse any trade you might do, or delete, or alter or reassign any 'item' anywhere, anytime.
If *anyone* is going to be afforded the benefit of 'possession is 9/10s of the law' when it comes to virtual items, its going to be them, not you.
I'd like to make a fine distinction. I don't think it's reasonable. However, I think it's possible that a jury comprised of twelve US citizens would think it's reasonable.
Fair enough.
But on a relevant but also not-relevant note, if the gold/weapons don't belong to you in the game, what is your recourse when someone does what happened in the Netherlands? How do you get compensated for the damage done to your character?
I actually covered this elsewhere in the thread, but I'll reproduce it here:
Consider a situation where instead of runescape he played pac-man, and had a high score on the leaderboard. These thugs assaulted and coerced him into reseting his account removing him from the leaderboard (and boosting the thugs position as a sideeffect).
Consider a situation where instead of a game, these thugs assaulted him to coerce him to throw an exam, thereby reducing his grade, and due to being graded on the curve, boosting the thugs grades.
In -both- these cases we have a similar motive/harm/benefit situation in play. The thugs clearly derive/perceive a benefit from raising their leader board position or grades. The victim is clearly harmed by the assault beyond the physical assault itself. As you say, "the reward of 100's of hours of effort has been lost" in both cases.
However, we CLEARLY don't have to resort to recognizing leader board positions or grade point averages as 'legal property' to recognize or characterize the extent of what has taken place here.
The law recognizes that (absent a lawsuit) companies are not responsive to injured parties most of the time that they "ought to" be to make the injured "whole again." My concern is that if we do not agree that this is actual property belonging to the player, then there is no recourse for this.
As such, if you could sell your character for $500 on eBay but someone forces you to transfer all your treasure/gold/whatnot away and the value of your character plummets, have you not lost something of value for which you should be able to obtain restitution (either in the form of damages or specific performance)?
I think your concern is unfounded.
To give you a concrete example, some years ago I was in a car accident (100% another parties fault) and was forced to lose over 2 weeks of university classes mid-semester (just as things really ramp up); by the time I was back in school its was 2 weeks to finals and I had a LOT of catchup to do (probably 40+ hours worth of assignments/reading/papers, plus 60+ hours worth of lecture and lab time) so I elected to salvage 3 of the 5 courses I was taking and essentially abandon the other 2 to focus on the first 3 I kept.
When the courts and insurance company assessed damages, they readily agreed that in addition to the cost of replacing the written off vehicle, plus an amount for the pain/suffering/ that I should be compensated for lost wages at my part time job, the tuition value of the courses I abandoned, plus a component representing the time I would need to spend retaking them. The loss related to the university classes was valued at around 2.5k, (with the tuition component of that being 1.1k). Overall it was a small part of the settlement, but that's beside the point.
There was no absurd need in the proceedings to recognize my progress in the 2 courses that had to be abandoned and retaken as 'property' to recognize that they had value, or that I had lost it, or to quantify the loss as a dollar value.
The same applies to WoW. We don't need to recognize the acheivements/items/gold/scores/stats etc recording in your account as 'your property' to recognize that they have value, or quantify it, as in the case of a leaderboard or grade point score to capture the idea that the thugs were motivated by a personal benefit from causing that harm.
I suppose we could say that you and Blizzard are tenants in common of the in-game property or something. Or perhaps you are the tenant and Blizzard is the lessor.
I really think that's the wrong approach. We really don't need to consider the "virtual items" INSIDE the account as property at all to recognize that account owner has been harmed by what has happened regardless.
Nothing was transferred from one person to another in these examples, physical or otherwise.
Precisely.
We don't need to recognize things that aren't property as being property in order to find the cases equivalent in terms of harm caused.
In ALL cases, the people committing the assult 'gained' from the assault, and the victim was harmed (beyond the assult itself) even though there was no property transferred.
We don't need to assign 'virtual tokens on a WoW playsheet' as "real property". The pacman score or the grade score analagies capture ALL the motivation, harm, and benefit characteristics of a 'coerced property transfer' without needing property... ergo... the judges statement that we should recognize wow items as equivalent to 'real property' to capture the characteristics of this crime is FALSE.
The lawyer cannot discuss an issue like how a jury in another trial decided an issue unless he has introduced that fact as evidence.
Right, but we -can- discuss it -here-.:)
The question is: "what would a reasonable person expect in terms of ownership from playing WoW".
In a case, you don't get to "tell them" what is reasonable, but for this intellectual exercise, we can debate what their thought processes would be for determining it for themselves.
Pointing out to -you- what has occured in previous cases is simply me providing supporting evidence for how -I- think a reasonable person would come to a determination.
