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Paper by Yale Law Professor - goldfish - 08-14-2004
I just looked over a paper by Yale law professor Jack Balkin (one of the top constitutional law and First Amendment scholars in the country) about some tort liability and First Amendment issues relating to MMRPG's. There turn out to be a surprising number of potential legal issues. Can a person be sued in tort (and should they be allowed to) for defrauding another player of valuable in-game items? On the flip side, is the nature of a video game such that the expressive act is protected by the First Amendment? And if someone PK's you and steals your items, do you have a legal right to force the game operator to identify the theif so that you can bring a suit against him?
Balkin's abstract of the article notes:
Virtually all activity in virtual worlds must begin as some form of expression, and therefore virtually all forms of legally redressable injury in virtual worlds will be some form of communications tort. However, the law of the First Amendment, as it currently exists, does not adequately protect many important features of the rights to design and play. Many virtual spaces are rapidly becoming sites of real world and virtual world commerce. In the future game designers will likely attempt to invoke the First Amendment to avoid regulation of their business practices.
Professor Balkin's paper is an interesting analysis of the legal issues at play here. It is available, free, from the SSRN, at:
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abs...tract_id=555683
(Warning: It's about 50 pages long. And it's actually quite breezy reading for a legal article, but non-legal types might find it to be a complicated read).
Paper by Yale Law Professor - DeeBye - 08-14-2004
This is pretty interesting, but I see a glaring problem.
Quote:In the future game designers will likely attempt to invoke the First Amendment to avoid regulation of their business practices.
The First Amendment is an American thing, but MMOGs are played by people from all countries. Whose laws do we follow?
Paper by Yale Law Professor - Minionman - 08-14-2004
You follow us dangit. :)
So legal issues are starting over whether stuff in games is "expression" or "property" or other stuff. wow.
Paper by Yale Law Professor - Occhidiangela - 08-15-2004
You have provided lots of neato legal links in the past, so I suspect this will also be good.
Our allegedly inalienable right is "the pursuit of hapiness," not hapiness.
Still pursuing . . .