http://valleywag.com/tech/linden-lab/the-v...real-264991.php

Very interesting...

Forren's going to jail!

Check it out at Matt Mihaly (Head of IRE, for the IRE younglings) and Ralph Koster's blogs

http://forge.ironrealms.com/2007/05/31/bragg-vs-linden/
http://www.raphkoster.com/2007/05/31/toses-in-trouble/

It's pretty interesting stuff. I actually wrote a research paper on material culture on the Internet and how this kind of stuff is coming up where people are buying virtual goods. It's a weird age we're coming into for sure

An age of idiots... what kind of a moron would pay for someone to change a few bits on a server they don't own, with no guarantee the server will even continue to- oh wait.

Yep, just like online banking!

Except, it isn't.

Except, it is.

*points to pay pal*

PayPal isn't online banking.

It isn't? You can move money in and out of an account, you have a balance... what is it then?

Once upon a time, PayPal wasn't an online banking service. It was only a payment facilitator, kinda like CCBill. We can only assume that, in his constant attempt to buck The Man, poor Verithrax hasn't had contact with PayPal (or any other popular, mainstream, capitalist venture) for several years now.

The case is interesting, but I don't think it's going to have the far-reaching implications that the hype websites say it will. People actually own their data on Second Life. I can't think of any other "online world" that has the same clause. It's either very explicitly not yours (World of Warcraft) or not stated and up in the air (Iron Realms). IRE's actually fairly generous when it comes to credits. We trade them between characters. We sell our systems, which are unauthorized interfaces for IRE games, for credits. (Heck, they allow us to sell systems. I don't know all their rules, but I wouldn't be surprised if Blizzard toadstomped someone selling WoW mods.) I think we all assume that we don't own our characters, but do we own our credits? I'm fairly sure that, if it's ever decided that we don't, this ruling wouldn't touch IRE.

I haven't actually had any need for PayPal's services, so no, I don't keep up-to-date on how PayPal works or what it does nowadays. If it's a proper bank, then it stopped being like Second Life; if it's still like a virtual currency, then it's not a proper bank. My definition of a proper bank is: Can you take a wad of real cash and deposit it? Can you convert money in your account directly into real, live cash? Can you transfer money between arbitrary accounts? Are they legally obligated to come up at least partially with whatever amount of real money you have deposited in them?

Any virtual economy with a purely one-way relation to the real world (Like WoW or an IRE game) is economically identical to a service. The problem starts when it becomes possible to liquidate virtual assets into real-life assets, but it can and should be viewed as a system of services and credit, not as a system of real commerce or assets.

Good luck selling a WoW mod. The only reason systems remain profitable in IRE is because we're small enough that I can't recall anyone having taken a system they bought and handing it out to everyone. With 5 million or however many people playing, you can bet it'd be on a mod site in a day.

Actually all it takes is an active combatant with a penchant for open-source software.

Murphy, Ethelon, whomever sells Palisade: Take note, it's in your best interest that I never become an active combatant.