I agree with you. In our hypothetical case, Blizzard is covered. However, it's a really boring case. So I spiced it up by saying "absent a license/contract provision."
My impression was that absent a license/contract provision, you believe a reasonable person would think they owned the pieces. I disagreeing with that position, and have been attempting to communicate why someone who considered it thoughtfully would likely ultimately conclude they do not.
your points make absolutely no sense. What has "handing out a deal" or "playing scrabble" to do with property? Nothing, imho.
Because unlike in WoW, in scrabble, you actually get real property put into your hands, yet as you agree, doing so has NOTHING to do with transfering the property with respect to property rights.
My point is precisely that. When you get WoW gold added to your account, it is as meaningless with respect to legal property rights as putting a scrabble tile in your hand.
Suppose you you rent an account to a "virtual world" called web space. Yes, a simple root server;D Suppose you connect to that world via SSH, yes you don't need a special game client in my simple example... Suppose you wander around (use cd for example) with your character (type who... so you see what your character is;D)... Suppose you touch or make something in your virtual world... probably you only edit a web page and real people elsewhere can read it with a web browser...
I'm with you so far.
So? You do all that in a rented computer, the storage, the memory, the bits and bytes, the software you use, you own nothing from that. Exactly as if you would be in an online world!
Agreed.
However: for you it is completely clear that you own all the text and html files you have created with those tools which you do not own.
Whoa there. That would generally be correct, but your agreement with your webhost applies. Consider that something you write at work on work equipment can be found to belong to the company if they decide to try and assert ownership over it. Similarly writing something on a blog may or may not belong to you. Similarly writing something on a webhost may or may not belong to you... although in the case of webhosts they would generally assign all copyrights to you.
In any case, your ownership of what 'you created' cannot and should not be automatically assumed.
The data you create is yours. Just as in the examples above. Your character is data, the virtual property of your character is data, the abilities of your character is data. You pay your monthly fee to get your data hosted and to have access to your data.
Suppose you are playing a game of monopoly online; the game data recording which properties you hold, how much money you have, whether you have a get out of jail card, your houses and hotels, and where your piece all represents a 'creative work by you'?
And that therefore, you are now the 'legal owner' of this information, and legally entitled to ebay your get out of jail card to another player?
Does this apply to the physical game too? If we are playing monopoly does the collection of cards, and currency in front of you represent your creative work? Do you now have the legal right to ebay your monopoly money to other people? Of course not.
At most, you can argue that the arrangement of the pieces in front of you is a creative work, but that doesn't give you any rights to the pieces themselves.
Your wow account is little more than your monopoly account. It holds more stats, but its little more than a record of your achievements in the game. In terms of artistic creativity, it pretty much stopped after you chose your name. Again you could argue some creativity over the how things are arranged... perhaps you arranged your bank inventory into a flower pattern or something... and sure you could argue you own that design I guess. But that doesn't give you the right to sell the pieces.
(Just as creating a mosaic from some photographs gives you rights to the mosaic but you still can't sell it because you don't own the underlying photos its composed of.)
As I said in my post before... in germany accounts in games are ebayed every day,
They are ebayed everywhere. That doesn't make it legal. I'm not sure what level of
Precedents matter only when determining legal issues, not fact issues. "Reasonability" is a fact issue, not a legal issue. Thus, precedent does not matter.
Yes, I understand that precedents are only BINDING when determining legal issues. But insofar as discussing how a question of fact might be resolved, its not improper to discuss how 'reasonability' was determined in previous cases.
That's all I'm asking for or doing here.
I using them to explaining WHY I think a reasonable person would find that there would be no expectation of ownership, by comparing it other "game piece" examples where we all clearly agree.
If you want to disagree please explain why WoW's game pieces are somehow different. And why you think WoW induces the expectation of ownership.
I'll say it again. absent a license/contract provision . ..
Understood. However, you must acknowledge that a license/provision does in fact exist. And in the real world case of WoW (as opposed to a hypothetical case where one does not exist) this -must- be considered.
If we were to reach an impasse in the hypothetical case, finding that a reasonable person could go either way, then the license/provision in the real case surely puts it over the edge.
After all, what more could WoW really do to clarify their position?
Intent and situations can play a role in these things, and in this case it was a physical assault with intent to deprive the owner of property. Whether that property is physical/virtual, the owner still lost it.
I strongly disagree.
Suppose the runescape tokens were instead simply a high score in pacman, and they used a physical assault to force him to reset his score, removing him from the top of the leaderboard and advancing their positions.
