Woman Faces Charges Over Virtual Murder, Teenagers Sentenced For MMO Extortion
Thursday 23 October 2008 @ 11:19 pm | By Ivan 'Nahu' Lozano 10 Comments
Today come to you two stories of real world insanity over virtual world crimes, its like a pulp fiction novel, only completely absurd. First up: romance, betrayal and revenge.
A 43 year old woman in Japan has been arrested for virtual murder of her online boyfriend’s Maple Story avatar. In-game the two characters were married and when one morning the woman found her character had been divorced overnight she log on to his account and deleted his character, effectively committing online murder. She faces 5 years in prison or a fine of up to $5000.
Next up, two teenagers in Amsterdam where sentenced to do community serviced after coercing a 13 year old boy into giving up a mask and an amulet in RuneScape. One boy got 200 hours, the other 160 hours of community service. At least no virtual lives were lost in this case.
[Yahoo News / News 24]
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Abraham 'Velcor' Duarte
David 'KidKobun' Bruno
Ivan 'Nahu' Lozano
Random J
Sol
This is great. It reminds me of a story where two clans in WoW meet in real life to duke it out.
….I know I’m probably being insensitive, but Darwinism at work?
wow… in japan you delete a character you goto prison, here you get your account suspended, i bet they dont have as much issues with hacking there
Indeed it is serious business.
Is this more evidence of the blurring line between reality and the virtual world? I’m getting scared.
These stories highlight the lack of sanity and perhaps the lack of a true democratic legal system (as we fondly think of it) within these countries.
Legal systems are different all over the world and many are unsafe and undemocratic when compared with much of the English-speaking world’s legal systems (these are sadly also changing for the worse). Unfortunately harmonisation is moving us to a more authoritarian system. I’m sure none of us wants this ..
Yes indeed. Having english as a nations native tongue has always raised the standards of its legal system and practised democracy… Good one.
Well it all comes down to the legal definition of property. I don’t see much about these being undemocratic or unsafe.
Martine parry-
Are you calling the non-English speaking population uncivilised? If so, you might want to take a look at Japan. It is one of the wealthiest, most high-tech countries in the world, speaking in civilian terms. One of these crimes occurred in Japan, yes, but they do have a very different social order over there. It’s very pretentious to say that your own system is better.
The avatar was the dude’s property. You can’t just go around destroying property. Das illegal yo!
I’m fairly certain that avatars are not the player’s property, but the property of the MMO’s administrators. this issue is probably directly addressed in the EULA, such as World of Warcraft’s “You can be banned for literally no reason whatsoever clause” essentially expressing that Blizzard owns it’s players.
200 hours of community service for the ‘extortion’ of an item that doesn’t exist in reality as nothing more than a collection of bits and cost the original owner nothing more than fifteen minutes of play time (likely) is grossly overcompensating. It seems as though Amsterdam isn’t as laid back as the rest of the world would see it.
1st case is invasion of privacy pure and simple.
2nd case virtual or not is harassment.