Down the Rabbit Hole

You've heard of virtual worlds in which people pay real money to buy make-believe property.

Now, this other world is producing real world lawsuits. An excerpt from Roger Parloff's article in Fortune:

First, in a 46-page ruling handed down Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Eduardo Robreno of Philadelphia allowed a player’s suit against Linden Lab, the maker of the popular online fantasy game Second Life, to go forward. In April 2006 Linden Lab seized Marc Bragg’s virtual property and expelled him from the game for allegedly violating its terms of use by using an “exploit” — a software trick, essentially — to buy virtual land in that world on the cheap. In October 2006 Bragg sued to recover the value of his virtual property, which he estimates at $6,000, as well as about $2,000 in U.S. currency that he had in a game-related account controlled by Linden Lab. “While the property and the world where it is found are ‘virtual,’” Judge Robreno wrote, “the dispute is real.” Though the game’s Terms of Use (i.e., the contract to which the user clicks his agreement before starting the game) required that such disputes be handled by arbitration in San Francisco, the judge found those arbitration provisions to be “unconscionable.” This was so, Judge Robreno found, even though Linden Lab offered to move the arbitration to Philadelphia and pay all of Bragg’s upfront fees. It was so, moreover, even though Bragg, who is himself a lawyer, might have seemed unusually well situated to understand the meaning of the Terms of Use.