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.
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
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.
[ link to this | view in thread ]