[MUD-Dev] Ebay bans character selling

[the_logos at www.achaea.com]

On Sun, 28 Jan 2001, Frank Crowell wrote:

> the_logos at www.achaea.com wrote:

> 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 agree, it's not clear. I would like to believe they have been
violated though as I do not believe you as a customer own the database
entry in their database

> 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.

Ponder, possibly. One way I try to discourage any illicit
character-selling (which isn't too difficult in the case of any
decent-sized character due to fact that our playerbase is a lot
smaller than EQ's) is by driving it underground. Whenever anyone asks
about character selling, I'm sure to point out that while you could go
ahead and sell the character, there's no guarantee the other guy is
going to actually transfer the character to you, and that even if he
did, he could just turn around and mention it to me, in which case I
will turn the offending character into a shrub, thus having cost the
buyer a lot of money.

--matt

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