Selling The Emperor's New Clothes

By now almost everyone will be familiar with the concept of online gaming, Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (or MMORPGs) and virtual worlds. If you haven't played one then it's almost certain that you know someone who does, possibly a teenager, but more and more likely another lawyer, or an accountant or banker. Indeed there are "clans" existing on certain games who all work for the same investment bank or Docklands based law firm (for example).

The demographics of online gaming worlds are infinitely flexible, in July 2007 Blizzard Entertainment claimed that it had over 9 million subscribers to its online fantasy game "World of Warcraft" and Second Life claims a resident population in excess of 10 million, albeit with only a tiny percentage seemingly online at any time. It is, however undeniable that virtual worlds of every type engage a huge number of people who devote large amounts of time, energy and money to these pursuits. Small wonder, therefore, that lawyers are getting involved in this area on a professional basis.

One of the more contentious areas in online gaming has been the ownership of an individual's online persona (or avatar) and equipment. In the early days of online environments (principally MMORPG's) these were limited in nature and a player could choose an avatar from a limited number of templates and equipment was rigidly defined and either bought with virtual coin from virtual shopkeepers or found as virtual loot. Quickly, however interaction between players became sufficiently advanced that equipment was firstly swapped and then sold, both in game, and frequently outside the game, either through existing markets such as ebay and then more commonly on specially created sites such as those run by IGE (Internet Gaming Exchange), and independent market and most recently by Sony Online Entertainment for the Sony universe of online games (such as The Matrix Online, Star Wars and Everquest). The latter is of particular interest as most game developers initially took the view that since they had developed and owned the code on which both the virtual worlds and the online items were based then they were the owners of all these virtual goods, to the extent that these existed at all. Buying and selling items was perceived as "cheating", although this position became rather debatable as all the major players adhering to this view permitted ingame trading and actually facilitated it, reserving their wrath for sales on...