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General: Nine-Tenths of the Law
Stradden
Managing EditorMember CommonPosts: 6,696
MMORPG.com's Jaime Skelton takes a look at the recent lawsuit filed against Linden Labs, the makers of the virtual world Second Life.
Earlier this week, CNN reported about a new lawsuit against Linden Research, Inc. (aka “Linden Lab”) in regards to Linden's virtual world Second Life. The suit asserts that Linden promised players ownership of their virtual property (virtual land and assets they contain and create), but has not actively protected or asserted those rights. The suit actually claims Linden acts like a dictatorship, in that they have promised virtual property ownership for several years, but do not uphold the ownership of an individual's property in their virtual world and, in fact, seek to “reclaim” the virtual assets as their own.
The Second Life virtual property ownership dispute has a long and interesting history, one that begins not with the 2006 Bragg v. Linden Research, Inc. case, but one that begins with the company's shift to the first “virtual property” MMOG. In reading through the history, the detailed media campaigns that Second Life launched, and commentaries from legal experts, I actually found myself lost in hours worth of research that left me puzzling over the fate of the virtual world and its laws.
Read Nine-Tenths of the Law.
Cheers,
Jon Wood
Managing Editor
MMORPG.com
Comments
"In fact, the Terms of Use for World of Warcraft even claim the ownership of chat transcripts belong to Blizzard Entertainment and not to the player, despite the fact that the chat content is created by players."
That would never stand up in a court of law.
"" Voice acting isn't an RPG element....it's just a production value." - grumpymel2
This issue becomes confusing if you think of "property" or "ownership" of something that does not actually exist.
But it makes perfect sense when you think of it in terms of a "lease" or "license." Basically you pay money for the right to be able to do something, or to occupy something, and you pay additional money to have certain rights exclusively; i.e., the ability to use and make alterations to something in a virtual world.
What you "own", and what is your "property," is the exclusive right to do something in Second Life - not really some pixilated plot of land, but what you can do with that pixilated piece of land.
Imagine that I pay for the exclusive right to sell some company's product in a three state area. I don't own those states. I just have a legal entitlement to be the only person doing something in that area. My property interest is the license.
EQ1, EQ2, SWG, SWTOR, GW, GW2 CoH, CoV, FFXI, WoW, CO, War,TSW and a slew of free trials and beta tests
I wonder if any game company would consider sanctioning their own ways of allowing players to auction off their characters to other players through each others accounts and taking a small cut of it (1-5%?).
Afterall, its the players time that is also spent and as a player I do personally feel invested into my character over time. At least if a player no long wants to play their game, they can sell their characters to someone that might want them and make a little extra on the side for a sub loss.
Just a thought and idea that crossed my mind that could benefit both parties. In regards to this Second Life thing, that's a toughh call especially if they marketed themselves as such. I really hate when people start using convuluted language to re-assert themselves in a more favorable position (that counter previous thoughts) when things like lawsuits come up.
The problem is, that now 90% of what is owned in the world is electronically traded, land I own in one state was electronically traded to me by a middle man firm, that aside, you have seen the advent of the concept of intelectual properties, that has been around since the first novels were written and copyrighted has grown into a large scale virtal operation.
Under the law, anything that is "created" by an indvidual regradeless of medium is owned by that individual, technically under law, every character created by every person is owned by the creator, since money has exchanged hands from the creator to the service (the MMO owner) they have been paid for their services rendered. They however, regardless of ELUA, do not "own" what their players have created with their mediums, ie their character creation tools. These tools are seen in law as the same as any other creation tool, ie. Photoshop, Poser, 3DS Max, what the MMO owner owns, is the servers and environments created we use to interact in them. The character was created by us and thus is our virtual/intellectual property. This is excatly why a GM can have you change your characters name, why? because your using a name copyrighted within the same genre (sci-fi fantasy) which infinges on anothers virtual property rights.
So NO the MMO providers are NOT owners of the characters or the chat (chat is writen creations they don't own the chat anymore than microsoft owns the words written by their program to form a novel). They are owners and PROVIDERS (this means they are paid for the services they render) of the MMO nothing more.
I am a lawyer, but not an IP lawyer, but it would appear to me that under general contracting law that there is a big difference in the 'contract' based on a EULA like the WoW one noted above and the representations that Second Life has repeatedly made. One of the core concepts in contracting is that you get what you bargain for. If you are bargaining to pay $15 a month to play a game, use their chat, and play your avatar in a virtual world you wont have a case if they take it away. If you bargain to pay money for virtual property, you have a very different argument. It appears they are working the latter angle as this suit has apparently survived the (b)(6) type motion phase.
