[MUD-Dev] Ethical behavior ... a hijacking.

[Koster]

From: Matt Mihaly

> This is directed to John: Why would a single document be desirable
> or necessary? I mean, the standing of individuals in games is
> already contained in the legal codes of the various countries of
> the world. And why would I, as a developer/administrator, sign
> that kind of document, except as a marketing ploy?

I'm not John, but since I'm loony, I'll answer anyway. :)

The standing of individuals in games isn't addressed coherently in
any legal codes that I have heard of. The standing of a website
isn't even settled legally yet (recently, a judge in Florida ruled
that a porn website could not violate community standards of the
community from which it was hosted, because it was a "place" of its
own), much less that of virtual environments.

Online environments are currently governed by a horrible mishmash of
laws wherein some precedents (like the one I just cited) consider
them places, others consider them telephone conversations (cf
current legislation governing the use of wiretaps and surveillance
on the Internet), others consider them venues of publication (cf
Harlan Ellison's lawsuit against ISPs and AOL), and others consider
them broadcast media or common carriers or "just games."

To cast it in another light--characters in an online roleplaying
game are a record of activities undertaken by a user on a remote
server. This is no different really from the records that make up
your credit report, nor the records that make up your preferences at
Amazon.com, nor the records which make up your bank transactions,
nor the records which make up your typical /logs directory on any
webserver. Some of these have legislation covering them, and some
don't--but the laws are all different, and in some cases it's
considered private info and in some cases it's not and in many
cases, it is but it gets sold to the highest bidder anyway.

Why would you sign such a document? Because signing such documents
gets you more users and an aura of reputability. That would be why
other companies in other fields have ended up signing such
documents, sometimes under governmental pressure and sometimes
not. As you say, this can be considered a marketing ploy.

>From my (loony) point of view, it doesn't matter why the
administrator of a space signs such a document. As soon as the very
notion is in the air, users will consider them to be inalienable
rights. And fighting the battle for nomenclatture with your users
is, as Jeff Freeman observed, a futile act. :)

-Raph
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