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August 02, 2025, 09:33:26 AM

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Quote from: Reuters

Online gamer killed for selling cyber sword
Shanghai online game player has stabbed to death a competitor who sold his cyber sword for real money.

The sale created a legal dilemma because China has no law covering the ownership of virtual weapons.

The China Daily newspaper reported that a Shanghai court was told Qiu Chengwei, 41, stabbed competitor Zhu Caoyuan repeatedly in the chest after he was told Zhu had sold his dragon sabre, used in the popular online game Legend of Mir 3,

The online game features heroes and villains, sorcerers and warriors, many of whom wield enormous swords.

Qiu and a friend jointly won their virtual weapon last February and lent it to Zhu, who then sold it for 7,200 yuan.

Qui went to the police to report the theft but was told the weapon was not real property protected by law.

"Zhu promised to hand over the cash but an angry Qui lost patience and attacked Zhu at his home, stabbing him in the left chest with great force and killing him," the court heard.

'Private property'

Newspaper reports on the incident did not specify the charge against Qiu but said he had given himself up to police and already pleaded guilty to intentional injury.

No verdict has been announced.

More and more online gamers are seeking justice through the courts over stolen weapons and credits.

"The armour and swords in games should be deemed as private property as players have to spend money and time for them," said Wang Zongyu, an associate law professor at Beijing's Renmin University of China.

But other experts are calling for caution.

"The assets of one player could mean nothing to others as they are by nature just data created by game providers," an unnamed lawyer for a Shanghai-based Internet game company said.

Bruce

Holy shit. I think China just beat Korea for insanity.

Even worse? It was in Legend of Mir 3. I'm now surprised we didn't see a hatecrime on the priest that disenchanted the deathstriker. rolleyes

I didn't see Blizzard's logo anywhere on their site (the Euro version).

Someone should tell them their Diablo engine has been stolen.

If you rip off a "friend" for a thousand bucks, you are a jagoff who should expect to be sued. If you rip off a "friend" in a shady field where the legal system can't compensate him, you are a jagoff who should expect a beating. Actually killing the jagoff was a bit over the line.

That's part of the reason why illegal activities like drug dealing breed violence. There's no legal recourse to get restitution so people turn to violence.

Bruce

Quote

"The assets of one player could mean nothing to others as they are by nature just data created by game providers"

So if digital assets (data) mean nothing in a legal sense, does China not have any laws about software or music piracy?

I suspect that The Sword of Pwnz-Yang is not intellectual property.

So the source code and art assets that make up that game object aren't the intellectual property of the game company?

If so, can't you extend that to the entire game?

Quote from: SirBruce on March 30, 2005, 10:32:20 AM

That's part of the reason why illegal activities like drug dealing breed violence. There's no legal recourse to get restitution so people turn to violence.

Bruce

Brilliant. Also, water is wet.

Quote from: Samwise on March 30, 2005, 10:58:00 AM

So the source code and art assets that make up that game object aren't the intellectual property of the game company?

If so, can't you extend that to the entire game?

It is the company's IP. But the company wasn't complaining about the "theft." It is not the IP of the murderous party from which it was "stolen." That is to say, possession of the item did not convey IP rights to the possessor.

Technically, I don't think you could show that anyone other than the game company ever had possession.

Limited and very restricted use maybe; certainly not possession.

Quote from: Mesozoic on March 30, 2005, 11:05:38 AM

Quote from: Samwise on March 30, 2005, 10:58:00 AM

So the source code and art assets that make up that game object aren't the intellectual property of the game company?

If so, can't you extend that to the entire game?

If I buy a piece of software, or a CD, or I download a song from iTunes, what I'm doing, basically, is acquiring a license to use another company's IP, right? That copy of the data has become my property, and if somebody steals my CD or my game key or whatever, they have committed theft. Right?

Isn't acquiring a piece of data in a MMOG pretty similar? How is having the chunk of data representing the sword of Pwn-Yang transferred to my MMOG account fundamentally different from having the chunk of data representing "Superbeast" transferred to my iTunes account?

You don't need to be the own something in order to be injured by someone else usurping it. So this is a red herring.

Bruce

Quote from: Samwise on March 30, 2005, 01:28:02 PM

Legally - by my understanding - no data in a MMOG is purchased or acquired, per se. When I referred to a possessor above I was speaking in the common definition, not the legal one.

In buying a music CD you pay someone money and in return you get to manipulate (listen to) the songs on that CD.

There is no legal contract where you gave the developers money and they gave you the Pwnz-Yang in return. Instead you pay a monthly fee to access a service, and nothing that takes place in the game can be construed as a violation of that arrangement. Law is essentially blind to whatever happens inside that service. If data was legally acquired by individual players over the course of play, then the developer could be sued if that item was, say, nerfed. Or duped by a third party (since duping reduces the "value" of the data).

Now if the developers denied you access to the game and kept your money? Yeah,grounds for lawsuit if you cared to pursue it.

So for the sake of argument, what if there actually were an arrangement whereby you could pay the developers real money and get the sword of Pwn-Yang? Would it count as your property then?

What if, instead, there were an arrangement whereby you could perform a certain amount of labor, rather than pay money? Would it count then?

(Guess where I'm heading with this.)

You're headed towards "A virtual item is my time, made manifest."

