Latest News with Tag 'Legal'

According to today's New York Times:

"HANGHAI — The buying and selling of the make-believe currencies used in online gaming has become so widespread that Chinese authorities fear it will affect the real economy. To quell that threat, those authorities said on Tuesday that they had issued new regulations aimed at restricting the trade and use of virtual money.

....Last year, nearly $2 billion in virtual currency was traded in China, according to the China Internet Network Information Center. Some experts say they believe there is a much larger underground economy in the virtual world.

......On Tuesday, China said that new regulations would restrict the trading and use of virtual money, and that virtual currencies would be banned from being exchanged for goods."

The official statement can be found at China's Ministry of Commerce.

The problem China is facing is that users have started to take virtual currency such as the widely popular QQ coins and exchanged them for real goods and services. This in effect bypasses the government's highly regulated currency which is subsequently seen as a threat to government control.

News from China last week brings possible vast legal ramifications:

“Four young men were convicted of and sentenced for theft of virtual facilities and coins of online games, according to sources with a local court in Shenyang, capital of northeast China’s Liaoning Province.

On Oct. 22, 2008, Wang and his three friends beat, coerced and forced “Shenyang fellow” to transfer to 100,000 yuan worth of QQ coins, a kind of virtual money, and a large amount of virtual facilities to Wang.

Wang Xiaoquan received three years’ imprisonment and his three accomplices received reprieved sentences, each of the four was fined 5,000 yuan (about 735.3 U.S. dollars), according to a verdict statement of the People’s Court of Dongling District on Saturday.”

The virtual currency was worth about $14,700 USD and comes from the Chinese web portal Tencent with over 300 million active users. It is important to note that since the virtual QQ currency once purchased or won can not be converted back into cash the traditional argument for it having value was not deployed. Instead the court found that:

“…although no law has acknowledged legitimacy of the virtual property, game players have paid time and real money to accumulate their virtual property, which should be protected by the law.”

As more and more online companies use virtual currency to generate revenues, it will be interesting to see what happens when such cases go to U.S courts and what ramifications it will have on secondary markets.

On a side note QQ made it in the WSJ some time back because players were using it as a real alternative to China’s heavily regulated currency.

One of the fears of the anti-RMT crowd deals with the potential of player v. player lawsuits. If your character and virtual sword is worth a real world amount, then what happens if you wish to role-play (the MMO legal equivalent of pleading "insanity") as thief in a MMO and cheat someone, steal something from them, or use some exploit to grief them. If they for example lost their sword or their character suffered some loss could you sue them in court?

This question came up in the class action lawsuit where WoW players sued IGE in Hernandez v. IGE. In that case World of Warcraft players filed a class action lawsuit against IGE as a third-party beneficiary of the EULA contract IGE signed with Blizzard everytime an employee logged into the game. However that case settled out of court so the question was never answered. Can individual users/players of an EULA/TOU sue each other for violations?

It seems the recent court case: Jackson v. American Plaza Corp has provided a probable answer. The case ruled that one Craigslist member could not sue another for a violation of Craiglist's TOU (Terms of Use). This should provide precedent should an MMO player ever try to sue another for "damages" (in the form of lost real world RMT value) for breaking an MMO's EULA such as "griefing". 

For a full analysis head on over to: E-Commerce and Tech-Law Blog

In 2006 Megan Meier a teenage from Missouri commited suicide as a result of cyber-bullying through Myspace. The bullying took place from what looked like 16 year olds myspace account named "Josh Evans". However,  "Josh Evans" was in fact monitored by the mother of a former friend of Megan, whom the police identified as Lori Drew to punish Meier for spreading gossip about her daughter.

A federal grand jury indicted Lori Drew on May 15 2008 on three counts of accessing protected computers without authorization to obtain information to inflict emotional distress, and one count of criminal conspiracy. Drew was found guilty on three lesser charges (reduced from felonies to misdemeanors by the jury) on November 26, 2008. The jury was deadlocked on the fourth felony charge of criminal conspiracy. 

A tragic story and a poignant reminder that those avatars you play with are real people, but what does it have to do with RMT? One of the charges against Lori Drew is that it is a federal crime to intentionally violate the Terms of Service on a website.

Volkoh Comments:

"For those trying to make sense of the mixed verdict in the Lori Drew case, here's a quick (and somewhat simplified) guide to what it means.

The government's theory in the Lori Drew case is that it is a federal crime to intentionally violate the Terms of Service on a website, and that it becomes a more serious crime — a felony rather than a misdemeanor — if the Terms of Service are violated to further a criminal or tortious act. The tortious act the government alleged is intentional infliction of emotional distress, which in this case was alleged to have led to Meier's suicide.

The jury agreed that it is a federal crime to intentionally violate the Terms of Service on a website, and that Drew directly or indirectly did so, but it acquitted Drew of having violated Terms of Service in furtherance of the tortious act. That is, the jury ruled that Drew is guilty of relatively lower-level crimes for violating MySpacs Terms of Service (for being involved in the setting up of a fake MySpace account). It acquitted Drew for any role in inflicting distress on Meier or for anything related to Meier's suicide. The maximum allowed penalty for the misdemeanor violations are one year in prison for each violation, although the majority of federal misdemeanors result in a sentence of probation."

If violating a TOS is a federal crime it has huge consequences for the RMT industry. Furthermore, as a TOS can say almost anything this seems like it would have far reaching unintended consequences.

Sweden always seems to be in the bleeding edge when it comes to civil/legal rights and privacy concerns don't they?

Although they were one of the first countries to tax virtual currency income they are now one of the first to offer wills for their players.

That's right according to Swedish news site GP (English translation here) the "Second-Life"-like Project Entropia (700,000 players) published by Swedish company MindArk will start drafting wills for it's players so that their virtual assets can be passed on after their death. 

This begs the question, which one of your kids get's your decked out character with that castle in prime virtual real-estate? Let the sibling rivalry begin.