Suppose they used a physical assault to force him to flunk an exam, hurting his grade, and because its on curve, advancing theirs.
We shouldn't treat a high score in pacman or leaderboard position as "property". Nor should we treat his grades as "property". We should simply recognize that he was forcibly coerced into doing something that was against his interests, and that he didn't wish to do.
We clearly don't have to declare his runescape tokens as equivalent to real property to recognize that a wrong has occurred, and that his interests have been harmed.
Personally, I think a short stint of community service is a pretty lenient punishment for assault and theft. I'm hoping that Runescape permabanned their accounts, too...
What if they changed the rules for getting the trophy and issued everyone one, nullifying your advantage? What would you do if they up and decided to start playing chess instead of scrabble going forwards? What if they closed the club down entirely?
Is any of that "fair"? Do they now owe you money? Should someone go to jail?
Bad example. Buying WoW gold is like giving real money to someone in the game in exchange for monopoly money to make your Boardwalk purchase. I'm not sure the rules of Monopoly prohibit that. The rules of WoW prohibit the purchase of in-game assets in that fashion.
Right. The rules of monopoly don't prohibit that because it assumes the people you are playing with aren't morons. The rules of monopoly implicitly prohibit this.
Try it next time you play monopoly at a friends house, bring some extra monopoly money from home and set it down in front you when you start to play. When they call you on it, you can try your argument that nowhere is it expressly prohibited in the rules; let us know how that works out.:)
You can't possibly be equating their policy of suspending access to your account because their fraud detection software alarms went off with the outright theft of your money.
Clearly they did not have the intention of depriving you of your money.
AS you said yourself: it took one phone call, to sort the issue out.
The issue is, as always, Would a reasonable person think that gold won in WoW belongs to them?
The was precisely the reason I brought up the other games - because the precedents are so very clear.
A reasonable person who considers the situation in WoW in the context of it being a game, would not think items 'dealt to them' on the WoW servers belonged to them in the sense of being 'their legal property', and would recognize them as merely game tokens that form a record of their position/status/achievements in the game they are paying to play, no different than monopoly tokens in a game of monopoly (played physically or played online).
Now, on top of that, WoW has gone to considerable lengths to communicate that this is in fact the situation in their EULA, Terms of Use, etc, etc.
There is simply no way you can make the argument that WoW has some how created or induced a false expectation here. If anything, they are bending over backwards to be absolutely clear on the point.
I think the draw of playing DVD-Video and DivX video on the Wii was supposed to be the fact that a DVD player takes shelf space (especially in Japan and other locales with overpriced real estate), and you need an extra set of five cables going into your switch box.
I can't really see that being the case.
1) All those mini 'home theatre in a box' systems have a DVD player built into the amp/tuner/switch. They also make TV/DVD combo devices.
2) Standalone DVD players roughly the size of a laptop internal drive, with upscaling, hdmi, divx/avi, and even usb and memory card slots are readily available.
3) If you can afford and have installed a more extravagant home theatre with discrete components than space for a DVD player isn't a problem.
This process only works by handing over the exact image file that you are using as your ID. If they don't have that exact image file, it wouldn't work.
That's precisely what I meant. Alice and Bob don't even need to take pictures of eachother... they could just point and shoot in random directions, but there are clearly some convenience features inherent in using 'just taken' images of eachother.
However, this isn't about the parent company taking away assets though,
But that's the -interesting- question here.
it's about a bunch of asshole kids beating and threatening another kid to take something away from him. Seems to me that - regardless of *why* they did it, they deserve a harsher punishment than they got.
Yes, the beating and threats etc are a crime in their own right, and should be punished accordingly. However the judge here specifically identified that we should treat his 'game account stuff' as the same as 'his real property'.
If had said, "we need to treat 'beating kids up' as serious whether its for their lunch money or to coerce them to make a particular move in a video game. I'd be with him, but he said something MUCH more than that.
a) companies make law (aka... you signed EULA, all your "property" belongs to us, muhuhuhua!)
So if we're playing cards and I deal you a hand, you now legally own those cards? Please explain.
b) virtual property is not real property? (Hint: shares, money in bank accounts, rights to ground, houses, yield of crops etc.)
The question really isn't whether its real or not. The question is whether its YOUR property.
If you join a scrabble tournament, and you draw your seven tiles, are they now your property? When you play monopoly, are the pieces, property, and currency your "legal property"? Of course not.
When you play Wow, and Blizzard generates a bunch of "equipment" in the game, the fact that its electronic instead of little plastic pieces is essentially irrelevant really. They aren't "yours".
