Should WoW Thieves Be Sent To Real Prisons?

Big Peanut: Yo homie, what are you in for?

UbErsl4y3r1996: I stole a rare unicorn mount from this dumb kid in World of Warcraft.

Big Peanut: ...

UbErsl4y3r1996: I mean car jacking.
 
Anyone who plays wow since 2004 should goto prison and still pays 15.00 a month for it since then 1,000 better MMOs have come out. A real wow fan would like Prison because of the free food and inability to go anywhere and be social. Kinda like me =)
 
Philosophically speaking, material things in our lives have value because of the time taken to create and/or acquire them (time is what gives everything in its value—including our own lives—because it is limited for us mere mortals.) In that light, I can see why losing a virtual item that took a long time to acquire can hurt as much as losing something physical. Legally speaking, it's a whole new world we're moving towards.
 
As silly as it sounds I would not be surprised if this is done somewhere in the future though.
 
rudy said:
How easy it is to steal does not matter its theft. If someone parks their bike in front of a store for a minute or 2 while they run in and get something and it gets stolen, it is still a punishable offense. Like wise what is considered hard to one person may be easy for another. Maybe you think your password is strong but I know you and know what it is so its easy for me to get in. Or maybe I just have physical access to watch you typing it.



You are probably grossly misinterpreting the article. The mention is for crimes to be punished in a similar manor to real life. No one goes to prison for stealing a $500 watch in real life. But if they get caught multiple times or break other laws in the process then they might. Same should be true for hackers and virtual thieves.





Courts do this all the time. They estimate time lost, items of unusual value, etc...








To the above 3 and others.. I think people are confusing 2 issues. No one is saying that if you steal an in game item during regular game play you should be punished if it is part of how the game works. Seriously people think that is what someone wants? What we are talking about stealing it through some stealth or forced manor. IE hacking your account, forcing you to give something through black mail, or other things that you would never think are right in real life with physical objects.
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None of that matters. It doesn't matter if the virtual item was worth $1 or $1,000,000 dollars. It is virtual and inside a very limited scope of a game. As such it can both be restored by a simple button click and deleted from the offending party. Sorry but this doesn't even warrant the discussion of real prison time. You cannot claim monetary loss on something that a GM can simply create again as needed. Just because people are dumb enough to pay RL currency for it doesn't mean it has any value.
 
Dekoth-E- said:
None of that matters. It doesn't matter if the virtual item was worth $1 or $1,000,000 dollars. It is virtual and inside a very limited scope of a game. As such it can both be restored by a simple button click and deleted from the offending party. Sorry but this doesn't even warrant the discussion of real prison time. You cannot claim monetary loss on something that a GM can simply create again as needed. Just because people are dumb enough to pay RL currency for it doesn't mean it has any value.
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All of these same things would apply to stocks, money government can just print more so what? The point of punishment is to deter rampant abuse and that applies to virtual goods as well. It costs the system time and resources to deal with a problem on top of the dollar value of the item. Your argument doesn't make sense and does not look like any type of world I would want to live in. By your definition no one should be able to be prosecuted for pirating software either.
 
I don't really see any reason for that in a virtual world.

I mean, everything that happens in these games is logged. All they have to do in order to make things right is go into the database and delete the item from the character that stole it, and add it back to the rightful owner. If the behavior needs to be punished, they can ban the offender from the game. That should be punishment enough.

Virtual items are completely replaceable, as long as the people running the virtual world are willing to investigate.

Illegally gaining access to an actual ACCOUNT and doing something with it the owner didn't agree with is a real-world matter, however. Because the account represents your identity and a record of the rights you've purchased. It's effectively a form of identity theft. An individual item is not an identity.

Another issue would be if someone hacked into WoW's servers and deleted everyone's WoW accounts. That should be prosecuted in a real court. Stealing an item in the game is not on the same level.

To be honest, I really don't like the door opened up by the idea of punishing people for online actions. We've had a lot of freedom on the Internet up to now, but stuff like this would probably result in a lot more regulation and expense. You'd have to deal with more red tape and harsher consequences for any mistakes you made online. And it's so easy to do stuff online that people's inhibitions are lowered. It just seems a little unfair to expect people to treat it with the same respect/gravity as real life at all times.
 
athenian200 said:
I don't really see any reason for that in a virtual world.

I mean, everything that happens in these games is logged. All they have to do in order to make things right is go into the database and delete the item from the character that stole it, and add it back to the rightful owner. If the behavior needs to be punished, they can ban the offender from the game. That should be punishment enough.

