Rights To Virtual Property In Games? 167
With the rise of MMOs and other persistent environments over the last decade, the trafficking of virtual game property has become a multi-billion dollar industry. Regardless of whether the buying and trading goes on with the blessing of the content provider (or, in many cases, the owner of the account in question), the question of players' rights to virtual goods is coming to the forefront. The Escapist Magazine takes a look at how some companies are structuring their EULA in this regard, and what some countries, such as China, are doing to handle the issue.
"... the differences between China and the West in this case have more to do with scale than cultural norms. So many people play online games in Asia — and play them so intensely — that social problems in meatspace society inevitably emerge in virtual worlds as well. ... The general consensus, therefore, is that paradigm shifts like the ones that have already occurred in Asia will inevitably come to the West, and with them, the need for legislative scaffolding that keeps us all from killing each other."
Re:It is your property! (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:It is your property! (Score:5, Interesting)
Furthering on from my rushed comment earlier:
I used to pay a monthly fee to a chess club I was a member of.
I was never under the delusion that the pieces were "mine".
Who owns it? Ultimately, the game companies. (Score:5, Interesting)
Ownership of online content of this is not clear-cut, like ownership of your chair or computer might be. You don't really own your character; the game company does--your character is subject to the alterations and whims of the company as needed, and access is even based upon whether they let you or not. They can kick you off if you are selling gold, selling your account, being a jerk, or because they simply don't like you.
Some of you may have an entitlement complex going on--"But it's mine! I am paying for it!" No, you are paying to RENT it, to have access based on their terms. Remember, they're the one making the game, without the company you couldn't have a game in the first place.
I think user agreement on MMOs are particularly important. If you don't like the terms of ownership or the rules, then don't play. They make no real guarantees. They make no guarantees that the in-game economy will remain just as stable, that they won't nerf rogues in a future patch, or that your character won't receive a huge revamp for balance.
Too often, I think, consumers fist-pound over their rights when they are the ones who signed the contract conceding the terms in the first place.
Can you imagine people suing Blizzard for devaluing their online property because Blizzard nerfed a certain set piece, or introduced better items?
People seriously want to bring the government into this? If you don't like the terms, don't play. You aren't owed. You do not have a special right; you agreed to the transaction upon signing up. You pay to play a game, and nothing beyond that unless you agree otherwise.
It's a tightrope for both sides of the fence: (Score:3, Interesting)
If you own the virtual items, things like a rollback causes you loss. You can demand they be returned.
If you own an item, and the developers decide that it is too powerful, and they nerf it. Do you need to be compensated? Should you be?
If you can buy and sell items ingame legally as your own items you are actually selling something that is beyond your control. You are selling data, but in reality you are selling a virtual item - really messy around IP with that from a legal aspect.
If you own the goods in your characters inventory what happens when you find out that the game is really old, no-one plays it and it's going to be scrapped? Do they fax you a printout?
If it's items you own, what about your character itself? What about ingame houses and real estate?
Re:It is your property! (Score:5, Interesting)
For one thing, you aren't paying for the items, you're paying to play the game and to pay the company's bills, and hopefully they will use some of the left over profits to make new content for you to play, so you will keep subscribed and pay them more money.
Technically, your items are nothing more than records in a database, owned by the company. All MMORPG companies likely can legally do whatever they want with this "property", from giving their employee game accounts every "super-rare" item for free, and lots of money for nothing, to messing with random players' items and stats to deleting random accounts to the whole database. Of course these would all upset players, leading to less money income as players leave. It's all about the money, so for now they will protect your virtual goods for you because it's in their best interest... but they're not really yours.
At least, that answers your question of who else could own them. I suppose it's still a matter of perspective, and EULAs.
However can you really "own" something that has no context whatsoever outside of that company's property (the game servers)? The database records in question would just be a bunch of strings and integers. Useless to you on their own without the game giving them context and meaning.
Other examples that come to mind... I can say I own the files on my computer because I own the computer, plus they still are useful when removed from my computer to other computers (note what this says about DRM). I can say that documents I create with Google Docs I own, because although I don't own the servers I created them on, it's trivial for me to print them out or download them in formats I can use locally.
Re:I'm on the fence... (Score:3, Interesting)
Do I own this Slashdot comment? Slashdot says I do
"Ownership" in that case means copyright.
what happens if Slashdot deletes it on me? I've lost something I own, and there's nothing I can do about it. That doesn't seem right.
It's not their problem if you're stupid enough to store the only copy of your valuable written insights in something as unsuited to the task as the slashcode system. Save to your local computer, fool.
Now, in the case of online virutual worlds, you didn't create that Godslayer of Hit Points sword your character carries. If you did, you'd have a local copy of the 3D vector file used to draw it. No, the GoHP sword is just an in-game milestone. It doesn't matter that it took you three years of 12 hour a day gaming to get your character's weapon byte set to that value; the "sword" still isn't yours. It's no more something someone can own than a high score on an Asteroids coin-op game is.