What makes those bits any different from scrabble tiles, or monopoly pieces?
c) regarding this case: someone used force of weapon to get some one else to yield over "stuff"... thats a crime... it does not matter wether he had to yield, a bike, a car, his house, his money, his account data to his bank account to his money, his shares, his account data to the institution holding his shares, his account data to the institution holding his game account...
The crime was that force was used, not that a "theft" occured. If your fellow monopoly player holds you at gun point and makes you hand over the deed to boardwalk, did he just "steal your legal property"?
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:
1. Defendant induced an expectation on the part of the Plaintiff
2. Plaintiff relied on the expectation
3. Were the expectation false, the Plaintiff would be harmed
It seems to me that in this case, absent a license/contract provision, this would be a textbook example of estoppel.
At what point does offering access to a game constitute 'inducing an expectation' that the game items you might acquire somehow belong to you? If you pay to join a soccer leage does that create the expectation that when someone passes you the ball that its yours to sell ebay?
If you join a bridge club, and they deal you a hand, are the cards now yours? Can you sell them? What about selling them to another player at the table? Is that ok? If the host decides not to allow you to do that, is that estoppel? What if the host kicks you out of the club?
Do minor leagues all over the country need to establish contracts stating that any equipment or items you make or obtain during the game still belong to the club?
See... a lot of the issues with WoW aren't even 'virtual property issues'. WoW is no different from a physical game in a lot of respects. If I go play a scrabble tournament, the letter tiles I draw aren't mine to sell on the open market.
Hell, there are even games out there that allow players to trade "game assets"... if I play monopoly I'm actually allowed within the rules to buy property from other players. But even in monopoly I can't just pull out a some US currency when I run out of monopoly money to pay the rent on my turn, nor can I head to Toy-R-Us to pick up a pack of extra monopoly money to fund my Boardwalk purchase.
I'm not sure why you think WoW should even need a "contract" to enforce what should be an obvious "rule of the game".
It isn't as if they protection won't be beat, every protection ever devised has been beaten.
For single player games. Not for multiplayer games. For games that do both, only the single player component has been reliably beaten.
If the game requires you to have an 'account' with a 'service' in order to play multiplayer, and you get your account via a 'key' in your copy of the game, the ability to defeat the system is to either come up with:
a) a keygen that reliably generates keys that have been 'allocated but not used'. Good luck with that. b) a hack to redirect the link to the service to a counterfeit service, and then you need to design build, and run that counterfeit service. c) a method of logging into the real service with a counterfeit key. Not bloody likely.
The only option that really feasible is b, and that's a LOT of work. It has been done... bnetd for battlenet and there are server emulators for everquest and other games too out there... but its not just breaking DRM anymore, its creating a whole alternate support infrastructure, which presents itself as a juicy target for litigation if it gets big enough. (see bnetd)
I dont care about any tests, I care about what detects dangerous stuff on my network and what doesn't. Every client I have in on Kaspersky stuff, after Norton, McAfee, Trend and others FAILED to detect viruses that Kaspersky found straight away.
Game over.
Kapersky, in my experience, also has the highest rate of false positives.
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"?
Slashdot Mirror
On the other hand, if you are paying a subscription (aka World of Warcraft is a monthly fee service), it could be argued that you are paying "rent" on the physical server and memory chips where this data is being stored and that it in fact does belong to you, the player/consumer.
No you can't argue that because you don't have a rental agreement with Blizzard. Its that simple.
You clearly have a subscription agreement for a service not a rental agreement for some some undefinable fraction of their infrastructure. No court is going to entertain your attempt to contort your clear subscription agreement into a rental agreement that gives you a claim to some fraction of their hardware.
That's the same level of absurdity as telling a judge sentencing you for a crime that he should let you go since you are his boss because you pay the taxes that pay his salary. That is simply not how it works.
Sure its 'arguably' true in some highly abstract sense, but not in any practically meaningful one.
Does it support non-English texts? If I want to read a PDF with heavy use of diacritics, or even completely different alphabets, will those display correctly on Kindle?
I know there are french and spanish books available for Kindle, so it will support at least basic stuff like c-cedilla, n-tilde, circumflexes, accents, umlauts, thorn, etc. I read somewhere the first version only supports latin-1, but that later versions allow some sort of font embedding...
I also couldn't say whether any current existing pdf-kindle software will be able to take advantage of that though... and I wouldn't put high hopes on doing an asian or arabic language on it.
Web based makes sense since you could possibly transition to some other technology, or, more likely, a mobile device's web access will only get better making it in-place upgradable for a long time.
I'd teir it. A web service tier that does all the actual work. A web based front end, lowest common denominator UI for any device including a laptop, it uses the web service to get things actually done.