Sadly there is also no contract specifying that the developer will provide you with the Pwnz-Yang in return for any amount of play time.

I have ventured into the that breach once more dear friends, arguing about whether virtual items are real enough to be considered property over at Terra Nova. Surprisingly enough (to me at least), the TN folks seem to take it for granted that virtual items really are items. At least that the sense im getting from the thread. Personally, I think that way lies madness.

Sorry for the large cut and paste, but here was my last post.
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Sorry for boring people who already have this under their belt, but I have to say, from the overall tone you seem to suggest this topic is a closed one in that the TN crowd all agree that virtual items are in fact real and has some characteristics of property. Frankly, I'm shocked.

>Xilren, having been lead to a comparison involving a bank account, you essentially say a bank account is real because I can spend it.

Um no, that's not what I said at all. I said it's real because it can leave the system in which it currently resides in a variety of ways. Programming code can leave the system on which it was written, even if it still needs enviroment X in which to run. Intellectual property can travel through a variety of forms and systems. Interpreted game rule like the virtual sword, cannot.

This isn't about value; value is highly subjective which why it's meaningless in this discussion. We're talking about whether something is objectively deemed "property" or not.

>Only if you define your system in a sufficiently small (and might I offer shortsighted) fashion. Your money has value outside a single bank the way l3wt has value on multiple continents of Azeroth.

IMHO it's a simple definition. You define your system as the one of which the database is a part, whether it's a bank or a mmorpg. Poor analogy to continents of Azeroth. Would have been better if you could say, take platinum pieces in EQ and somehow transfer them into Planetside or SWG directly. Only way you could do something like that today is wholly external to the system via IGE or other secondary market activities.

||If the bank's computer crashed tomorrow, that does not mean I have lost my money.||

>Ever heard of The Depression? People lost their money, or perhaps their money lost its value. And that didn't even involved something as 'real' as hardware failure.

World of difference between a bank going out of business ala the depression and a bank's computer system crashing. In the former, yes people lost their money; in the latter, my money doesn't vanish despite the fact the "byte in the database" just went poof.

>I beg you to reconsider physical objects as candidates for value or realness. It's simply not a tenable position with even the smallest amount of thought.

I didn't say it was; intellectual property being the primary example of non physical property. I am much more interested in an object transferrence. If it can't exist outside of the medium of it's creation, then it isn't really seperate from such medium and can't be treated independently of it. That why I said these virtual items aren't items at all, they are interpreted game rule modifiers.

Look, if we removed computers from the equation, would you view it any differently? All these games are is computerized version of pen and paper rpgs (whith more players and layers of complexity to be sure). No one seems to get hung up on the realness of their D&D character sheet, or even a magic sword their DM made just for them, yet for some reason as soon as we use computers to be the intermediary of how the game is played, now all the game rules somehow acquire status as object or property? What if we stick with computers and just remove graphics? Would we have this same disucssion over a virtual sword in a text mud? While some might, I suspect you'd have a much harder time convincing people a string of text in a mud representing a sword in game really is a peice of property b/c it's easier to see the unreality of it. What about single player rpgs; i can sell my saved games of Planescape of BG2 on ebay but does that somehow make them mine?

I said "there is no spoon" for a reason. Everything in a computer game, multiplayer or not is nothing more than an interpretation of the game rule; a sword is nothing more than a modifier affecting the rules of combat. Just b/c all of players in the same gamespace agree to the rules to participate doesn't grant them property status external to the game. I can pay someone $5 real dollars to have them give me their Boardwalk in a game of monopoly, but at the end of the day it not mine; it belongs to the owner of the board game. Same thing as this sword, just a different medium.

Xilren

Huzzah, brother Xilren. Preach on, you magnificient motherfucker.

The only thing you own is your account and the rights afforded to it from the agreement you have with the game company. Normally these rights include crap like backups of the accounts, not deleting it without noticing you, etc. The owners of the account are never afforded property rights on the in-game items, levels, abilities, or anything else. What they did was to exclude anything that can be gained by putting any amount of time playing the game, leaving only what you recieve when activating your account.

That's the basic reason you look at those account ebay sites and they always have that non-binding agreement at the bottom of their posting talking about they aren't selling items or characters, but their time used playing the game. It's all a load of crap as they could have just put "I R teh win!!1 Lolz game company noobs!" at the bottom and nothing is different. Guess they do it to make the buyers feel more confident about the purchase.

Ya know, now that I think about it, virtual property (or the time used to play the game, ha) is just about the best money laundering possibility I can think of...

The day you give users the rights to their in-game property is the day you open the door for the lawyers to have a freaking field day over simple computer errors.

"I lost my sword due to your company's bug, I demand restitution for the value of the sword on the open market and the emotional distress the loss of my sword caused me. I also demand recompensation for time lost not playing because of the loss of said sword."

Quote from: Biobanger on March 31, 2005, 08:21:14 AM

Ya know, now that I think about it, virtual property (or the time used to play the game, ha) is just about the best money laundering possibility I can think of...

You have no idea.

Quote from: HaemishM on March 31, 2005, 08:38:07 AM

Quote from: Biobanger on March 31, 2005, 08:21:14 AM

Ya know, now that I think about it, virtual property (or the time used to play the game, ha) is just about the best money laundering possibility I can think of...

You have no idea.

Seriously. Roflcoptor++.