"Never met a pack of humans that were any different. Look at the idiots that get elected every couple of years. You really consider those guys more mature than us? The only difference between us and them is, when they gank some noobs and take their stuff, the noobs actually die." - Madimorga
This has been a long time coming. We're standing on the precipice between truly acknowledging and embracing virtual worlds and economies, and leaving them burried under the legal weight of the companies that control the virtual environments.
The owners and operators of virtual environments very obviously do not want users to gain rights over virtual property. The liability to them could mushroom into gigantic legal nightmares, despite whatever ridiculous EULA they try to make us sign. Server rollbacks, outages, etc, could become grounds for seeking damages due to any loss that might be incurred. So yes, it makes perfect sense as to why those who operate virtual environments are so against it.
On the other hand however, users are currently in a very bad position, especially in the case of Second Life where user created content, real estate, and game currency hold legitimized real world value. In such a virtual world, any and all assets do carry a real world value, that is legitimized by the fact that the game's currency does have an official exchange between the virtual world's currency, and real currency. As such, any assets that can be traded within the virtual environment for the virtual currency, does hold a legitimite real world value. By keeping any rights away from users with regards to access and control to their own assets, severely stifles the economic growth of such a virtual environment.
All of that said, I have the feeling that the laws will continue to be agaisnt user rights. The only way I can see they really changing would be if governments began to tax virtual goods. After all, if the government is going to go to the trouble of recognizing virtual assets and currency as havign real world value, and protecting user property rights, they might as well get a cut of it.
While a lot of the things might be true in NA (my law knowledge is limited in that direction) the EULAs are a different thing in the EU. While you indeed hold no property of the characters you have they can't simply cut you off in the middle of your sub for no reason without risking legal trouble. Same goes with mid-sub EULA changes.
The 2nd world thing is of course another story with the statements they made.
My Signature
Yes, I can name one company that does allow explicit RMT type exchanges for items, coin, and characters in at least one of their games. It was successful enough a third party company formed to handle not only that companies games but also handle it for other game companies if they should want to utilize it. (Many games have made use of LiveGamer.com's services now. I'm not sure if all involve things such as character and item trading.)
See www.livegamer.com for a list of developers and games.
Entropia i think would be a better example, you can buy land masses, with ingame currency, and set taxes on anything sold on your land mass, and you also get a small cut of the value of things that drop off monsters in your land mass...now heres the important part, you can, through the company, exchange the ingame money to real life money at anytime you see fit
now imagine you get banned for some silly reason, however you own a huge land mass, and have millions of ingame money, which can be exchanged at any time at a 10 ingame to 1 real life US dollar exchange rate, being that all items and all landmasses have a real life monatery value assigned to it, it should be protected by some sort of law, otherwise you invest into the game(its very very hard and time consuming if you dont buy ingame money to start with), then get banned for some made up reason by the company, then you lose it all
also this isnt a new game or anything, its quite a few years old, at least 6 years, and its been proven to be a working profit gaming model
Given the implications of the court case, i would hazard a guess that all the MMO's are currently checking their own EULA's to make sure they're not missing something, as they can be reworded/expanded at any time - in WoW you accept the terms in order to play the game, no different from any other MMO i know .. but.. with certain games based on 'real currency' i can imagine that this is something that would have implications for them directly... it will be interesting to see how this all pans out really, though i wouldnt expect it to be sorted out any time soon.. and it might even affect how we play games in the future.. .particularly those games with cash shops!
I, for one, have been waiting for a case like this, to both clarify the question of the strength of the EULA vs the rights of the customer, and have a US court weigh in on if virtual property can/may/must be treated as real property.
The game companies have had their own way for so long that it was only a matter of time until someone pushed back. EULAs are a contract like any other, and they are not ironclad nor uncontestable. Some I have seen, would probably not sustain the first decent legal challege they face....
A good rant, but left out all the important things like.. the point of the whole lawsuit and shit.. GG !
People are also failing to see the big picture here. What happens if they succeed? Here are a few of the items on that list of fallout form a decision in their favor:
LL will file income statements with the IRS for money earned in SL. This will be reported income on which you will need to file taxes.