Then you can just build a phone UI directly against the web service for any device you want a more 'slick mobile application' for than accessing it via the web.
"Possession is 9/10 of the law."
As for physical 'scrabble tiles', there isn't a judge in the land who is going to side with your legal ownership of the tiles. If you walk into a scrabble tournament, draw your tiles, and then declare they are now legally yours due to possession being 9/10s of the law, and try and walk out, you will laughed out on your ass. Its that absurd.
And its doubly absurd in the case of WoW items because you don't meaningfully possess anything ever.
The virtual items are all always on WoW's servers, they can't meaningfully be removed from them, Blizzard also asserts they own them, you have to click you agree before logging in. And they can, at their whim, reverse any trade you might do, or delete, or alter or reassign any 'item' anywhere, anytime.
If *anyone* is going to be afforded the benefit of 'possession is 9/10s of the law' when it comes to virtual items, its going to be them, not you.
I'd like to make a fine distinction. I don't think it's reasonable. However, I think it's possible that a jury comprised of twelve US citizens would think it's reasonable.
Fair enough.
But on a relevant but also not-relevant note, if the gold/weapons don't belong to you in the game, what is your recourse when someone does what happened in the Netherlands? How do you get compensated for the damage done to your character?
I actually covered this elsewhere in the thread, but I'll reproduce it here:
Consider a situation where instead of runescape he played pac-man, and had a high score on the leaderboard. These thugs assaulted and coerced him into reseting his account removing him from the leaderboard (and boosting the thugs position as a sideeffect).
Consider a situation where instead of a game, these thugs assaulted him to coerce him to throw an exam, thereby reducing his grade, and due to being graded on the curve, boosting the thugs grades.
In -both- these cases we have a similar motive/harm/benefit situation in play. The thugs clearly derive/perceive a benefit from raising their leader board position or grades. The victim is clearly harmed by the assault beyond the physical assault itself. As you say, "the reward of 100's of hours of effort has been lost" in both cases.
However, we CLEARLY don't have to resort to recognizing leader board positions or grade point averages as 'legal property' to recognize or characterize the extent of what has taken place here.
The law recognizes that (absent a lawsuit) companies are not responsive to injured parties most of the time that they "ought to" be to make the injured "whole again." My concern is that if we do not agree that this is actual property belonging to the player, then there is no recourse for this.
As such, if you could sell your character for $500 on eBay but someone forces you to transfer all your treasure/gold/whatnot away and the value of your character plummets, have you not lost something of value for which you should be able to obtain restitution (either in the form of damages or specific performance)?
I think your concern is unfounded.
To give you a concrete example, some years ago I was in a car accident (100% another parties fault) and was forced to lose over 2 weeks of university classes mid-semester (just as things really ramp up); by the time I was back in school its was 2 weeks to finals and I had a LOT of catchup to do (probably 40+ hours worth of assignments/reading/papers, plus 60+ hours worth of lecture and lab time) so I elected to salvage 3 of the 5 courses I was taking and essentially abandon the other 2 to focus on the first 3 I kept.
When the courts and insurance company assessed damages, they readily agreed that in addition to the cost of replacing the written off vehicle, plus an amount for the pain/suffering/ that I should be compensated for lost wages at my part time job, the tuition value of the courses I abandoned, plus a component representing the time I would need to spend retaking them. The loss related to the university classes was valued at around 2.5k, (with the tuition component of that being 1.1k). Overall it was a small part of the settlement, but that's beside the point.
There was no absurd need in the proceedings to recognize my progress in the 2 courses that had to be abandoned and retaken as 'property' to recognize that they had value, or that I had lost it, or to quantify the loss as a dollar value.
The same applies to WoW. We don't need to recognize the acheivements/items/gold/scores/stats etc recording in your account as 'your property' to recognize that they have value, or quantify it, as in the case of a leaderboard or grade point score to capture the idea that the thugs were motivated by a personal benefit from causing that harm.
I suppose we could say that you and Blizzard are tenants in common of the in-game property or something. Or perhaps you are the tenant and Blizzard is the lessor.
I really think that's the wrong approach. We really don't need to consider the "virtual items" INSIDE the account as property at all to recognize that account owner has been harmed by what has happened regardless.
-cheers.
Nothing was transferred from one person to another in these examples, physical or otherwise.
Precisely.
We don't need to recognize things that aren't property as being property in order to find the cases equivalent in terms of harm caused.
In ALL cases, the people committing the assult 'gained' from the assault, and the victim was harmed (beyond the assult itself) even though there was no property transferred.
