Terra Nova

Patent Arcade / IGDA SIG

After typing up my post on KC Munchkin, I thought to myself: "Wouldn't it be helpful if someone made a comprehensive online list of early IP lawsuits related to video games?" Of course, as these things tend to go on the Web, someone already has.  Today I stumbled across The Patent Arcade, a blog by lawyer Ross Dannenberg (who is also an adjunct IP prof at George Mason) that features a continually updated library of  video game IP decisions, with blog-format postings about the opinions (including screenshots).  Included are some cases discussed here before, including the KC Munchkin case, Williams v. Arctic Int'l (here, there), and Marvel v. NcSoft.  Relatedly, I should note that the IGDA has recently started an IP rights special interest group with a wiki and a blog.

Update: I just received an email from Chris Bennet of the Video Game Law Blog.  They've even got an RSS feed for online/multiplayer.   If any one knows of more gaming blawgs out there, please let me know or post a comment.

RIP KCM

If you're interested in Pac-Man, you might have heard of K.C.Munchkin. Then again, maybe you haven't.  K.C. Munchkin had a brief existence, perhaps due to the fact that he infringed the copyright in the much more famous Pac-Man, according to the 1982 decision of the Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, Atari v. North American Philips Consumer Elecs., 672 F.2d 607. 

123321456787654

While we were chatting about virtual crimes a few months back, cybercrime guru Orin Kerr (who blogs over at TVC) pointed me to the case of People v. Johnson, 560 N.Y.S.2d 238 (1990).  What a fascinating case -- it stands for the remarkable proposition that mere knowledge of a 14 digit number can constitute criminal possession of stolen property.  What 14-digit numerical properties do you have in your head?  Might I offer you 123321456787654?  Do you want it?  Can you be sure it isn't contraband?

Criminal Games

Doing research on other issues, I stumbled across two interesting state criminal statutes.  Permit these a broad interpretation and then apply them to Julian's Bone Crusher theft (described here, discussed by Dan and I here) -- would the statutes criminalize the theft of a virtual item with the intent to realize a real-world profit?

The Politics of Sports

Are professional sports simply a mirror of society's savage brutality or are they a site of resistance?  Dave Zirin, writing for The Nation, seems to think the latter.... kind of.  And anway, even if sports are somewhat savage, Steve Johnson tells us, the interactive version is an improvement...

Virtual Crime Update

Symantec notes a new trojan horse "PWSteal.Wowcraft" that steals World of Warcraft passwords and emails them to the author.  Security guru Bruce Shneier notes how this business of stealing imaginary things seems to be part of a growing trend.  Thanks to TN friend and virtual worlds scholar James Grimmelmann for the tip.

In related news, David Long of Gamer Dad has some thoughts on the recent EQ II Dog Dupe story that, if credited, apparently netted the wily Methical somewhere upward of $70K.  This was reportedly well spent on a trip to Paris.   Note that Methical, like Julian, does have some pangs of conscience:

"P.S. Sorry for ruining the economy and all that."

Robert Morris, on the other hand, didn't really understand what he was doing.  How long until we see decisions applying the CFAA to virtual worlds?

Marvel Xbox MMORPG

As "That Chip Guy" noted in a comment thread yesterday, Marvel has licensed Microsoft to do a superhero MMORPG for the Xbox.  Plenty of news coverage available here which references the success of World of Warcraft, yadda yadda. And DC Comic is apparently doing an MMORPG with Sony for the PS3 -- see here.  We've talked about consoles and MMORPGs here from time to time.  Is there anything lost if the MMORPG mainstream shifts to consoles over the next few years?  Sure, you'll need a few more buttons, but aren't the multimedia Xbox 360 and the PS3 just PCs in console disguise anyway?

Babbage & Cabbage

On-topic: Richard is going to be speaking in the Second Life future Salon on August 14th.

Anda / Grokster / New Paper

Three quick notes on Anda's Game, the Grokster ruling, and my GLS paper on Norrathian law, respectively.

(This post has nothing to do with the Kalmar Nyckle, btw -- just couldn't think of a good picture to use...)

GLS Conference

Several Terra Novans (Ted, TL, Cory, Dmitri, and I) have descended on Madison, Wisconsin for the Games, Learning, and Society conference organized by Constance and guided by the James Gee mafia of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  As the title suggests, the focus is mostly on games in education. Below are notes from the first panel I went to, featuring Henry Jenkins and James Gee. (Updated 6/24 -- added notes from PARC PlayOn guys. Added Social Effects / Addiction.)

