Chinese Justice

[Jarulf]

According to the EULA or TOS (one of the two, or maybe both), Blizzard owns all of "your" in-game content.
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Well, in my opinion one first have to think about if there really is something to "own".

Next, we have to look at what we mean about this "own". Owning is typically about physical property. Someone might raise the copyright issue, but then, normal game data (actually data in general) is not something you get copyright on. In addition, for there to be a copyright violation, you need to, for example, copy something, which you never do.

Even if we DO assert that, for example, Blizzard "owns" something, what is the violation we have done? We have hardly removed their ownership (however we defined it) they still own it, it is still on their servers and so on.

This leads to another problem, the "selling" we normally talk about really doesn't take place in unless we actually own them, since ownership, regardless of who has it, doesn't change. At most we have a change of which character in the game holds the item/gold. However, we are certainly allowed to make such changes in the game, or there would be no possibility to change it to start with. If Blizzard owns it though, including the characters, they still own it afterwards, if they don't, no problem either.

So even though one use terms such as "own" and "sell", it really has nothing to do with what those concepts traditional means and hence one can't think as it would. What it boils down to is that it is a contractual thing (only, in my opinion, no copyright issue or similar) and weather it is possible to have the terms as they are and if it is valid for a third part (in this case Blizzard) to forbid two people to exchange money for whatever reason for doing something that in itself is perfectly allowed.