States with property tax laws will need to start appraising your virtual property, meaning they will be granted access to your virtual database for purposes of determinign the worth and taxing you accordingly. States have that right by law already. If you claim it as your property, they have a right to tax it in accordance with its value.
Casinos and games that payout will fall under strictly regulated state and federal guidelines (this has already occured and is one of the reasons they are forbidden/not used now) for gambling. You'll be required to have a license from the state LL (and probably from the one you live in as well) to run a gambling casino, and you will have to report all gambling winnings and losses to the IRS for proper consideration on the incomes of people who play your games, and your machines will be randmly audited to make sure your games are fair in accordance with the standards for your state.
Destructive scripts and harassing items you own (because now you do own them) will be tied speficially to you, and they can track your use of them, so things like the shenanigans that we saw during the 2008 elections at the Republican and Democrat islands will be largely criminalized offenses. Causing a connection, or an entire island, to crash because you can will be considered assault at the worst, and vandalism at best. And LL will have no option but to turn over your contact information to the police just as they will have to report ownership rights to the proper authorities, as well.
And if you used a false name, address, etc, nothing in SL will be yours anyway. So to skirt the issue, you might think that you can just put in false data, but in reality, since this now ties LL to be responsible to actual legal entities, they'll probably just close your account until they get actual verifiable information. This can possibly lead to an increase in identity theft, which will be a constant hazard for LL, and one they probably won't want to take on.
So the real fallout from this going in favor of the plaintiffs is that LL will shut down SL and all that property you just won your rights to is now gone forever, anyway. Net result, you gain nothing, lost all of it, and no one can enjoy SL anymore.
Thanx for nothing.
How any of those people that filed the lawsuit thinks they legally own something in 2nd Life is ludicrous. Too many nuts in this world and too many lawyers willing to cater to them.
Actually it isn't. In South Korea, where gaming is much bigger, the S. Korean Supreme court said that transactions for virtual goods were just as enforceable under the law as physical goods.
What makes a downloaded song, that a person buys for $1 any less "property" than an IG item purchased in a cash shop as part of some game? Is it exactly the same? No. But the first example is fully acknowledged as a legal and legitimate transaction where all consumer rights laws apply, and the second example, the customer has no rights whatsoever, simply because the gaming company says so, as part of their (not-legally-tested) EULA.
That is what the courts will look at.
There are people who make a decent amount of real life cash from activities within SL, many of which have required a significant amount of time and effort to build up, even real life currency to purchase ingame currency to purchase assets within the virtual environment. Such lawsuits are simply to protect people's investments from being unfairly stripped from them.
Just because something is digital and on someone else's server, does not mean you do not 'own' it. If that was the case, music, movie, and software companies would have zero recourse against unauthorized use of their Intellectual Property. This is a similar situation, but the other way around.
In Entropia if you are banned your account and all its assets are transferred over to Mindark. Mindark then processes them, and any money accumunalted during the processing of these items is factored in.
The banned individual then recieves a check for the balance of their account after processing has completed. The items vanish, and estates are given back to the broker. The player may lose the items --- but not the value.
Laudanum - Romance. Revenge. Revolution.
Crappy, petty people breed and raise crappy, petty kids.
Dear Jaime:
Plz allow me to say this first...i was wrong about you.
Your articles may yet bring light to the dark places we know as MMOs, but you are yet missing the punchline at the end of the article, the bold remark, that distinctive line of opinion that highlights your thoughts on the metter.
As for the OP, the case will surely be arrenged outside of courts, like the one before that, why? becouse, theres no precedent the court may look upon for guidence, nevertheless this smalls steps are needed, if we are to see a road free of obstacles.
Good day to you.
Careful how you use your terms here!
Remember that 'real property' has a legal definition. I can certainly see code assets such as virtual store fronts and the like becoming real property eventually, but I don't think we're there quite yet in data persistency across enough of the Internet. (If the host server shuts down for any reason, the asset is not available. However, with some companies, the data is redundant and if one server shuts down, the data is still available through another server.)
As far as using the phrase as a comparison to virtual assets (assuming the real property being discussed is personal property: cars, electronics, etc or even a virtual house or location in a game/virtual world), I'm not sure that any court ruling will matter as those assets are completely dependant upon the company running their servers. If a company such as Linden Labs or MindArk says that their world has 'real value', then I would think that they are making a commitment to keep their servers running as long as anything in the game has a reasonable value. I think a comparison could be drawn between the virtual property and stocks and bonds. The stocks and bonds have value as long as the company is solvent and turning a profit. If the company goes bankrupt and out of business, then anyone left holding stocks or bonds just lost their investments. I believe that this is just one of a few reasons that companies such as Blizzard explicitly state that anything used in the game is property of Blizzard, just like going out to a paintball field and renting equipment.