DiGRA 2005

Terra Novans descend on Vancouver tomorrow for DiGRA 2005, Changing Views: Worlds in Play.  As you can see from the program, TL Taylor will be kicking off four days of hundreds of videogame-related papers with a keynote address (w00t!).   The other big news, though, is that many of the hundreds of papers are now available in full-text form online.

Human Pac-Man

The BBC reports on the National University of Singapore's Mixed Reality Lab's Human Pacman project. 

Players equipped with a wearable computer, headset and goggles can physically enter a real world game space by choosing to play the role of Pacman or one of the Ghosts.

SWG Music Muffled

Reminiscent of Marvel v. NCSoft, but just without the lawsuit, Katie Dean writes for Wired about how players in SWG don't have the freedom to play virtual instruments because IP makes that possibility too dangerous for Sony Online:

As musicians, the characters play pretend, virtual instruments like the slitherhorn, ommni box or the nalargon, but are limited to a handful of canned tunes. Lawyers at Sony Online Entertainment and LucasArts envision a legal nightmare if musicians were to re-create music copyrighted in the physical world.

"If we allowed someone to play anything they want, they could play a song by Madonna and then we'd have licensing issues," said Julio Torres, a producer for Star Wars Galaxies at LucasArts. "We don't want to give them the option to try, because the bottom line is, if we open that gate, they will go through it," he said.

My friend Eric Goldman gets quoted on the legal issues.  As to my personal thoughts about all this, I'm again with Fred -- this is a problem that needs a solution.

Zerg, Borg, Firm, Guild, Collablog

Nate's most excellent post on Zerging suggests the alien Zerg collective's attack strategy may be bad because it is boring.  By contrast,  the Borg, another four-letter alien bunch whose name ends with "rg", are not particularly boring, but are thought to be bad because their all-assimilating Hivemind wipes out Mill's concept of individual liberty (and plus all that flesh-machine grafting is kind of icky).  The Firm, according to Grisham and certain others, is dangerous when it gets too big, too powerful, too sharp.  Collectivity threatens the individual, and in some cases, it threatens society as well.  Which, of course, leads me to Robert Marks' interesting book: Everquest Companion.

Cows, Immersion, and Sports Law

My friend Eric Goldman (who I've mentioned before as skeptical of much of "virtual law" scholarship) posted recently about a presentation on Vacheland,  a French simulation of virtual farm management.  Eric says Vacheland was "initiated by a public agency to increase awareness of farm issues and to help address negative perceptions due to mad cow disease."  Eric says that: 

Norrath's Fictional Factions

I'm hardly an Everquest expert, but I'm in the process of writing an essay about law and governance in Norrath, and I was drawn into a side issue on which I wanted to elicit comments.  (So beware, I'll steal your thoughts if I like them). 

My primary focus in the essay will be on two issues that I feel more qualified to discuss: first, the general relation of game rules and game governance systems to "real" law, and second, the relation of coded (so-called "architectural") software constraints to legal regulation.  Still, in parsing out these issues in relation to Everquest, I feel obligated to  discuss Everquest as a text that actually represents a fiction of governance, and investigate, to some extent, how this fiction relates to the other "governance" issues I want to talk about.  So here's a (slightly edited) bit of my thinking:

Grimwell on RMT

Of possible interest to the virtual property mavens: Matthew Hector (a.k.a.  CmdrSlack)  has posted There's Gold in Them Thar Pixels! over at Grimwell.  It's a law review format walk through RMT issues -- Matt's previous posts are here and here.   I'm turning off comments here to push them toward Grimwell's forum.

Console Hacks & Game Economies

A recent Wired News article describes how Microsoft is attempting to combat Halo II hacks.  What does this have to do with virtual worlds?  Our own Ted and Julian explain:

15 MMOG Experiments

Thanks to Lisa Galarneau for pointing out a this 60-page Technical Report made for the ADL of the DOD by Curtis Bonk of Indiana U and Vanessa Dennen of Florida State: Massive Multiplayer Online Gaming: A Research Framework for Military Training and Education.  Though styled as a report, it's essentially a blueprint of what the authors think they could do with a bunch of military research money earmarked for the study of MMOGs.  The Executive Summary begins:

Virtual Power Politics

Several of us are in Milwaukee at Command Lines today (it's open to the public), exploring "the diverse ways  in which governance is both implemented and emerging within cyberspace."   So it's quite timely that James Grimmelmann of Yale Law School has just posted Virtual Power Politics on SSRN.

