I had the distinct pleasure of attending the recent Virtual Worlds London show as the guest of Chris, Joey et al at Virtual Worlds Management this week. To say it was a mixed bag would be an understatement. The media, kids and games sessions where alive and vibrant, and absolutely full of excitement The enterprise sessions were lackluster, stale and unconvincing.
–Stagnation in the enterprise virtual worlds space | Clever Zebra
VeeJay Burns of the MindBlizzard blog has kindly translated the Court Ruling in the RuneScape Case that was the subject of a post a couple of days ago.
As the virtual amulet and virtual mask as defined in the case at hand meet the aforementioned criteria, the court is of the opinion that these virtual goods are to be included in the concept of ‘goods’ as provided for in Artcile 310 of the Penal Code and belonged to the declarant.
What is most curious to me is how shallow the treatment of “possession” is here:
Case law has previously determined the foregoing is not applicable in case of a PIN number, computer data and phone call minutes in a subscription bundle. In this case the virtual goods, namely a virtual amulet and a virtual mask, were in posession of the declarant. Only he had actual control over these goods.
Manifestly, Jagex has greater “actual control” but the issue of Jagex’s interests in the case doesn’t seem to come up at all.
We’re running on the newest version of WordPress now.
I have also installed WP-Super-Cache in an attempt to reduce those pesky CPU Exceeded errors that keep happening. Supposedly, for anyone who is a logged-in commenter there will be no visible difference. Leaving a comment will update the cached page immediately. Keep an eye on the sidebars, though — those may not update instantly, not sure.
Let me know if you see any problems.
The eyeballing game is neat. I got a 1.08 on my first column, then finished with an overall of 2.87.
One presumes that doing this over and over again would improve your “eye” for angles. And in fact, I noticed that when I overthought stuff, I was more likely to be off, whereas when I just winged it, I did better.
Yet another country has come down on yet another side in the ongoing “virtual goods are property” debate. This time it’s the Netherlands.
The Leeuwarden District Court says the culprits, 15 and 14 years old, coerced a 13-year-old boy into transferring a “virtual amulet and a virtual mask” from the online adventure game RuneScape to their game accounts.
“These virtual goods are goods (under Dutch law), so this is theft,” the court said Tuesday in a summary of its ruling.
MindBlizzard seems to have a great and detailed overview. Virtually Blind has a take on it as well:
