Man arrested for virtual crime

i don't see a crime here.

the only thing that the 'victims' lost was the time spent playing the game to 'earn' the items that were 'stolen'.

the fact that people pay money for microelectrostatic charges should speak volumes.
 
Wayne,

You don't gift your thoughts to Rich. Ask him.

The phone company doesn't get to use your ideas or the sound of your voice. An idea you speak about in a letter to the editor does not become the newspaper's to use.


TFL is a media, and owns the server space, and they can delete what they want from it. But they cannot use your ideas or language for profit without your approval.


Oleg Volk understood this when I asked him to delete some design ideas from his website.
 
(Please god, forgive me for what I'm about to do :D ) (god used in lower case on purpose due to I'm making a joke with the first () statement)

I can see where Handy is coming from. The game objects were worth money in real life. So, the other gamers could have sold their game objects and gotten real money to buy real things.

So, since the game objects were worth something on the real market then what this person did was steal the objects even though they don't really exist in real life and then sold them to high bidders in real life for real money.

Wayne

*PS, please don't hurt me too badly :)
 
What's the paper that a lottery ticket is printed on worth, in actual dollar value?

Probably less than a penny.


But if it has winning numbers on it? It becomes symbolic of a real-world monetary value.

Steal my winning lottery ticket, and what will you be charged with? Theft of something worth a negligible amount of money, or theft of something world $15,000,000?

It's a good question. I don't know how DAs handle that.
(I know how I would want it handled.)

And I don't know what I really feel about this video game case. It sounds to me right off the bat that these idiots are putting too much value on ethereal nonsense. The value of these items is artificial -- it's based on "how much would you pay for the elven sword" kinda crap. That should be harder to prosecute than, "You stole a chit worth $25 at XYZ store."

-blackmind
 
You don't gift your thoughts to Rich. Ask him.

The phone company doesn't get to use your ideas or the sound of your voice. An idea you speak about in a letter to the editor does not become the newspaper's to use.


TFL is a media, and owns the server space, and they can delete what they want from it. But they cannot use your ideas or language for profit without your approval.


Oleg Volk understood this when I asked him to delete some design ideas from his website.
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If you post on this board or any others, if you use their software to show your pictures, then the things on their boards belong to them. You have presented it in a public forum and belongs to the owner. Unless you have some sort of "this is copyrighted" remark which the board owner can just delete it from the board and therefore, it is gone.

The phone companies use your ideas all the time. If you call them up with a good idea, and they use it, and you didn't pay the copyright, then it is their's to use.

And yes, if you send a letter to the editor, they can do anything with it, print it, use it, whatever. They do it all the time in the "letters to the editor" pages. If you subment the letter or idea you are giving them permission to use it. Now if you put a disclaimer in it like "cannot be printed, used, etc.. without my permission" then they will do like Rich would do, delete it.

Actually, if you bothered to read the rules and FAQ of the board, Rich (and others) hold the right to use what is posted or said . When you hit the "I agree" button, you just released all ownership of what you say or post (to clarify: On the board).

Oleg may have, or may have not, I don't know the background on this issue so I can't really comment. If his personal website then maybe he misunderstood what you were doing when you gave him the ideas and looked into it. If THR then he is not under any obligation to do so since now they are public knowledge and he holds the rights to what is on his board.

Bottom line is this Handy, if you don't want others to use your ideas to make money, which aren't copyrighted, then don't post them. Or, if you post them, make a disclaimer and be done with it.

Wayne
 
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If cheating on video games is a crime, there aren't enough prisons in the world to house all of the 12-15 year old offenders. I used to play virtual games called 'MUDS' in the 90s where one invests a huge amount of time to acquire special objects, there were cheaters then that would use multiple characters grouped together with triggers set to efficiently gang up and kill other players and take their stuff. This was considered cheating on many games, people who got caught got banned from the game. Same should happen in this case. In new games, people can buy items with real money from eachotehr instead of spending 50 hours trying to get it themselves, its a shortcut to the game, and IMHO is a minor form of cheating in itself.