@muushu: Yes, pretty much everything in the MindArk catalog (currently only Entropia, but soon to be expanding to other worlds) has a cash equivelent exchange rate (1 USD to 10 PED), but you still can't trade characters that I'm aware of, only items that can be placed in the Auction or traded between characters.
Little by little the law creeps its way into the internet. I'm all for it honestly, but where and when does it stop. If virtual property ownership becomes a legal standard then when will we see the first vitual trespassing suit, virtual theft, even virtual murder. If my virtual property extends to my virtual avatar then anything anyone does to interfere with my character or its property is a crime. Seriously, where does it end? What precedent can be established that won't open the way for further abuse?
Well, the interesting fact is that it is the companies themselves that are assigning virtual goods "real value", and that is usually something hard to establish. But not when the company sets the price when they sell it to you.
The game companies want the best of having it both ways: When they sell virtual items through a cash shop, they say, "These are extra items that are not included through paying your normal subscription, so you have to buy them," then, on the other hand, they say "You are subscibing to a service, and you have to pay for monthly access to our servers." I suspect, that when the courts look at everything, they will say that the game companies can do one or the other, without regard to applicable consumer protection laws, but not both. Something can not be both a good and a service.
As I mentioned eariler in the thread, in S Korea, they already consider transactions for virtual property to be just as legally binding as for real property, so giving some/all of those protections to virtual goods elsewhere is not totally outside the realm of possibility.
It will be interesting to how things turn out, personally, I expect there to be a pre-judgement settlement, because the last thing the MMO/Gaming industry wants is binding precident.
If this is true (never played SL), I believe that the company will win this case. Because if the items have real value but the company will pay that value if they cancel your account I believe that will give LL the right to hang on to control over their virtual world and it's use. As indebt as the US is right now though it wouldn't surprise me if the government saw this as a way to get revenue and tax the shit out of it.
Experience demands that man is the only animal which devours his own kind, for I can apply no milder term to the general prey of the rich on the poor.
Thomas Jefferson
Dracondis has the right of it, and the law is already on the internet, it's just taxation that has yet to really bite us in the ass.
I feel for whoever lost their investments in SL. I considered a business model that would have required SL also briefly. After hearing about this, I'm glad I decided against it. Still, I (think I) understand where the company is coming from. They have to protect themselves and their business as well. Any business exists only for the purpose of making money, nothing else. I don't know the circumstances as to what caused these SL "players" to have their virtual property yanked away from them, but I can't honestly say I hope they win the lawsuit.
Damn. It's news like this that makes me wonder how long it will be before i have to start looking over my shoulder for a real-world L. Bob Rife. (If you don't know who that is, read "Snow Crash" by Neal Stephenson. Any good gamer should.)
No, I don't mean Hacking or identity theft, what I am talking about are these things in a virtual setting, like the worlds or islands of second life. Like somebody hunting on your vitual territory being a poacher. Etc. The protection of intangible assests like insider information and such is covered by law because it represents something of value, something that the law understands. It's this 'virtual currency' that only carries a value based on its exchange rate with Linden Lab itself, directly or through others involved with this virtual world, that lies in this hazy limbo.
"There's no reason to think otherwise"
That is flat wrong for every MMO I've played, which states clearly everywhere that all virtual property belings to the company that owns the game. Period, end of story. You don't own anything, no matter how long you play. If you think otherwise, you aren't paying attention at all. There is EVERY reason to KNOW you don't own the virtual stuff in a MMO.
However, this is absolutely no cause for concern. Most software you "buy" is NOT yours, you haven't bought it, you've licensed it. You don't own it at all.
Same is true for music, movies, and most other recordings. Unless you created them entirely yourself, you don't own them.
Of course, you CAN own this stuff; the creators of the intangible goods all do, don't they? They can pass on ownership. The problem with an MMO though is, how is all of this going to be defined? Everything from quantity to quality and who is responsible for storing the actual files of data must clearly be defined, or the agreement is shaky at best. For a conpany to say "That character is yours forever" and let it go at that is ridiculous.
Have played: Everquest, Asheron's Call, Horizons, Everquest2, World of Warcraft, Lord of the Rings Online, Warhammer, Age of Conan, Darkfall