If I hack into someone’s bank account, and transfer $500 into my own account, I haven’t stolen anything that really exists. That $500 doesn’t have a one-to-one correspondance with a stack of actual bills sitting in a bank vault somewhere. I’ve just moved some data around. I don’t see how this is really any different.
Well, if we’re discussing the original article (got a link somewhere, Cal?), it says the 13-yr-old was “coerced” into giving the items to the other two. But how did this happen? Was it within the laws of the game, eg Give us that amulet or we’ll kill your character? Unless they actually hacked the account, I’m less willing to agree with this until I see some more details.
Hell, this is a closer parallel to stealing than software piracy is, since not only did the material taken have a monetary value, but the incident actually left the victim deprived of his virtual goods.
Of course, treating either scenario as theft is ridiculous. The only reason I’m okay with this having been treated as a criminal matter is that (per Balance’s link) the boy appears to have been physically assaulted. Beyond that, anything that can be done inside of a virtual world to “coerce” someone into compliance with your wishes is fair game.
I’m not familiar with Habbo Hotel, but if the architecture of the software allows a regular user to take another user’s virtual furniture, that’s not theft, it’s playing a video game. If it doesn’t, and they obtained the furniture by hacking into the other users’ accounts, that’s not theft, it’s hacking. Repeat logic as needed for scenario of your choice.
So basically they were physically threatening the boy to force him to sign over the objects.
There would have been an assault case in any event. And probably should have.
The details of this particular case aside, there are a couple of reasons why I’m dubious about treating virtual items as real property.
The main one is that in online games, everything that exists within the game is usually defined as property of the game operator by the license agreement. This is to cover the game company against lawsuits over lost items or oddball copyright suits from players for the use of their in-game information. They don’t want to face a suit because a glitch caused you to lose your Sword of Uberness +10, or because they used a piece of gameplay video with your character in it for an ad. In most cases, they also have rules against selling in-game items or currency for real money, and will ban accounts they catch doing it. In short, even if the items are “real” property–they’re not the player’s real property. They belong to the game company, which is allowing the player to play with them.
The other worry is taxation. If the virtual items are treated as having real, monetary value under the law, their acquisition could (as I understand it) be treated as capital gains for tax purposes. If you acquire that Sword of Uberness, and the going rate for the Sword on eBay is $1000, is that a capital gain? What if you get taxed on it, and the game servers shut down forever the next day? What if you never intend to sell it, and keep it for years, until the servers do shut down? You’re out the tax on $1000, for something that you never really owned. The potential for lawsuits is mind-boggling. (Yes, the $1000 Sword is an exaggeration, but not much of one. Even a casual MMO player can accumulate stuff that could be liquidated by gold-sellers for hundreds of dollars.) It sounds crazy, but the idea has been discussed seriously.
I can’t see items earned in a virtual world being subject to capitol gains. Let’s say you have an ounce of 24k gold worth about, say, $900 (just a guess, I have no idea what gold goes for these days). You start tinkering and toying around with it and manage to crank out a half a dozen shiny doohickeys that, were you to sell them at market value (using eBay as a market standard) would net you $300 each. You have doubled the value of the material but have no intention of selling any of it. Would the additonal $900 be taxable as capitol gains? Let’s say you sell three of them and make your initial $900 back, the proceeds of the sale would certainly be income but would the tax be based on the net value of the sale or on the net value of the item in question plus the intrinsic (added) value?
Ok, so let’s say you dive into WoW and earn a rare sword that’s worth $1000. You did the work in earning (finding) it. Is that really so different than you doing the work to increase the value of the gold doohickeys? If I’m walking down the street and find a bag of $100 bills, the right thing to do would be to turn it over to the authorities and, depending on jurisdiction, wait to see if it is claimed or not. If it goes unclaimed and I have legal claim to it then the right thing to do is to declair it as income on next year’s taxes. But let’s say it wasn’t $100 bills, what if it was a bag full of gold doohickeys. Doohickeys are certainly not money, even though they may be worth $300 each. Do I need to claim my fortune on next year’s taxes as well? The “currency” content of the gold doohickeys is only $150 (the value of the raw materials). If even though the doohickeys are worth $300, nobody is willing to buy them for that price and they are essentially only worth the gold they are made of, is it a gain or a loss when I file taxes next year?
Additional note just to stir things up. I recently downloaded TrueSpace 7, a free 3D graphics and animation program. Online there is a place where users can exchange models or offer them for sale. I could buy 3D models of original furnature from the original manufacturer to use in my models just as if I were to buy actual furnature to use in real time productions. This furnature is totally virtual but the model of it has intrinsic value as a virtual item. If I make my own models and post them for sale I assume that will also generate income for my tax return.
What a long strange trip it’s been.