Skinnable World II

This is a follow-up to the Skinnable World post -- a few hacks and papers are making their way through the blogosphere that seem worthy of mention:

First and most memeworthy seem to be those related to extending Google Maps to deeper functionality and greater potential for folksonomic markup (for much, much more on folksonomies, see Many-to-Many).  Google Maps has added satellite images, which were marked up with personal narratives related to the spaces by the Flikr group Memory Maps, and then Craig's List apartment listings were scraped and integrated into Google Maps.   Fun.

Top 10 MMOG Trends?

Dave "Fargo" Kosak, who writes about MMOGs for Gamespy, would like to start a conversation here on TN with the academic/industrial/ub3r hivemind about the top 10 current trends in MMOGs.   In his opinion, the industry started to turn a corner around the time City of Heroes hit the market.  But rather than just offer up his own opinions, he'd like to get some feedback from the folks who hang out here--with a promise to give credit in the article by linking back to this discussion (presumably if we do more than complain about Blizzard's server problems).

For starters, here's what Dave thinks are three trends he's spotted:

World of Warcraft Reviewed on NPR

Old news, but in case you missed it, listen here.   

The Skinnable World

During the State of Play II conference, TL, Torill, and several others kept challenging the presumption that Norrath and other virtual worlds should be thought of as separate places.   This is a good question to ask with regard to Norrath, but I wonder whether if it will be an even more important issue with regard to the future direction of virtual worlds.

Worlds in Play Abstracts

The paper abstract for the Digital Games Research Association's "Worlds in Play" four-day conference in Vancouver have been posted.  Quite a few TN authors will be there and quite a few MMORPG-relevant abstracts are in the over 250 papers listed.  Registration here.

The Forsaken

During the past year, I've spent significant time with two MMORPGs: City of Heroes and World of Warcraft.  By "significant time" I mean something far less than the typical author here would mean: my top avatars in each are under level 20 (aka ub3r I am not).  But since these two particular games were designated by Computer Gaming World this month as top games of the year (WoW winning best game and CoH, oddly, winning best MMORPG), I though I'd offer a casual gamer's comparison and some thoughts.  My main reaction is that unless you're a power gamer, World of Warcraft is a comparatively solitary place--especially for an undead warlock.

Martha's Avatar

Jonathan Glater picks up the story of the Martha Stewart Newsweek cover for the New York Times today.  More coverage here.  The long and the short of it -- the picture on the right isn't Martha (which makes sense, right -- because since she's in prison?), but instead is an old shot of Martha's head grafted onto another person's body.  Newsweek says this was made obvious by the credit on page 3.  (Query: If you don't open the magazine and just see it on the newsstand, is it still obvious?)

Whither the tangibile?

Ilya Vedrashko has a post about a virtual keyboard. 

Some Skepticism

My colleague in legal academia and uber slinky-fan Eric Goldman joined Cory at the Santa Clara Rules &  Borders conference and is attempting to throw a wet blanket on some of the more ambitious legal claims regarding virtual worlds.

Marvel v. NCSoft Update 2

The EFF is keeping copies of various Marvel v. NCSoft pleadings here.  It appears Marvel has filed a Second Amended Complaint, and NCSoft has responded with an amended Motion to Dismiss. 

Rules & Borders

Santa Clara University School of Law is hosting Rules & Borders: Regulating Digital Environments on February 11th.    It looks like a good mix of industry folks, law professors, and legal practitioners.  The panel topics look very interesting--of special note is the "Ownership in Online Worlds" panel, which will be moderated by Professor Tyler Ochoa.   

Terra Nova Welcomes Dmitri Williams

We'd like to welcome Dmitri Williams to the merry Terra Nova hivemind.  Dmitri is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Speech Communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  He studies online behavior from a communication theory point of view.  While this means he's done some aggression work, his primary interests are the social impacts of online games and virtual communities (check out his two current courses here).   His publication list is impressive and extensive (available here) and Ren even blogged about his dissertation here a while back.   But his real credential is his level 48 gnome rogue on the WoW Illidan server that stalks n00bie g4nk3rs...