For those who think that these virtual items have any value whatsoever, what would happen if a major gameserver crashed and everyone lost their artifacts? Does a software developer take out an insurance policy to cover the virtual damages? How exactly are you going to make an insurance claim of a virtual object created in a virtual fantasy world? Can you create a business that sells these artifacts and claim depreciation on your virtual inventory when the video game they belong to falls out of favor for a new improved version of the game or a new game altogether?
 
Also to add about 'property' in virtual games.


With many virtual games, some gamer geek with a lot of free time inevitably creates a 'trainer' which increases or changes attributes of a character with the click of a button. Often times there is a hacked list of every possible item in the game which can be created and given to the character by using a trainer to hack the character's saved file.

I'll admit that I'm not up to speed on virtual games anymore, the last game I had time to play with was Diablo II, in the first 5 minutes of playing the game online, another player used a cheat that duplicates items and gave me a copy of his arse kicking armor and weapons, even though these items would cost $$s in real world money on auctions. Should I be able to sue the th4e other guy who zapped me 1/2 later using another cheat and who stole my stuff?
 
Let's not forget that this case originates from Japan, where the government maintains the power to conduct unannounced, random searches of the people's homes. :rolleyes:

And we're wondering why they are charging someone with stealing imaginary property?

-blackmind
 
Handy,

At least I tried. In post #23 of which it seems that you didn't/couldn't/or bypassed what I wrote and I went to your side on the debate.

Yet you are just so obsessed about arguing against anything and everything so it didn't matter did it.

What YOU don't seem to understand is that by being a member of this board, everything and anything that you post is the property of the board owner. I don't give a hoot what you THINK, look at the law when it comes to boards and then you will know.

Hell, if you turn out to be a serial murderer or if you crash and die on your next flight, Rich can, if he wanted, write a book using things you said here for profit.

Or, he could and is able to use what we post here in the next issue of SWAT.

You said that it's copyrighted no matter what, show me the sources or the law that says just that. As Rich has already confronted you on, it's not up to me to prove what I say, it's up to you to prove yours since you were the first to voice that it's copyright law.

Wayne
 
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It seems to me like Handy is right, unless there is something about releasing copyrights in the terms of service agreed to upon creating an account. But, I'm no lawyer... and copyright laws are crazy and hard to understand in some situations anyways.
 
I may be confused here. How are these things originally got by the owner? Are they bought, or earned, or found?

(I stick to FPS, none of this fantasy world crap)
 
Are they bought, or earned, or found?
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They can come from any of the listed sources, plus player killing. player killing is an act like in a first person shooter where you kill the another person's character. In fantasy worlds, such acts range from being encouraged to being considered mildly antisocial behavior, some people get a thrill out of PKing, but everyone who plays such a game, plays with the understanding that that there are PKers out there and there always is a danger of being PKed, its just part of the game. Usually experienced characters can go where less experienced characters cannot go, allowing them to get rare and difficult to obtain artifacts. The normal procedure is that if they are surplus, they are often sold in a store in the game for gold coins, or traded for other goods or gold coins with other characters. Its a more recent phenomenon that people trade virtual objects on places like ebay for real money. To me that seems completely absurd, it would be like playing dungeons and dragons and selling your imaginary character to someone else for $100.

Bots are automated characters that have triggers set in them to automatically do things in very quick succession. A trigger might be that if certain conditions exist, such as entering a room occupied by a lower level character, the bot character immediately casts offensive spells, blocks the exits, and heals itself by using potions when needed. Bots are usually frowned upon by software companies that run the game servers and will get you kicked and banned if caught, but I don't see how the rules of a software developer equate in any way, shape, or form to real life criminal laws.

If a person can be convicted of killing another character, taking his stuff, and selling it for real money, it starts to make me think that the movie "The Matrix" is more of a documentary than science fiction.
 
