Real Justice For Virtual Crimes?
from the police-who-play-EverCrack-all-day? dept
As people get increasingly used to the idea of building up characters and virtual goods in various online games and then selling them off on eBay, some are wondering if real police should be brought in if a character is mugged within the game. After all, the character and his or her possessions are now worth real money, and losing them within the game could be "costly". Of course, isn't the point of a bunch of these games to beat up on other characters and rob them? Meanwhile, I'm just waiting for the day when police departments have their "gaming squad" who have to police Ultima and EverQuest online all day, to track down the bad seeds online. In South Korea people are already reporting such "cybercrimes" to the police, though the article doesn't say whether or not the police are doing anything about it.
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futurism
In the second of the two books, most of the cybercrime investigated is copyright violations. A telling comment on the way we are going with our IP laws.
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