Another lawsuit for the timeline

  13 Responses to “Another lawsuit for the timeline”

1. BPMWare says:

   May 10, 2006 at 10:20 am

   Ironically, the guy filing the suit is a laywer!

   (I live in West Chester)
2. Inkling says:

   May 10, 2006 at 11:13 am

   This could be a landmark case in the legal and popular understanding of virtual worlds. Has there been any response from Linden Labs?

   I, for one, hope Mark wins. If people are going to be investing millions of RL dollars in Second Life, as Linden Labs hopes they will, these entrepeneurs will need basic legal rights to protect their investments.
3. Faith says:

   May 10, 2006 at 1:05 pm

   […] Comments […]
4. Oogami says:

   May 10, 2006 at 10:24 pm

   I do not really understand why online ‘property’ fetches such high monetary value. The provider can create new ‘land’ with a snap of their fingers.

   It feels like a zero sum game that gambles on the premise that there would never come a time when all their userbase would decide to cash out their virtual properties. It might be even worse than zero sum, because there is a constant outflow of real money for the provider to keep the system running.
5. Eskie says:

   May 11, 2006 at 1:15 am

   In response to Oogami:

   In Second Life people can buy land from Linden Labs at their leisure. However, Linden Labs does not have to repurchase this land if a user leaves the game or wants to get rid of it. The only chance a user has to get back his initial investment is to sell or auction to other users.

   On top of that, Linden Labs charges land maintenance fees – the more land you own, the higher your monthly bill.

   From the view of Linden Labs, there is a constant influx of money from the user base, and assuming monthly land maintenance fees exceed operating costs to maintain that land, Linden Labs can only make money.
6. chabuhi says:

   May 11, 2006 at 6:16 am

   This is just going to become lawsuit heaven in the next few years. I was thinking about virtual eviction when I saw a similar discussion some months ago. When I was still “playing” Second Life my virtual landlord disappeared one day, having had enough of the VW and cancelling his account. Now, this meant little to me — I played SL for fun and my little business was not generating any real revenue. But it made me wonder, what if one of his tenants DID have a seriously profitable venture going and his sudden disappearance meant a serious disruption to that tenant’s virtual business? Is that a legal risk for the virtual landlord? IRL, if you were to show up at your store one morning only to find a grassy field where the strip-mall once was, I would imagine you’d have some legitimate gripe against your landlord, wouldn’t you? I don’t know what the law is, but I know that in my state, for residential agreements anyway, the landlord is required to give the tenant 60 days notice (or something like that). I wonder if this is going to become a requirement in VW’s like SL? I suppose the arrangement is at-will between the two parties, and it may very well be covered in the EULA, but this story just got me thinking about that.
7. csven says:

   May 11, 2006 at 7:04 am

   Which is why reputation systems will increase in importance. Chinese businessmen haven’t had many laws to depend on, so – according to a report I read not too long ago – they do things the old-fashioned way: they ask around to find out if the other guy (or gal) is trustworthy. Reputation is the new currency. “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss”.

   Next up: reputation systems built into the new advertising syndication feed systems. From there it might spread into the more immersive things like vw’s. But until then, serious virtual world shop owners go with names they can more-or-less trust. In Second Life, there’s one that stands out like a sore thumb. For people entering the space who have no substantial and well-publicized investment to make them a trustworthy bet, ditching anonymity and leveraging their RL information/reputation will probably be the way to level the field to some degree in this regard.
8. Prokofy Neva says:

   May 11, 2006 at 7:28 pm

   I think it would behoove all the posters here to do a little bit of basic preliminary research into this case before you base your judgement on it as being “about the value of virtual land” or that “you hope Mark wins”. It isn’t about that at all — and he shouldn’t win unless you think it’s fine to build up precedent law on how consumers can destroy gaming companies on a whim. Or course, that’s not going to happen.

   Mark Woebegone and his alts, some of whom were already charged with copyright theft for reverse-engineering and mimicking houses of some of the better architects in SL, bought some land on the Linden auctions by using a hitherto unknown exploit. He found that by going to a parcel visible as purple in the auction queue inworld, but not actually posted on the auction itself, he could force the system to open up the on-demand bids at only $1.00 by plugging its Auction ID right into the browser in the place of another, active auction. Normally the Lindens open them up at $1000 per sim or rough equivalent. Using alts, he then bid it up to make it look like a legit auction, and then bought it for a few bucks, then sold this entire server (valued at $1000 or so) for pennies. So far from a courageous crusader staking out important new territory in virtual law, he’s merely like a joyrider stealing a car with the car keys in it, then dumping his hot car on the street to whomever would buy it quick, then yelping when the police catch up with him.

