[MUD-Dev] Re: Mapping real money into MUD-Money

[Ren Reynolds]

I think one of the main issues with mapping real money to some
virtual money (say for the sake of argument v-gold) is that of
ownership - or lack of it.

At present I think it is highly unlikely that anyone owns v-gold (or
just about any other virtual item for that matter). My legal
research is primarily into avatar ownership, however many of the
legal lessons apply to any type of virtual item.

The problem is that current laws just don't cover these things. As
we are talking about abstract objects here, this is primarily
Intellectual Property laws.

Any individual bit of v-gold certainly is not patentable.

Because any given quantity of gold (that is the individuated thing
that someone would claim property in) is data, it falls outside
copyright protection in software or a collection or a literary work
generally or EU sui generis laws covering databases.

What's more contract law does not particularly impact this i.e. you
can't have a valid contract between two parties transferring
something that neither of them own.

Yes I know this is out of step with practice, but it's still the way
the law reads (at lest to me and other researcher who have looked
into this area of law - see also Molly Stephens's work).

If virtual items to become property (and that property is owned by
players) then the issue that we have is that game companies suddenly
have liability for a significant amount of other people property,
they in effect become banks.

Ren
www.renreynolds.com
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