Wed - December 10, 2003

With massively multiplayer games such as There.com consuming the time—and money—of growing numbers of people, legal scholars are asking questions such as these about whether the law should recognize rights in virtual swords, virtual cars, and even virtual identities. The answers that they reach could affect online communities for years to come.

Take, for example, a virtual identity. Although it exists only within a game, in the virtual environment it can gain attributes that the legal system protects in the real world, such as a reputation, wealth, real property, and possessions. Acquiring these virtual status symbols may take considerable time, effort, and financial expenditure.

But in virtual worlds like Ultima Online, which encompass hundreds of thousands of users yet have no police force to regulate behavior, mischief makers can harass other players, tear down homes, and otherwise make game play intolerable. If a virtual thief steals virtual possessions that a player has worked long and hard to acquire, should that player have legal recourse to recover them?

The answer isn't always clear.

In the offline world, theft is punishable because it breaches laws that define our social compact with each one another. Social expectations may be quite different in a virtual environment. Stealing, pillaging, and other antisocial behaviors may be "fun" reasons that many people find massively multiplayer games so compelling. But if virtual behaviors cannot be called criminal without first understanding the social environment in which they occur, it is equally clear that some virtual acts invite offline consequences. For example, few would argue that a hacker who broke into an Ultima Online account and sold another person's virtual property for real world profit should not face prosecution.

If the intersection between real and virtual worlds raises fascinating questions, it is not without its dark humor. The day that some plaintiff finally establishes that his virtual castle in Britannia holds real world value, he'll probably receive a sobering notice from the Internal Revenue Service claiming that he owes millions in property taxes for the structure.

I wonder if a virtual attorney will be able to help?