[MUD-Dev] Ebay bans character selling

[Frank Crowell]

the_logos at www.achaea.com wrote:

> Ebay and Yahoo have banned the sale of virtual characters based on
> the fact that doing so violates the intellectual property rights of,
> say, Verant.

> While I certainly applaud this enforcement of Verant's rights, I
> wonder how long it will be until someone sets up an auction service
> specifically to cater to the buying and selling of virtual items and
> hosts it somewhere handily out of the reach of the US government.


It's not clear at all that any IP laws have been violated.  There is
no transfer of items -- they are database entries.  The only new
property that is "transferred" is the character itself -- created by
the player.  Certainly the effort to create a character has more IP
value than a database entry.

I tried to contact Verant through their dev/null mail addresses on
this whole topic last spring. I felt that Sony/Verant were going
overboard and that there were more rational approaches to what they
preceived as a problem.  Btw, at that time the issue was not IP; that
came later when Verant needed a way to get Ebay to take action.

I believe that Sony/Verant will do more harm in the long run by
driving this whole buying/selling business underground. At least Yahoo
and Ebay provided some protection to the buyer.  And this in no way
solves the "account stealing" problem -- which was the real problem to
begin with.

frank




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