It makes me sad when people with no idea what they are talking about try to argue with others about something.

I agree that running cheat programs doesn't exactly meet some people's narrow definition of the word 'hacking'. Too bad, it's what the game companies call it as that is the end result- a software program or exploit hacking the game code to produce a certain outcome.

This person was running multiple bots, IE 5-10 game clients all dashing about and automatically robbing people, which is part of the game. It would be the same thing if they had been killing monsters and harvesting items as in other games with automated bots. The fact that he was virtually robbing has nothing to do with it, it's the automation.

In other words, he was:

Cheating
Cheating on a massive scale
Running hack programs
Profiting from it

And if there's anything legit gamers hate to see, it's people abusing the games they enjoy, and making money at it too. This is why this arrest makes me smile.

After all, he was in a pay-to-play game, not something like counterstrike, and the developers have a responsibility to their paying customers to keep the game free from people who would cheat for money and mess up the in game economy or playing experience.
 
No idea is tangible, but ideas comprise some of the most valuable things one can possess.
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You do not own ideas. You can possess them, but their distribution is pretty much uncontrollable. The law grants, through patents and copyrights, control over manifestations of certain types of ideas.

Ideas are not generally worth much money; the legal right to print ideas (in certain forms) and/or to make patented devices is what is worth money. In fact, the act of patenting a device necessarily discloses the idea behind the device (unless the patent is classified, in which case it's not issued until someone else tries to patent it, at which point the patent is issued to the original applicant and the 17-year term begins). It is also perfectly legal to disclose ideas from copyrighted books. Paraphrasing without attribution is an academic crime, not a legal crime.

This game had form and rules. The offending party violated those rules using programming outside the bounds of the game to hold, for ransom, parts of the player's game. If you don't want to talk about the virtual objects, just look at it as disrupting someone's affairs for money.
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And those form and rules include permitted killing and stealing, in the virtual world. The only legal challenge I might consider reasonable would be breach of contract by the player, which is a civil law issue.

It is totally irrelevant whether the virtual items are worth real money. If someone creates a website that gives visitors certain cookies, and people start trading those cookies for thousands of dollars, is it theft if the website subsequently deletes those cookies? If people are dumb enough to pay money for virtual items that can be stolen or otherwise deleted in a virtual world, they have no valid complaint if they die broke.

All the items are bound up inside the game. They have no value outside the game. Since the company probably retains the right to end the game at any time, or at least with some warning, valuing any in-game items at greater than the cost of the game is absurd. Also, since the game gives the items their value and has a pre-programmed set of rules that make this "virtual theft" possible, the game company might be just as responsible for the "theft" as are the people who run item-stealing bots.
 
Profiting from it
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We all know what P.T. Barnum said....

If people are willing to pay for vapor, ether, or other forms of ephemeral nothingness, they are idiots. Taking advantage of some programming skills, and ignoring the rules of a game (yes a game!) does not rise to the level of a crime, regardless of whether or not he was able to find willing idiots to sell nothingness to.

I get angry at cheaters, sometimes I wish I could strangle them, but I can at least seperate the line between RL and VR, for some, the line ceased to exist.
 
That's it! I'm going to go out and buy World of Warcraft and ask my employer to compensate me by giving my character gold coins and armor instead of giving me a regular pay check. :rolleyes:
 
After all, he was in a pay-to-play game, not something like counterstrike, and the developers have a responsibility to their paying customers to keep the game free from people who would cheat for money and mess up the in game economy or playing experience.
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If virtual theft is legal, which it is, and people are willing to buy virtually stolen virtual items for real money, which unfortunately they are, then people will maximally abuse the gaming system to virtually steal as much as they can. It is absurd to set a legal limit on how many virtual items can be virtually stolen, or by what mechanism.

Should it be illegal to steal $100 worth of food, but legal to steal $2 worth of food? Or maybe it should be legal to walk into a store and rob it because that requires "real work," but it should be illegal to steal real money with a computer because it's too easy and can be automated.
 
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