We don't need to assign 'virtual tokens on a WoW playsheet' as "real property". The pacman score or the grade score analagies capture ALL the motivation, harm, and benefit characteristics of a 'coerced property transfer' without needing property... ergo... the judges statement that we should recognize wow items as equivalent to 'real property' to capture the characteristics of this crime is FALSE.
The lawyer cannot discuss an issue like how a jury in another trial decided an issue unless he has introduced that fact as evidence.
Right, but we -can- discuss it -here-. :)
The question is: "what would a reasonable person expect in terms of ownership from playing WoW".
In a case, you don't get to "tell them" what is reasonable, but for this intellectual exercise, we can debate what their thought processes would be for determining it for themselves.
Pointing out to -you- what has occured in previous cases is simply me providing supporting evidence for how -I- think a reasonable person would come to a determination.
I agree with you. In our hypothetical case, Blizzard is covered. However, it's a really boring case. So I spiced it up by saying "absent a license/contract provision."
My impression was that absent a license/contract provision, you believe a reasonable person would think they owned the pieces. I disagreeing with that position, and have been attempting to communicate why someone who considered it thoughtfully would likely ultimately conclude they do not.
your points make absolutely no sense. What has "handing out a deal" or "playing scrabble" to do with property? Nothing, imho.
Because unlike in WoW, in scrabble, you actually get real property put into your hands, yet as you agree, doing so has NOTHING to do with transfering the property with respect to property rights.
My point is precisely that. When you get WoW gold added to your account, it is as meaningless with respect to legal property rights as putting a scrabble tile in your hand.
Suppose you you rent an account to a "virtual world" called web space. Yes, a simple root server ;D ... ... so you see what your character is ;D) ... ... probably you only edit a web page and real people elsewhere can read it with a web browser ...
Suppose you connect to that world via SSH, yes you don't need a special game client in my simple example
Suppose you wander around (use cd for example) with your character (type who
Suppose you touch or make something in your virtual world
I'm with you so far.
So? You do all that in a rented computer, the storage, the memory, the bits and bytes, the software you use, you own nothing from that. Exactly as if you would be in an online world!
Agreed.
However: for you it is completely clear that you own all the text and html files you have created with those tools which you do not own.
Whoa there. That would generally be correct, but your agreement with your webhost applies. Consider that something you write at work on work equipment can be found to belong to the company if they decide to try and assert ownership over it. Similarly writing something on a blog may or may not belong to you. Similarly writing something on a webhost may or may not belong to you... although in the case of webhosts they would generally assign all copyrights to you.
In any case, your ownership of what 'you created' cannot and should not be automatically assumed.
The data you create is yours. Just as in the examples above. Your character is data, the virtual property of your character is data, the abilities of your character is data. You pay your monthly fee to get your data hosted and to have access to your data.
Suppose you are playing a game of monopoly online; the game data recording which properties you hold, how much money you have, whether you have a get out of jail card, your houses and hotels, and where your piece all represents a 'creative work by you'?
And that therefore, you are now the 'legal owner' of this information, and legally entitled to ebay your get out of jail card to another player?
Does this apply to the physical game too? If we are playing monopoly does the collection of cards, and currency in front of you represent your creative work? Do you now have the legal right to ebay your monopoly money to other people? Of course not.
At most, you can argue that the arrangement of the pieces in front of you is a creative work, but that doesn't give you any rights to the pieces themselves.
Your wow account is little more than your monopoly account. It holds more stats, but its little more than a record of your achievements in the game. In terms of artistic creativity, it pretty much stopped after you chose your name. Again you could argue some creativity over the how things are arranged... perhaps you arranged your bank inventory into a flower pattern or something... and sure you could argue you own that design I guess. But that doesn't give you the right to sell the pieces.
(Just as creating a mosaic from some photographs gives you rights to the mosaic but you still can't sell it because you don't own the underlying photos its composed of.)
As I said in my post before ... in germany accounts in games are ebayed every day,
They are ebayed everywhere. That doesn't make it legal. I'm not sure what level of
Precedents matter only when determining legal issues, not fact issues. "Reasonability" is a fact issue, not a legal issue. Thus, precedent does not matter.
Yes, I understand that precedents are only BINDING when determining legal issues. But insofar as discussing how a question of fact might be resolved, its not improper to discuss how 'reasonability' was determined in previous cases.
That's all I'm asking for or doing here.
I using them to explaining WHY I think a reasonable person would find that there would be no expectation of ownership, by comparing it other "game piece" examples where we all clearly agree.
If you want to disagree please explain why WoW's game pieces are somehow different. And why you think WoW induces the expectation of ownership.
I'll say it again. absent a license/contract provision . . .