Nice, I’m glad I read that story to the end. Nice spoiler. 
If I find a $1000 sword, and sell it for $1000, why shouldn’t I be taxed on $1000 income? Have the taxable event be selling the sword instead of finding the sword. I was under the impression that capital gains taxes already worked that way - that you paid the tax on a stock’s increase in value when you sold it. I could be wrong.
Another EVE Online player here. Whilst I’m not personally much for blowing up other people’s hard-earned ships, I’m all for other people doing it. The game wouldn’t be half as much fun without the steep penalty for dying.
Talk of virtual property as real makes me very uneasy. My virtual property would be worth several hundred bucks (and the character that much again or more), but it isn’t real property. If tomorrow I undock my Golem with the Gist A-Type XL booster (worth roughly $85 according to an ISK-selling site I googled) and someone suicide ganks me, that ship is gone. Poof. I have no recourse. If it were real property, then if someone destroyed it I would have some sort of recourse. If you take a baseball bat to my car, I have a civil case for damages against you. If you take a load of heavy blaster ammo to my ship, all I can do is whine in local. Well, that’s not really true. I can blow you up before you blow me up. But should I fail to do so, there’s nothing I can do. Ergo, it is in no way my property from a legal perspective.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Software is the single most important invention that humans have made to date. More important than the wheel, sliced bread, TV, the automobile, or flight.
http://videogames.yahoo.com/feature/online-divorcee-jailed-after-killing-virtual-hubby/1259111
And don’t kill virtual ex-husbands.
Wow, a lot of people really need to get a life. Paying real money for virtual swords and shit in a computer game for geeky overgrown adolescents. Depressing times.
Do we have to drag this canard out every time there’s a thread about MMORPGs in any way? I mean, seriously–you don’t see video gamers (for the most part) making fun of stamp collectors or the guy who spends $75 every year on a new football jersey. What’s the difference? Either way, it’s a lot of money spent on something that’s objectively not worth what you’re paying for it from a practical standpoint.
I guarantee that nearly everyone has at least one hobby that a lot of other people think is a stunning waste of time, money, and energy.
silently calculates the odds of the Gist XL surviving a sudden, brutal 8x 800mm repeating artillery attack on the Golem 
Threadshit much?
I don’t play MMORPGs since I don’t have the time nor the computer to power such, but it’s as good a hobby as any other. The items have intrinsic value to their owners or users over and above the actual cost of the item. People are willing to pay thousands of dollars to own a moldy old baseball that some long dead player used once. It’s no different in this case. In fact it’s even a bit more justifiable since these type of items are usable within the context of the game. They might help you advance to places you couldn’t have gone before, or allow you to make in game money to buy silly user generated items that amuse you.
Virtual crap is still just that; *virtual *crap.
I used to collect knives, some of which were worth a great deal of money. Even if the price I paid for a given piece seemed disproportionate to the value of the knife to a person who didn’t collect, I still had an actual, physical knife. Its value might go up or down, but it had physical existence. If nothing else, I had a knife with which I could cut things.
That $1000 dollar virtual sword not only may go up or down in value, but may simply cease to “exist” from a software glitch. It has no utility outside the game nor any existence. As for comparisons to things like rare stamps and baseballs, there aren’t going to be any more of those stamps with the upsidedown plane on them and Babe Ruth ain’t signing too many autographs these days. The ubersword can be limitlessly duplicated and its rarity is only a function of the game’s rules…which can be changed or hacked.
What is the utility of the upside-down stamp - apart from the fact that people are willing to pay money for it?
When this board was pay-to-post, what were you getting in actual value for your $14.99?
It’s true the stamp has little utility. It does, however, have rarity. There are only a tiny few of those stamps. They are unique. Can the same ever be said of virtual items?
Yes. There are rare items in MMORPGs. Things that only come about during special events (holiday festivals, for example) or for buying a real-world product (The Lord of the Rings Online game expansion is coming out, and they’re offering in-game items for preorders). Many rare items are bound to the character, so they’re impossible to sell to another player; but if they’re not, they do often have real-world value.
While I’d never spend real money on in-game items in an MMORPG, I don’t see it as any different than the real money I spend to download songs for Rock Band. I’m not getting something I could use for anything besides Rock Band, after all.
That’s not true rarity. Rare items in games are rare only because the rules say they are. Tomorrow the guys running the game could, if they wanted to, give everybody an ubersword, all absolutely identical to the one somebody paid $1000 real world dollars to own. Alternatively, they could decide uberswords don’t exist and delete them from the game.
Tomorrow, unless some are physically destroyed tonight, there will be the same number of upside down stamps and Babe Ruth baseballs. There may, due to attrition, be fewer; but there will never be more. That’s rarity.