Someone can't make models very well, her arms are about as big as her stomach!

Maybe I should sue TQ they've banned a lot of my game accounts for unknown reasons and then asked for bribe money.

God I hate Second Life.

I find this interesting in that this lawsuit isn't over genitalia graphics.

My opinion is this: if you pay money for something, it's yours. Whether or not it's tangible or not. If I buy something in Second Life, I own it and it should be up holdable in court.

I think WOW got this right in this case. You don't own anything and the money your paying to Blizzard is for your access to their servers. So lets say that you buy gold on eBay and than do something that violates the TOS, Blizzard can ban you and you will have no recourse to get your money back for the bought gold because in the end of the day regardless of whether you paid money for something or not it all belongs to Blizzard.

Fun fact: the aforementioned court case took place in the Fifth Circuit Court of Yiff.

I would like to say, and believe truthfully, that ingame property should belong to the player. However, the implications involved with such a ruling could be aggravatingly far reaching. It's better for the gaming company to say "this is our ball, we're just letting you play with. For a price." I had an account get hacked once. If that was my stuff that was stolen, it becomes a crime. If it's a crime, do I call the cops? Let the gaming company just handle it? If it was stolen by someone in another country, indeed, if this becomes an international incident, do I contact foreign affairs?

The internet is serious business.

Nietzsche said capitalism is evolving monster, always inding new ways to grow, is this just one new frontier? Digital expansion of a world of servers and cables?

Getting closer, one day Snowcrash could be a reality.

Well... Minus the freaky mystical junk.

On the cover of BW, isn't that the woman who got wanged in Second Life?

I'd say that gamers don't own virtual property. Like boxofthegods said, in WoW you only pay for the servers. For games in general, you're buying a disc, not the actual characters or objects in the game (If I were to, say, go out and buy Halo 3, I couldn't get the game and then start selling Master Chief coffee mugs immediately afterward, I don't have actual ownership over anything in the game). And virtual items or DLC are only usable in the context of their respective games, at any rate, so there's already a limit to the degree of 'ownership' you have over them.

At the same time, game companies should still be responsible for taking action if someone's account gets hacked. Any company should have stellar customer support before they think about charging for extras in a game.

I guess things also get complicated for stuff like Second Life where you can use actual money to purchase specific things from vendors that are other users.

(Disclaimer: I don't actually play any MMOs, nor do I have any legal background, but these are just my thoughts on the subject)

Property Rights?

It means income and that means taxation, I know SOME morons want this but the companies will rather pull the plug that allowing that to happen.

at leased you don't get taxed over your own home in second life!

dammn i hate council tax! It's free when your a student, but the minute you graduate, down comes the housing tax! Dammn you labour!

D:

Its amazing how they manage to convince people that second life is actually meaningful of anything and worth giving a crap about. I still think its just a really horrible 3D (if you believe those graphics even deserve the title of 3D) chatroom.

At first thought, "ownership" of the items that you've played long and hard to acquire seems like a good idea, but with a little further thought one should realise that it's a terrible, terrible idea for two principal reasons.

First: Do you really want to have to declare every drop from every mob to the IRS? If you own them and they have real-world value, you will have to, it's capital gains.

Second: What happens if/when the game shuts down? Will they send you "your" items on a floppy disk? If so, what would you do with them. Surely if you own the items and they have real-world value the company running the game would be legally obliged to keep it running forever.

I can seriously see Blizzard or Sony or NCSoft or whoever simply unplugging their servers if this madness looked like becoming a credible problem.

...actually no. They wouldn't unplug, that would be foolish, they would just have to make every item "bind on pickup" to make transferring items between players impossible.

@NitrousO: How is it not meaningful? These words are just arrangements of shapes - they're nothing more than symbols, and symbols mean nothing except what we decide. Yet we hold words in the highest regard and consider them a fundamental characteristic of not just our civilization, but our species itself. Just because something isn't tangible doesn't make it meaningless.