Marvel & NCSoft Update

As we have noted here before, Marvel has filed a lawsuit against NCSoft and Cryptic Studios based upon claims that City of Heroes infringes Marvel's intellectual property.   NCSoft has now retained Cooley Godward LLP and last Monday filed a Motion to Dismiss in the United States District Court for the Central District of California.

I thought we could pick up that mailbox

Daniel Terdiman (who seems to be the alpha games beat reporter for Wired these days) has a little article about how the real world doesn't use a joystick.  The intro bit talks about a person who had been playing a little (too much?) Katamari Damacy (see Tim's review) and, for a split second, tried to pick up a real mailbox with a real car.   

Over at Broken Toys, Scott is understandably a bit skeptical regarding whether this behavior can be generalized (assuming the term "complete crack monkeys" denotes skepticism).  But there is a shred of truth to the existence of a post-video game cognitive haze, is there not?  Other anecdotal evidence provided in the story:

• "When I played [The Sims] a lot," said Laura Martin, a devotee of the game, "I remember thinking, 'What percent of my bladder is full?' to decide if it was time to head to the bathroom."

• "I've been using the computer for so long, and command-Z works for undo in all the software programs," Hoffman said. "So whenever I find something in my life that I want to undo, I reach for the command-Z keys and I find it weird that it doesn't work."

What are your experiences?  Any ideas about whether these effects are amplified or muted in MMOGs?  Any good paper references from the cog psych folks?  

License to Pretend

Like several other Terra Novans, I'm a fan of City of Heroes and am quite concerned about Marvel's suit against NCSoft.   The Complaint[1.7MB pdf] raises some very strange issues at the level of legal doctrine, but it's a particularly troubling claim with regard to the policy of virtual worlds.  Marvel is claiming that NCSoft is vicariously and contributorily liable for copyright and trademark infringement--which means that it must be claiming that players are infringing Marvel's copyrights and trademarks by making avatars resemble superheroes in the Marvel portfolio (the X-men, the Hulk, etc.). 

Fred von Lohmann (who argued [16MB mp3] the Ninth Circuit appeal in the Grokster case, btw) has an excellent essay today in law.com on what a bad idea this is in terms of law and policy.  After he tells the legal audience what in Sam Hill an MMORPG is, Fred points out that the players are really at the heart of the claim:   

Letter Griefing

"Someone keeps stealing my letters..." is fascinating to watch.   It's somewhat like an open wiki, but with a constrainted set of symbols.  You've got persistence, scarcity, a lack of any clear goal, a lot of anonymity, and the possibility for user creativity.  Like art, but socially negotiated on the fly.  Sound familiar? 

As you watch the letters, you can clearly see things that seem like griefing and acting out (lots of profanity, lots of letter-stealing) as well as emergent organized behaviors (conga lines, letter-sorting, patterns).  Does anybody have URLs listing other shared sandbox spaces?  Any pointers to research papers directly relevant to this kind of stuff? 

Thanks to Jay Bibby for pointing to this. The link follows, but since it's limited to 75 players at a time, you might wait awhile before checking it out.  <link>

Player Interactions in SWG

Nicolas Ducheneaut and Bob Moore run the PlayOn project at PARC.  The PlayOn project investigates the social dimensions of MMORPGs, fccusing on SWG and EQOA in particular.  Papers available here.  They'll be showing up at Other Players next month and this week, they're presenting a paper at the ACM's CSCW in Chicago entitled The Social Side of Gaming: A Study of Interaction Patterns in a Massively Multiplayer Online Game

State of Play II Off-TN

Live-blogging from the State of Play II can also be found at Grand Text Auto, Thinking With My Fingers, Second Life Herald, Habitat Chronicles, Susan Crawford's blog, some news stories, Crescat Sententia, New World Notes, and Alphaville Gazette. If people are aware of more sites, please add to the comments.

If you want the raw data, there are actually streamcasts currently available on the SOP II website.

SOP II: IP Panel

I'm posting live notes from the intellectual property panel here at the State of Play II. My first experience with live blogging, so sorry for the messiness. These will be cleaned up later & links will be added.

State of Play II: Reloaded

State of Play II kicks off today. Most of us will be in transit today, but we'll soon be covering events in this space -- stay tuned.

Player-to-Player

Dan and I have posted a new paper on SSRN, Amateur-to-Amateur, which is about how copyright theory is challenged (or should be challenged) by disintermediated content production, selection, distribution, and modification practices. While we don't mention virtual worlds at all, I think there are obvious implications in the paper for the way we think about virtual worlds. As TL has stated:

With ever broadening definitions of intellectual property rights the status of cultural and symbolic artifacts as products of collaborative efforts becomes increasingly problematized. In the case of virtual environments – such as massive multiplayer online role-play games – where users develop identities, bodies (avatars) and communities the stakes are quite high.