   All that happened is that the Lindens, when they realized that someone was using an exploit to tinker with their land auction, seized the land back, and booted this guy and his alts. So there’s no case here. There’s no harm done against Marc Woebegone, but every sort of fraud and tort and harm done again Linden Lab. Even people very critical of the Land Auction and the Lindens, as I am, can see that as plain as day.

   Woebegone is posturing and blustering to try to get attention to himself for his overall project of trying to find the holes in SL and then claim negligence I guess. But no one had tried that exploit before, and it was closed already once the Lindens saw how it was done. It is not a proper and legitimate use of the auction to force a parcel of land out of the queue.

   I know the hunger to “have a case” about virtual land is so deep that people are willing not to look at the facts. It’s really a shame that this isn’t a good case, this media-saturated, attention-grabbing case, because we do need good cases to protect the value of our land. Bad cases make bad law. This isn’t even a bad case — it’s a case that will be thrown out of court or matched by a countersuit.
9. Eskie says:

   May 12, 2006 at 2:46 am

   And here I was wondering about that suspicious “Bragg learned of a way to purchase virtual land significantly below market values” phrase in his press release. I actually expected some kind of exploit taking place.

   I am not that familiar with Second Life, so I dont understand that in-game purple cell and out-of-game browser stuff – but if he actually used an exploit to get the land in the first place (and it sounds as if he used a vulnerability in the auction system to start an auction not authorized by Linden Labs, but taking place in the Linden Labs system), I doubt he has any chance of winning. He might get back his original investment, though (the low prices he paid), since the purchase contract is void and therefore Linden Labs has no legal means to keep that money.

   Of course, Linden Labs should look into sueing him for abusing the system. There should be some law somewhere prohibiting that (as hacking is a criminal activity). Might cost him his lawyer licence if Linden Labs successfully sues him…
10. Prokofy Neva says:

    May 12, 2006 at 7:04 am

    In the simulated, controlled game world of the so-called “market-based Linden auctions,” you can’t speak of a way of “buying land significantly below market value” when you are talking about what happens on the Linden auctions.

    The overly powerful executive branch or government of SL has a controlled auction and they set its initial, wholesale price — the “market” doesn’t set that price. They set the opening bid for every sim at $1000 (occasionally one that is smaller in size with more government land included might be opened at a somewhat lower rate). Whether the land is prime waterfront that has “Linden protection” as we call it, i.e. an open sea where no one can block your view that remains permanent Governor Linden Maintenance Land, valued at say $10-12/meter retail, or whether the land is flat PG roadside, valued at $4-6/meter retail, the market still opens at the flat, standard $1000. This forced-fed auction at forced-fed prices is one of the way the Lindens keep land at a value of around $5/m on the average, for their own social-engineering purposes.

    Then the bidding may or may not start. If someone likes the sim the Lindens baked and put out, they bid, and there are 3 days for the bidding to proceed until the auction closes automatically on a timer. If they don’t like it, and it sits there for awhile, beyond 5 days, they often simply remove it, and try recycling it later on a day when they have a shortage.

    What Mark did was jimmy the browser with an auction ID number from a future auction — not an existing, placed, open auction. So he didn’t find a way to “buy it below market value”. He found a way to *circumvent* the $1000-forced-opening-bid system to introduce his own, fake, opening bid of $1 or $5 or whatever, significantly below *the state’s wholesale value* not “market value”.

    Next, after using bids to bid against himself to move it along and make it appear real, it closed and he ended up paying $5 or whatever the ridiculous price was. He then scampered around hurriedly to unload his hot sim like a hotwired car, and had the Linden dollars in his account. I think he wasn’t able to cash out those Linden dollars into real US dollars (which is allowed on the LindEX) because the Lindens seized all of his accounts.