Virtual items are completely replaceable, as long as the people running the virtual world are willing to investigate.

Illegally gaining access to an actual ACCOUNT and doing something with it the owner didn't agree with is a real-world matter, however. Because the account represents your identity and a record of the rights you've purchased. It's effectively a form of identity theft. An individual item is not an identity.

Another issue would be if someone hacked into WoW's servers and deleted everyone's WoW accounts. That should be prosecuted in a real court. Stealing an item in the game is not on the same level.

To be honest, I really don't like the door opened up by the idea of punishing people for online actions. We've had a lot of freedom on the Internet up to now, but stuff like this would probably result in a lot more regulation and expense. You'd have to deal with more red tape and harsher consequences for any mistakes you made online. And it's so easy to do stuff online that people's inhibitions are lowered. It just seems a little unfair to expect people to treat it with the same respect/gravity as real life at all times.
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Agreed 100%.
 
Dekoth-E- said:
None of that matters. It doesn't matter if the virtual item was worth $1 or $1,000,000 dollars. It is virtual and inside a very limited scope of a game. As such it can both be restored by a simple button click and deleted from the offending party. Sorry but this doesn't even warrant the discussion of real prison time. You cannot claim monetary loss on something that a GM can simply create again as needed. Just because people are dumb enough to pay RL currency for it doesn't mean it has any value.
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Also agreed.
 
Comixbooks said:
Anyone who plays wow since 2004 should goto prison and still pays 15.00 a month for it since then 1,000 better MMOs have come out. A real wow fan would like Prison because of the free food and inability to go anywhere and be social. Kinda like me =)
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I can spend more than $15 on one meal. $15 a month is nothing. Plus it is cheaper if you pay for 6 month blocks. As for the 1000's of better mmos, I haven't played any that interest me. Even the new Wild Start is a real disappointment to me.
 
How bout all those guys that go LEROY Jenkins in the middle of the raid :D ??? I want to sue them for damages and time spent repairing armor.
 
rudy said:
All of these same things would apply to stocks, money government can just print more so what? The point of punishment is to deter rampant abuse and that applies to virtual goods as well. It costs the system time and resources to deal with a problem on top of the dollar value of the item. Your argument doesn't make sense and does not look like any type of world I would want to live in. By your definition no one should be able to be prosecuted for pirating software either.
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Not even close.

Stocks and money have a very specific value that is based not only on company performance but on how many are in circulation. Printing more money or stocks actually devalues the rest. Trying to argue that a virtual item in a game is the same as this is just stupid I'm sorry. As has been mentioned over and over, The Virtual item can be recreated resulting in no loss and in most modern games has a unique identifier and can also be deleted. This argument does not apply to software as a whole, this is strictly on virtual items within a virtual world.

What you are suggesting is a level of monitoring and police control no one should ever be comfortable living in.
 
Bamboo said:
Big Peanut: Yo homie, what are you in for?

UbErsl4y3r1996: I stole a rare unicorn mount from this dumb kid in World of Warcraft.

Big Peanut: ...

UbErsl4y3r1996: I mean car jacking.
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Reminds me of that scene in "Necessary Roughness" where the college scrimmages a penitentiary. As one of the guys is getting the living s#it kicked out of him by a bigger guy, he looks up and says "What are you in for?" The convict looks down at him, says "Computer Fraud!" then starts laughing.
:D
 
I think it would be ridiculous for something bad you do in a game to affect your real life that dramatically, but then again look at the ridiculous penalties for piracy, patent infrigement (which often happens by accident due to the ridiculous nature of the system) and other virtual "stealing". So it would not surprise me if it did happen. It seems virtual crime is more punishable than real physical crime these days. Sad really.
 
Comixbooks said:
Anyone who plays wow since 2004 should goto prison and still pays 15.00 a month for it since then 1,000 better MMOs have come out. A real wow fan would like Prison because of the free food and inability to go anywhere and be social. Kinda like me =)
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I laughed. Didn't want to...but I couldn't help myself. ;)
 
waste tax payers at it's finest, and fill the prison's with non sense, good one

got to love the system, it works the way its intended to work messed up, if it makes sense it dont work, but if it dont make sense it works
 
The article didn't go into detail on how the item was stolen... at least I didn't see it when I was going through it.

Was it stolen due to hacking an account or something? Or did someone ninja loot him? Or used an in game skill to steal it?

I know, it sounds dumb, if it was an in game skill and he's bitching about it, but you can't tell how stupid some people can be. That aside, does WoW have a skill to steal items? I never really got into it.I know Ultima Online did.
 
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