The Fine Art of Billing

A couple months ago, Ed Sullivan from Aria Systems bought me an egg sandwich at Ming's Coffee & Tea. He mostly told me his personal war stories about Dark Age of Camelot and Ultima Online, but he also explained to me how he thought Aria's business, customized billing, was something that more MMORPGs could use. In his opinion, the billing systems for many MMORPGs are shoddy and not well-integrated into the game models. They're an afterthought -- if that. He suggested that if billing systems were more flexible, companies might be able to grab revenues from players paying for micropayment pay-as-you-go power-ups.

TN Comments via RSS

Thanks to Christopher Allen of Skotos for giving us a recipe for syndicating our reader comments on TypePad. You can now subscribe to comments (XML) at: http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/comments.rdf.
To get our main feed, paste: http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/index.rdf into your newsreader.

If you're thinking "What the heck is a newsreader and why would I want one?" -- it's a way to keep track of your blogs on one page without a bunch of surfing and clicking. I'm using Feedreader, which is a *free* and open-sourced (GPL'd) option.

Richard Posner & Virtual Worlds

The Honorable Richard A. Posner is a judge on the Federal Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, a renowned public intellectual, and pretty much the inventor of at least one or two entire fields of legal scholarship. He's also guest-blogging this week over at Larry Lessig's weblog. Perhaps I should have seen this coming when he said that The Matrix was his new favorite movie--but in any event, his latest post shows that he's as fascinated with the social, economic, and legal implications of virtual worlds as we at Terra Nova. Read the post, you'll see what I mean. Professor Beth Noveck, in the comments field, has told him he must come to the State of Play II: Reloaded. We agree!

The Virtual Military

Clive Thompson, a journalist who shares many of our interests, has a new article in the NYT Magazine about There.com and the United States Army. We've discussed There.com & the Army a few times here: 1) U.S. Army adopts MMOG Tech (1/16/04), Earth the (Army) MMOG (2/18/04), 3) There's Army (4/24/04).

Auteurs & Hollywood v. Flash & MUDs

Looking around The Witchery during the pre-conference dinner at the Edinburgh International Games Festival, it really sunk home for me how far computer gaming has come since the days when game makers like Steve Russell or Richard Garriott were hacking. I was well aware of the financial strength of game companies like EA, Sony, and Nintendo, but I had not fully understood what that kind of size meant for the culture in which games are created.

Virtual Crime on SSRN

Dan and I have posted a new draft of the Virtual Crime article on SSRN.

Rubicite Breastplates & Narrative Nudges

Timothy Burke, who teaches at idyllic Swarthmore College, comments here from time to time, and had some interesting criticisms of Star Wars Galaxies a while back, has just posted a pair of papers on his weblog about design directions for MMORPGs (link link).

Dragons in Chickasaw

Peter Jenkins has a new paper in the Journal of Internet Law that analyzes free speech issues in MMORPGs. A version is available on SSRN. From the abstract:

In the 21st century, traditional company towns like Chickasaw, Alabama, where a corporation steps into the shoes of the state for purposes of the First Amendment, are almost non-existent. This paper postulates that they have been replaced by Massively Multiple Online Role Playing Games (MMORPG's)... The paper emphasizes that the case law on freedom of speech in MMORPG's will have a profound precedent setting effect on how the First Amendment is applied to [a] coming universal virtual platform, since the legal principles concerning new technologies tend to be set at an early stage of their development.

This is the most extensive analysis of the "company town" doctrine's application to virtual worlds that I've seen. For what it's worth, many of the TN authors here are cited.

Update: Readers may be interested in doing a contrast/compare with Jack Balkin's article around pages 33-37, where he discusses the Marsh case as well...

A Complex Narrative

The Washington legislature had passed a law a while ago that imposed a $500 fine on anyone selling to a minor a video game depicting violence against law enforcement officers. The law was just struck down yesterday as a violation of First Amendment rights. Here's the story of Video Software Dealers Assoc. v. Maleng according to Reuters and here's the opinion. (The opinion pdf is hosted by blogger Ernest Miller, who has a detailed walk-through with his comments that is worth checking out.)