@Onizuka-GTO: maybe not the house itself, but you pay land fees called "tiers" that might as well be called "taxes".

i dunno, something you pay for with real cash (whether converted to game cash or not), that you pay continuing use fees for-in cash, that you can sell later for profit ... doesn't seem so very virtual to me. ultimately, you're paying for space on a server somewhere, but you enter a contract that it will be there as long as you're keeping up your end of things (ie your tiers). when the plug gets pulled on that, through crime or whatever, its kind of reassuring to know that theres a court precedence for your "virtual" land having "real" worth.

I see a future of more lawsuits like these.

Obviously, this issue of "virtual property" is not going to go away quickly or easily. It is and will increasingly become the subject of much academic research, political legislation, and business strategization.

Right now, one can easily argue that because virtual property is tied to real world funds, crimes against virtual property affect an owner in the real world in a tangible way. But there will come a time when virtual property will become important to its owner without a tie to real world funds. People will want protection for their virtual property as much as their real world property.

@MartinX: Hilarious madness would result from this. It's like...what if all the WoW servers were simultaneously unplugged? Players across America would blink, then get up from their chairs, and throng in the streets, rising up for an American renaissance! Cries of "I could have been learning to play the piano with all that extra time!" or "When was the last time I mowed my lawn?" or "So that's what the sun looks like!" could be heard.

Virtual ownership is tricky business primarily because of the duplicateable nature of the content. In theory, if someone jacked something from you in WoW, Blizzard could just put that thing back in your inventory. But then, there'd be two copies of it out there somewhere. In aggregate, I think it'd probably have an inflationary effect on the in-game economy, and though I'm not much of an MMOer, I'm aware that those are already difficult enough to balance as they are.

Since we're moving into digital media distribution, I think that should probably set the precedent for ownership of in-game content (especially if it's purchasable in-game content, like a costume). While digital media downloads are meant to be duplicated, though, this sort of in-game content isn't, and on those aspects, the objects should be treated as though they were real. But I don't think it's the police who need to be tasked with this, unless an actual monetary transaction was involved. If it was a loss of content gotten normally in-game, I think it ought to fall to the company who runs the game. Not that I have any brilliant solutions for that, unfortunately.

I believe the Second Life terms of service defines the virtual goods as the property of the player that owns them. That is different from most MMORPG ToS agreements.

These games are going to need judges and lawyers. They can become their own countries. Pretty scary and weird. Weird scary.....

To those who claim you're paying for a service, why? I paid $X for my copy of the World of Warcraft disc, did I not? Do I not, then, own a copy of those files?

The law often works by analogy when faced with new problems. The nearest analogy I'm comfortable with is something like Final Fantasy the first. While you don't own any of the intellectual property within the game (for example, the sprite representing Fighter), you do own your copy of the game and the data contained therein. By right of the first sale doctrine, I can level my characters up to crazy levels, unlock the best weapons, and resell that game to somebody else. Is that so different from a gold farmer, who's essentially unlocking vast quantities of gold?

"But it's their servers!" you cry. So they are, and so you're paying for access. But what does the access encompass? Only being able to log on? The ability to go everywhere? What if Blizzard said, "You can only go to these four areas." It's their game, after all; everybody who argues that Blizzard's Terms of Service are absolute would simply have to love it or lump it.

I think that's ludicrous. I'm paying for a service and should be allowed to reap my rewards. When I get a rare drop, why shouldn't I keep it? Why should I not be allowed to resell it, if it's non-binding? Why shouldn't we treat MMOs with a reasonable care standard? Blizzard doesn't want World of Warcraft to have any more downtime or play imbalance than necessary because Blizzard is a profit-driven company. To that end, that a company wants to reap the most profits, we should trust that Blizzard will act in a manner to keep the game as fun for as many people as possible.

But accidents do happen, which is why like so many insurance policies, we should treat these accidents like acts of God. You can establish that Blizzard doesn't want them to happen and customer service will likely replace or repair the item, if possible, so what's the damage? And this god keeps intricate, detailed records, so if it finds evidence of duping, you can be expelled from the world. Again, this follows the reasonable care standard: cheating makes the game less fun for more people than it benefits.

As for the tax man, you don't have to report all transactions. Garage sales, for example, are often exempt. It would only be the largest trading houses that the government would bother going after.

As disclaimer, this is from an American standpoint and I am not a lawyer. Yet.