Random Law Review # 3

Jason T. Kunze's Regulating Virtual Worlds Optimally: The Model End User License Agreement,

7 Northwestern Journal of Technology and Intellectual Property 102 (2008)

Back around 1996-1997, in my first year of undergraduate studies, I got myself seriously addicted to an online role-playing game called Nitemare (later, Arcane Nites). This was a text-only game (MUDs in ancient parlance)--I was just a little too early and too poor for the modern full-graphics games like World of Warcraft or Ultima Online, of which I'm sure I would have become even more crazily obsessed. I had a ton of free time as an undergraduate and I filled pretty much all of it playing this game (my memories are a bit fuzzy, but I was the leader of some sort of knightly clan) (eventually, I got a real-world girlfriend and the game didn't seem that interesting anymore, but that's another story). Anyway, the reason for my rambling is that my experiences as an undergrad a decade ago made this selection in the Random Law Review Experiment a really interesting one for me.

Kunze's article talks about the one-sided contracts between on-line game developers and on-line game players--for the most part, those Terms of Service agreements that nobody ever reads gives enormous powers to the developers to do pretty much whatever they want in the virtual world, including deleting characters and their creations on a whim. The problem is that this isn't just a frustrating thing for the players, but that many virtual worlds have economies tied to real-world dollars, where people buy and sell their virtual creations for real money. For example, Kunze talks about a case where Second Life stepped into a virtual land sale, decided something was improper, and banned the seller from the game--a move which cost the real-life seller several thousand real-life bucks. My favorite example is from a game called EVE Online where one of the characters online acted as an investment bank and eventually collected deposits of 790 billion in in-game currency, which was worth about $ 170,000 in real-world currency; after getting that much in the bank, the character simply took the money and ran. Predictably, this led to frustrated depositors begging the EVE Online developer to punish the investment banker player, but the developer refused because such scams were part of the game's intentionally lawless atmosphere.

The sections of the article on improving Terms of Service agreements was a bit dry, but the subject of how real-world law gets dragged into virtual disputes really is an interesting one.