Ultimately, I think we'll see that virtual property is legally blessed to have real life monetary value, in much the same way that software is.
How is a token in a database somewhere "property"? It fits neither the definition of real property, nor even the hogwash definition of "intellectual property". Software is "owned" via copyright. Treadmilling in WoW doesn't give you copyright over an integer value in a database representing how much "gold" you have in-game. Such a thing may have value in its transferability, but only inasmuch as the operators of the virtual world permit the transfer of the value. If they want to prohibit transfers for meatspace profit, there's nothing you can do about it. Even in weird online worlds like Second Life, where you can actually create things (vs simply discovering things the content provider created), the value of your "ownership" of them is wholly dependent on that virtual world continuing to exist.
Re:It's a tightrope for both sides of the fence: (Score:3, Interesting)
I think you're mostly missing the point, but this question is half-way reasonable.
If you own an item, and the developers decide that it is too powerful, and they nerf it. Do you need to be compensated? Should you be?
Maybe and no.
How was the item acquired? If you earned the item through painful grinding and doing whatever it was you had to do in-game to achieve it, then you might have a case.
If you bought it, like from an in-game auction house, it's murkier. You speculated on an item and you lost. I do not think any game guarantees that kind of value (nor should it).
In general though, I think the ultimate answer is just plain no. You have to trust the game maker on that one and if they are making many arbitrary and possibly unfair decisions of that sort, they will receive the death penalty - enough players will leave the game and the game will die. Sad, but life goes on and someone else will make a better game.
I suspect you're thinking about this from a Second Life point of view and I'm thinking about this from a WoW point of view. Second Life is such dangerous territory to enter I'm positive that it will create problems that no one in positions of authority will have the slightest clue in dealing with until they are dead and replaced by people who grew up with such games.
Re:It is your property! (Score:2, Interesting)
It's not quite that simple. When you join a chess club you get access to the pieces but they are not yours to take away, but when you join a pottery club you get access to clay and it *is* yours to take away after you're done with it. Granted, you can also make original creations out of chess pieces but you're not supposed to, at least in any chess club I know of. Coming back to virtual realities, if a game provides the digital equivalent of clay which players can utilize to implement their own creative works, then arguably they should own whatever rights there are to those works. Even games that don't directly support creative activities can be used to produce truly original new content like machinima.
I can imagine. Sadly. (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, sadly enough, I can easily imagine that. One constant in my MUD days was that there'd _always_ be at least one idiot threatening to sue over some imaginary rights that he either made up or grossly misunderstood. We even had a stereotype of the "my dad is a lawyer and I'm gonna sue you" kid.
Favourite imaginary or mis-understood rights to sue over were:
- First amendment. If he can't shout insults and obscenities at everyone, you're censoring his free speech, ya know. He'll take you all the way to the ninth circle over it. That he doesn't even understand that it's a private server, and freedom of the press actually applies to whoever _owns_ the press (or the forum, as a digital age equivalent), seems to be the norm.
- freedom to act like a fucktard. If you don't let him be a griefer, you're
A) making role-play impossible at all (and here I was thinking there were a gazillion roles to play that don't involve screaming "I FUK UR MOM, NOOB! LEARN TO PLAY TEH GAME!" as you bury their equipment), and apparently role-playing an out-of-character fucktard is a basic human right.
B) some form of slavery. Why, having to play nice or abide by your common courtesy rules while on your property, is nothing short of a nazi dictatorship and denying him his basic dignity as a human.
The fact that nobody's forcing him to be there, if he doesn't like the rules, or that being on someone's private property is a privilege not a right, are beyond his comprehension skills.
- property rights. If his treasured Sword Of Ganking +5 got broken for lack of repairs, or worse yet _nerfed_, why, you messed with his private property. He'll see you in court for it.
Etc.
And while most didn't actually follow through, I remember offhand someone who _did_ sue Second Life because, get this: his business plan was abusing a bug in the program to buy virtual plots of land for a dollar, and resell them closer to their real value. And apparetly he thought he had some kind of basic human right to do that. And if Linden Labs banned his account for it, why, they're cutting off his money making scheme. And by Jove he has a right to make money. Heh.
Re:Another game (Score:1, Interesting)
Agreed, and how is taking your virtual "property" any different than losing all of your weapons/ammo at some plot event in FPS games? I always have a habit of stockpiling weapons/ammo, only to lose it all :(
I WORKED FOR ALL THOSE MINES/AMMO, DAMN YOU CRYSIS
Re:It is your property! (Score:3, Interesting)
I say let's talk about Taxes and Taxing virtual sundries, this is where this is all heading anyway.
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Re:It is your property! (Score:3, Interesting)