    “Buying significantly below market value” is an action you can perform only inworld, not on the external, web-based auctions. The market is inside the world, and there, yes, there are people who want to liquidate in a hurry, and sell you land valued at $10/meter for only $1 or $2/meter just to unload it so they don’t have to pay the tier, or maintenance fee on it. Mark sold his sim for $3/meter, or at least advertised it for that and sold some of it at that or lower prices (we don’t have sales records of inworld auctions, only auction records are public). So he SOLD at significantly below market value but he BOUGHT at his own contrived fake value, and not the state’s wholesale value. I think these are important distinctions to make.

    Figuring out how to jimmy the browser with the future auction ID number — substituting that number to an existing live auction’s number in the browser creating a new URL — isn’t hacking. It’s possible somebody may even argue their way out of saying it’s even an exploit — perhaps defense will argue that while land shopping and spotting the purple-coloured sim (they show up red when seized by Governor Linden or when first created by Governor Linden, then purple after being put in the auction line, then red again after being sold and with “view/property owners” these colours show up as you fly around), Marc simply pulled up the auction, which has numerous listings, and for convenience sake, he popped in the auction number of a parcel viewed inworld, not on the auction list. He might have actually discovered his exploit potential in this way accidently, or he may have figured out to do it, not sure. The point is, it is not how the system is intended, and you can see that by viewing the auctions themselves — they always open at $1000 (or a close pro-rated rate near that) for sims, not $1.
11. Oogami says:

    May 15, 2006 at 12:27 am

    I am not judging anything. I am just wondering about the attached value.

    I am well aware that the company would not be dumb enough to haphazardly release huge packets of land and depreciate the overall value. That does not remove the fact that they *can*. It feel like the diamond cartel to me.
12. Jim says:

    May 15, 2006 at 6:33 am

    Another thing that might end up on the timeline… Ever heard of Net Neutrality, and the recent efforts in Congress to bring it down?

    Currently telecom companies can’t determine what you do and don’t see on the web, or how fast you see it– their systems are completely egalitarian when it comes to their data packets.

    Legislation currently in Congress (the COPE act) seeks to change this. Telecoms want the right to charge tolls to send datapackets over the web, and give priority to those that pay. There’s even a chance they’ll redirect users to sites that have paid the tolls.

    I’m sure you guys can see how this might affect online gaming. It’s blackmail. Don’t pay this new fee? Sorry, your users get roxxored by the Lagmonster. Or maybe users can’t find the server at all.

    Read up on the following posts, which explain this better than I can…

    A Wiki about what Net Neutrality is:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality

    An editorial on the politics going down right now:
    http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/oped/bal-op.internet09may09,0,4559120.story

    A blog fast becoming the center of the “save the Net” effort:
    http://www.isen.com/blog/

    Finding out how to write or phone your congressman about stopping this legislation:
    http://www.house.gov/writerep/

    And thanks to Scott Kurtz for publicizing this cause:
    http://www.pvponline.com/

    (Raph, if you’d like to read up / weigh in on this, that would be fantastic. And it’s a bit in the way of soapboxing; if that’s not appropriate here I understand and if you’d prefer I didn’t post things like this just let me know.)
13. Allen S says:

    May 22, 2006 at 11:55 am

    Hmmm trying to remember some of that stuff from a year of law school….contracts and property law were fun but this takes the cake. In summary, this guy is a lawyer, who broke a EULA (contract), to force a fictitous auction (in contract, offer) that was accepted (in contract, accepted) for real money (in contract, consideration). Now my professor was an old school socratic type. So he tought us about the “peppercorn” which is basically an “item” or consideration, which must be exchanged.

    Now we couldnt say he was squatting, because he bought the land (I dont know much about SL so correct me if Im wrong)but it was actually stolen property (i.e the “title was no good”) (Property Theft) which he then sold to an unsuspecting buyer (Fruad)cuasing the previous owner, in this case Linden Labs harm (Damages) and probably the otherwise ignorant buyer distress (emotional distress eh?)

    It would seem to mee just kind of breaking this down with my rudimentary knowledge of the law that SL actually has a pretty good counter suit….if he wants virtual property to be his peppercorn he better be willing to accept ALL of the laws premises not just part of them. Of course if I remember my case books were always littered with case law wherein the plaintiff thought the law didnt apply to them……especially disgruntled tenants heheh

    Every day I am so thankful that Im a data miner for a living…as the alternative just would have been to scary to handle lol….

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