[MUD-Dev] Ebay bans character selling

[Dave Rickey]

-----Original Message-----
From: rayzam <rayzam at home.com>

> ----- Original Message -----
> From: <the_logos at www.achaea.com>
> To: <mud-dev at kanga.nu>
> Sent: Sunday, January 28, 2001 12:55 PM
> Subject: [MUD-Dev] Ebay bans character selling

>> Ebay and Yahoo have banned the sale of virtual characters based on
>> the fact that doing so violates the intellectual property rights
>> of, say, Verant.

> Out of curiosity or ignorance: does it truly, in a legal sense
> violate intellectual property rights? would that stand up in a
> court? Or are those auction sites trying to avoid a mess?

Not that clear.  That any intellectual property rights associated with
the items or characters are vested in Verant is clear, and the
transfer of accounts (and therefore the characters, that being the
only way in EQ to transfer a character) is clearly against the EULA
(which, like most, grants a non-transferable liscense, and unlike most
the company actually has some means of enforcing that).  However, I'm
not sure what legal theory can allow the transfer of in-game items for
in-game recompense (or none at all), but forbid the same transfer when
the payment comes in the form of a real-world transfer of funds.

But since the IP never leaves Verant's control (it's just data on
their servers after all, if they don't have control of it, it doesn't
exist), it's hard to see where any traditional definitions of IP
violation exist.  Maybe you could argue that characters (and their
inventories) were "derivitive works", and therefore Verant could
specify how they were handled in every particular?

Seems likely that Verant is concerned about the potential future
issues that allowing items to be traded for real cash raises (just for
example, what if they wanted to shut the game down, and were served
with an injunction to keep it up so the items didn't go *poof*?), and
has decided to wish the problem away.

--Dave Rickey

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