[MUD-Dev] Sony to ban sale of online characters from its popu lar gaming sites

[Matthew Mihaly]

On Tue, 11 Apr 2000 maddog at best.com wrote:

> Sellers, Michael wrote:
> > 
> > I strongly suspect there are a variety of more subtle/less draconian (and at
> > least as effective) solutions to this "problem" of people buying and selling
> > in-game assets on EBay.  It will be interesting to see how this policy plays
> > out however, and whether Sony has any actual legal legs to stand on in
> > trying to remove online auction sites from the picture.  
> >  
> 
> Yes, Mike there are better solutions. 
> 
> As for the IP issue, this has to be the weakest argument 
> that I have ever heard. No property ever
> gets transferred or transformed.  There is no reverse engineering,
> no derivative works, no copying and reselling.  It is just 
> items in a large database. 
> It's like saying everyone can buy the same book, but people have access
> to only certain pages (items).  Accessing the pages is an IP violation.
> Well I have been wrong before on IP issues, but this one really 
> baffles me.  Looks like TSR again, in a  different body.

Yes, and if you buy the book under those terms, then you've bought the
book under those terms.  If you don't like the terms, don't buy the book.
I mean, like you say, they are items in a database. If I go to a
data-mining website and pay for some service, I certainly don't have any
right to anything outside what I explicitly paid for, at least legally.
Just because it's in the same database doesn't mean you deserve access to
it.

--matt




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