Understood. However, you must acknowledge that a license/provision does in fact exist. And in the real world case of WoW (as opposed to a hypothetical case where one does not exist) this -must- be considered.
If we were to reach an impasse in the hypothetical case, finding that a reasonable person could go either way, then the license/provision in the real case surely puts it over the edge.
After all, what more could WoW really do to clarify their position?
Intent and situations can play a role in these things, and in this case it was a physical assault with intent to deprive the owner of property. Whether that property is physical/virtual, the owner still lost it.
I strongly disagree.
Suppose the runescape tokens were instead simply a high score in pacman, and they used a physical assault to force him to reset his score, removing him from the top of the leaderboard and advancing their positions.
Suppose they used a physical assault to force him to flunk an exam, hurting his grade, and because its on curve, advancing theirs.
We shouldn't treat a high score in pacman or leaderboard position as "property". Nor should we treat his grades as "property". We should simply recognize that he was forcibly coerced into doing something that was against his interests, and that he didn't wish to do.
We clearly don't have to declare his runescape tokens as equivalent to real property to recognize that a wrong has occurred, and that his interests have been harmed.
Personally, I think a short stint of community service is a pretty lenient punishment for assault and theft. I'm hoping that Runescape permabanned their accounts, too...
Agreed.
Is it fair?
Seriously?
What if they changed the rules for getting the trophy and issued everyone one, nullifying your advantage? What would you do if they up and decided to start playing chess instead of scrabble going forwards? What if they closed the club down entirely?
Is any of that "fair"? Do they now owe you money? Should someone go to jail?
Yes they are. They are legally mine (by game rules)
Don't conflate "legally yours by the rules of the game" with "legally yours with respect to property law".
They aren't the same thing.
Bad example. Buying WoW gold is like giving real money to someone in the game in exchange for monopoly money to make your Boardwalk purchase. I'm not sure the rules of Monopoly prohibit that. The rules of WoW prohibit the purchase of in-game assets in that fashion.
Right. The rules of monopoly don't prohibit that because it assumes the people you are playing with aren't morons. The rules of monopoly implicitly prohibit this.
Try it next time you play monopoly at a friends house, bring some extra monopoly money from home and set it down in front you when you start to play. When they call you on it, you can try your argument that nowhere is it expressly prohibited in the rules; let us know how that works out. :)
You can't possibly be equating their policy of suspending access to your account because their fraud detection software alarms went off with the outright theft of your money.
Clearly they did not have the intention of depriving you of your money.
AS you said yourself: it took one phone call, to sort the issue out.
The issue is, as always, Would a reasonable person think that gold won in WoW belongs to them?
The was precisely the reason I brought up the other games - because the precedents are so very clear.
A reasonable person who considers the situation in WoW in the context of it being a game, would not think items 'dealt to them' on the WoW servers belonged to them in the sense of being 'their legal property', and would recognize them as merely game tokens that form a record of their position/status/achievements in the game they are paying to play, no different than monopoly tokens in a game of monopoly (played physically or played online).
Now, on top of that, WoW has gone to considerable lengths to communicate that this is in fact the situation in their EULA, Terms of Use, etc, etc.
There is simply no way you can make the argument that WoW has some how created or induced a false expectation here. If anything, they are bending over backwards to be absolutely clear on the point.
I think the draw of playing DVD-Video and DivX video on the Wii was supposed to be the fact that a DVD player takes shelf space (especially in Japan and other locales with overpriced real estate), and you need an extra set of five cables going into your switch box.
I can't really see that being the case.
1) All those mini 'home theatre in a box' systems have a DVD player built into the amp/tuner/switch. They also make TV/DVD combo devices.
2) Standalone DVD players roughly the size of a laptop internal drive, with upscaling, hdmi, divx/avi, and even usb and memory card slots are readily available.
3) If you can afford and have installed a more extravagant home theatre with discrete components than space for a DVD player isn't a problem.
This process only works by handing over the exact image file that you are using as your ID. If they don't have that exact image file, it wouldn't work.
That's precisely what I meant. Alice and Bob don't even need to take pictures of eachother... they could just point and shoot in random directions, but there are clearly some convenience features inherent in using 'just taken' images of eachother.
However, this isn't about the parent company taking away assets though,
But that's the -interesting- question here.
it's about a bunch of asshole kids beating and threatening another kid to take something away from him. Seems to me that - regardless of *why* they did it, they deserve a harsher punishment than they got.
Yes, the beating and threats etc are a crime in their own right, and should be punished accordingly. However the judge here specifically identified that we should treat his 'game account stuff' as the same as 'his real property'.
