Rod Blaine
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Posted - 2005.03.24 23:57:00 -
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Edited by: Rod Blaine on 25/03/2005 00:03:44
 Originally by: Rexy
Originally by: Ander
For example, we've got the PUL (Personuppgiftslagen) in Sweden. It's a law based on an EU decree. Sections in this law makes it possible for me as a citizen to demand that all stored data about me in Sweden and (I believe countries in EU and countries which has accepted this decree) can show me what data they store.
apparantly the site stores info about a character, wich is the property of ccp, what you are refering to is personal information about the RL person. your virtual characters have no rights assigned to them by law, you can claim privacy intrusion as a RL person, you cant do that as a virtual character.
Wrong, or at the very least that statement is on very slippery ground.
Some time ago, an MMO player succesfully sued his game company for taking away an ingame item from his ingame character without there being any ingame reason for it as explained and written down in the rules of that game.
Of course, suing becuas eof something like this is ridiculous, but that does not make it less true.
Fictious characters and items on the Eve servers are CCP property. However, cases like the one I described (which is only as I recall it, but the gist of it was correct, and it was the game Lineage btw) show that this virtual stuff has an inherent worth because fo the time and money spent in making it. EULA's indeed can never override national law. And Iceland does have some nice laws when it comes to privacy and information storage.
Tbh, I would advice against setting up this site. Not because the idea is bad, but because indeed some fool might have the money to spend on pursuing you for storing his personal information or that of the character to which he is bound inside of a virtual world in which he spends productive time and which he pays for. You might be interested in finding out what the damages decided on in some extremer cases are.
Legal implications on virtual items in games are not something to laugh at out of hand. CCP does alot of things in peculiar ways exactly because of legal implications. And some of those can be applied to you as easily as to CCP.
For example. Why does CCP never respond to posts within the ideas forum ?
Becasue everything posted has an intellectual property law attached to it. CCP's forums and EULA or not, it remains YOUR property. It's just one example of how far reaching consequences laws on immaterial things can have.
As for the EULA stating that conversations within the game are not private. That only pertains to CCP reserving the right to store and read all communications within the game. It does not mean that anyone else has that right, nor that CCP may share ANY ingame communications between players with third parties without the players' consent. That goes for communications, paying statistics, subscribtion statistics, etc etc. The tools provided do not matter, everything you make is yours and yours only, always. Noone is allowed to use or store or share what is yours without your prior consent.
The grey area is where immaterial goods touch material or real worth. A character can be sold for rl money, even if the EULA does nto allow it, it is a given fact that they can. This make a character have an inherent worth, wich then can be said to also go for the items on an account, the tiime spent training it, and...the ingame reputation, alignment, record, or whatever not. Even a possible enemy knowing when you log on and when not usaully is an advantage in this game, and as susch can be said to have inherent worth. Since a real person determines this information, it can also be said to pertain to a real person as well as a fictious one.
All in all, you do not want to mess with information (on matrial items or immaterial ones alike) that has an inherent worth and is not yours to store without consent.
Like said, only a warped mind would make work of it, but it wouldn't be the first to do so.
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