It’s being suggested that this case of a murder over the unauthorized sale of virutal goods might create the need for new laws:

A Shanghai online game player has stabbed to death a competitor who sold his cyber-sword, the China Daily said.

The incident creates a dilemma in China where no law exists for the ownership of virtual weapons.

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 newspaper said a Shanghai court was told yesterday.

“The armour and swords in games should be deemed as private property as players have to spend money and time for them,” Wang Zongyu, an associate law professor at Beijing’s Renmin University of China, was quoted as saying.

I’m going to beg to differ here. The motive may be new, but the crime is definitely covered by existing statutes unless murder by individuals is suddenly legal in China.

Why is it that we keep hearing calls for new laws for “cybercrime” and “cyberspace” when existing statutes already provide adequate protections? I wish that a tenth of the effort that goes into “new” laws for computer crime was going toward resources to enforce existing laws in cases where the interaction simply happened to take place on-line.

The area where I see a need for truly new laws might come in the area of standardizing criminal codes across jurisdictions. Since Internet-enabled offenses tend to sit in any number of jurisdictions (victim, server, criminal, criminal’s anonymous proxy, etc), it’s often hard to find even one where they will take on the investigation, even when you “venue shop” for someone who will simply return your calls.

I think the new law alluded to would involve property rights in “virtual” goods. In this case, it may be that had the killer some means of legal recourse regarding this “theft”, he might not have resorted to murder.

I note with some bemusement that this step forward for property rights is being suggested by an official of the largest communist country on the planet.

Oh, you mean like music? I think that until we sort out things like rights for music, sorting out rights for items created in a game world is out of our reach.

For example, if I pay a million bucks for a Gordian knife, does the game company have an obligation to me to keep the game open? Do they have an obligation to keep the game vibrant?

The game vendor has no obligation to keep the servers up beyond the point they accept payment or will return pro-rated/unused subscription fees (unless they are otherwise contractually bound to).

If you’re paying a million bucks for a Gordian knife or a Spoon of Slaying, then you had either have a lot of disposable income or a tremendous risk appetite. If you view your new Virtual Item as an asset, then it should be treated as more volatile than an Indonesian Junk Bond (A redundant term, I know, but humor me here). It could cease to exist with no effective recourse) which you can do nothing but accept. It could be superceded and thus de-valued by a new in-game object. It could be a fraud and you get scammed during settlement of the transaction.

That’s not to say that those assets don’t have value, rather it’s a matter of opinion as to what the value is. If I can get you to pay me a million bucks for my Spoon of Slaying or my condo in Tokyo, then it’s worth a million dollars. If I can’t then it’s not. This is the underlying concept behind Open Outcry and Capital Markets.

A better comparison is between my Spoon of Slaying and a DRM-locked music file (maybe this is what you meant, Adam?). Both of these can be rendered unavailable at the whim of someone else.

Music files in a format I control, however, such as .ogg or .mp3,, are a whole different issue. I can now control the risks related to availability (I can make my own backups, etc.). I may be assuming risk related to copyright and the eroding definition of Fair Use by doing so, but the risk of my asset disappearing has been mitigated to my satisfaction.

The headaches around that, however, are more trouble than I have keystrokes for.

While I agree with your second interpretation, I think that there are other issues, as you imply. You have a bunch of bits which happen to conform to the MP3 format, but do you have ownership of anything?

I think that’s complicated, and I believe that game object ownership is even more complicated.

Howell’s Law:
As any discussion about Digital Intellectual Property grows longer the probability of MP3’s being invoked approaches one.

I think that a more interesting question is, “What do I own if I have a bunch of bits which happen to look like your Credit History when parsed by my Database Engine?”

Do I own rights to that data? What obligations do I now own with regards to handling that data? What is the value of that data? Is it worth more or less than my Spoon Of Slaying, given that they’re both just rows in database? What is it worth to you for me to handle your Credit Report responsibly? Conversely, what is it worth to me to handle your Credit Report responsibly?

Right now, unfortunately, it seems that the answer to that last question is either “Nothing” or “Less Than Nothing” since handling that information responsibly both drives up costs and reduces revenue (at least in the short term).

I just pointed at a posting which touches on some similar failures to understand the importance of changing conditions over at Perilocity.

Aww, now you’re just baitin’ me!

More seriously, it is a fascinating question. I wish i had more time to think about it.

I prefer to think of it as Driving Thinking ;-) .

I want to split this out into a separate entry, but I’m pretty short on time/focus myself these days. That’s not to say I’m not going to take a whack at it, just that I wanted to put something in writing before I got distracted by some other Bright Shiny Problem.