If had said, "we need to treat 'beating kids up' as serious whether its for their lunch money or to coerce them to make a particular move in a video game. I'd be with him, but he said something MUCH more than that.
Crack: Eve takes a picture of Alice and Bob to get a picture pair (Alice+Bob) and constructs the same symmetric key.
Why wouldn't it have to be using the same pictures that Alice and Bob took of each other?
If we rush to send someone there just to say we got someone there, what are we really accomplishing other than inflating our own egos?
Developing the at least the minimum level of technology and know how to do it.
Money is tight for these sorts of endeavours.
Money is always tight. At least exploration and science always pays off somehow.
They aren't saying hold off till teleportation is possible, but hold off until we get the best 'bang for the buck'.
There is always a better 'bang for the buck' next year. And some revolutionary technology just '10 years away'.
a) companies make law (aka ... you signed EULA, all your "property" belongs to us, muhuhuhua!)
So if we're playing cards and I deal you a hand, you now legally own those cards? Please explain.
b) virtual property is not real property? (Hint: shares, money in bank accounts, rights to ground, houses, yield of crops etc.)
The question really isn't whether its real or not. The question is whether its YOUR property.
If you join a scrabble tournament, and you draw your seven tiles, are they now your property? When you play monopoly, are the pieces, property, and currency your "legal property"? Of course not.
When you play Wow, and Blizzard generates a bunch of "equipment" in the game, the fact that its electronic instead of little plastic pieces is essentially irrelevant really. They aren't "yours".
What makes those bits any different from scrabble tiles, or monopoly pieces?
c) regarding this case: someone used force of weapon to get some one else to yield over "stuff" ... thats a crime ... it does not matter wether he had to yield, a bike, a car, his house, his money, his account data to his bank account to his money, his shares, his account data to the institution holding his shares, his account data to the institution holding his game account ...
The crime was that force was used, not that a "theft" occured. If your fellow monopoly player holds you at gun point and makes you hand over the deed to boardwalk, did he just "steal your legal property"?
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:
1. Defendant induced an expectation on the part of the Plaintiff
2. Plaintiff relied on the expectation
3. Were the expectation false, the Plaintiff would be harmed
It seems to me that in this case, absent a license/contract provision, this would be a textbook example of estoppel.
At what point does offering access to a game constitute 'inducing an expectation' that the game items you might acquire somehow belong to you? If you pay to join a soccer leage does that create the expectation that when someone passes you the ball that its yours to sell ebay?
If you join a bridge club, and they deal you a hand, are the cards now yours? Can you sell them? What about selling them to another player at the table? Is that ok? If the host decides not to allow you to do that, is that estoppel? What if the host kicks you out of the club?
Do minor leagues all over the country need to establish contracts stating that any equipment or items you make or obtain during the game still belong to the club?
See... a lot of the issues with WoW aren't even 'virtual property issues'. WoW is no different from a physical game in a lot of respects. If I go play a scrabble tournament, the letter tiles I draw aren't mine to sell on the open market.
Hell, there are even games out there that allow players to trade "game assets"... if I play monopoly I'm actually allowed within the rules to buy property from other players. But even in monopoly I can't just pull out a some US currency when I run out of monopoly money to pay the rent on my turn, nor can I head to Toy-R-Us to pick up a pack of extra monopoly money to fund my Boardwalk purchase.
I'm not sure why you think WoW should even need a "contract" to enforce what should be an obvious "rule of the game".
It isn't as if they protection won't be beat, every protection ever devised has been beaten.
For single player games. Not for multiplayer games. For games that do both, only the single player component has been reliably beaten.
If the game requires you to have an 'account' with a 'service' in order to play multiplayer, and you get your account via a 'key' in your copy of the game, the ability to defeat the system is to either come up with:
a) a keygen that reliably generates keys that have been 'allocated but not used'. Good luck with that.
b) a hack to redirect the link to the service to a counterfeit service, and then you need to design build, and run that counterfeit service.
c) a method of logging into the real service with a counterfeit key. Not bloody likely.
The only option that really feasible is b, and that's a LOT of work. It has been done... bnetd for battlenet and there are server emulators for everquest and other games too out there... but its not just breaking DRM anymore, its creating a whole alternate support infrastructure, which presents itself as a juicy target for litigation if it gets big enough. (see bnetd)
I dont care about any tests, I care about what detects dangerous stuff on my network and what doesn't. Every client I have in on Kaspersky stuff, after Norton, McAfee, Trend and others FAILED to detect viruses that Kaspersky found straight away.
Game over.
Kapersky, in my experience, also has the highest rate of false positives.
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"?