Amazon Pays $150k for Lost Homework
This story is amusing at first: Amazon Coughs Up $150K for Lost Homework
But when I think about it in more detail, it starts to make me nervous.
How much is someone’s MMO character worth? What if a character is lost and:
- Cannot be restored.
- The backup lacks expensive, virtual items.
- The account is banned – wrongfully in the customer’s eyes – and he sues for the value of the accounts/items/gold.
There are a lot of tricky, difficult issues when it comes to the valuation of virtual property. As MMO developers, we need some kind of codified legal protection here. We need a legal ruling that all characters, gold, items, etc. are completely and totally the property of the company. Unless the company chooses to cede those rights (as with Entropia-like games) then this property ownership needs to be absolute.
Otherwise, we have some potential legal disasters coming in our industry.
This issue comes up on occasion. In general, in my non-lawyer opinion, I don’t think there’s much to worry about. Most people have been explicit in that the money you pay is only for access to the service, not for any sort of “ownership” of items in the game. Most developers/publishers have been very careful about this issue, so any potential lawsuits are going to have a hard time in court.
The homework article you link has the advantage of being an emotional issue. Some kid loses his homework? Anyone in a jury who has had to do homework is going to be sympathetic to his plight. Some geek loses his game character? Mainstream people aren’t going to be very sympathetic, I think.
My thoughts.
Is it any wonder why I don’t bother with these fancy newfangled web-based “store your files with us” services? I’ll take care of my own file storage, thanks. (The Kindle example really is bad design, though.)
Tesh: No kidding. I really don’t understand how some people are so enthusiastically embracing “cloud computing.” Things like google docs are nice for collaborative work, but for data storage? Heck no.
Brian: I believe you are right, but I can’t help but be very nervous. It really is pretty shocking how little legal and political power the gaming industry wields in comparison to its market size. A $20+ billion dollar industry should have more clout in politics and law, but for some reason we do not. Perhaps it is our naturally insular nature as developers, but that needs to change going forward. The music and movie industries have enormous political and legal power, and both of those industries are SMALLER than games. We need to get on the ball and start protecting ourselves.
Muckbeast wrote:
We need to get on the ball and start protecting ourselves.
I think most game developers take a very pragmatic approach. We don’t need to do a whole lot of lobbying because we’ve been under First Amendment protection. Pretty much every time some “think of the children!” video game issue comes up, some judge eventually smacks it down.
Damion Schubert just posted a link to a recent case that got thrown out in favor of an operator: http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=25495 We’re pretty well protected by existing laws so far. But, complacency is not a good thing.
As for political pressure, I really appreciate this site: http://www.videogamevoters.org/ Sign up and they’ll let you know when there are bad laws being considered in congress or your state. I support this type of grassroots movement more than paying a bunch of lobbyists, myself.
I’m going to go off on a bit of tangent here, because this story made me extremely angry when I first heard about it. Remote deletion is absolutely 100% WRONG. That shit should be illegal. I will never knowingly buy a device that allows it. Kid should have went for way more than $150k.
As far as the gaming industry’s political/legal power, the ESA doesn’t seem to be doing too bad really. Last year 43 bills were introduced to regulate game sales in America, and none of them became law. Games are just the political whipping boy of the day. Politicians use it to generate some votes from the family values crowd, then forget about it.
Brian: Thanks for that link. That is a very encouraging legal ruling.
Outsider: No doubt regarding the Kindle. For that incident alone, I don’t see how I could ever stomach the idea of owning a Kindle.
I don’t think this specific case relates to the gaming industry. It’s something more akin to Microsoft remote wiping hard drives with “pirated” copies installed and getting the false positives as well. And I totally agree with Outsider about forced deletions.
Gamewise I think it’s the likes of Second Life that might want to worry…those that encourage real money to flow in and out of the actual game economy. Likewise although to a lesser extent games with item malls.
Second Life is actually getting sued right now by some people who make skins and such. They argue that Linden Labs has a duty to protect other people from ripping off their IP. That seems INSANE to me.