The Internet Crimes Division of the Shenzhen Public Security Bureau says it receives about 10 complaints of theft of ‘virtual assets’ every day.
HONG KONG: When 21-year-old Wang Zhenmin went to the Shenzhen police last year to report the theft of his hard-won ‘Antenna of Invigoration’, ‘Ballast Maul of Stamina’ and ‘Mage-eye Blunderbuss’, he had trouble getting them to take him seriously. “They pretty much laughed me out of the station,” he recalls.
“They said they had enough work on their hands without having to investigate cyber-thefts of weapons of war used in online games.”
Wang’s experience — of ‘virtual assets’ acquired during the course of a game not being recognised by law as property of any value in the real world — is widely shared in China, where online multi-player role-play games like ‘World of Warcraft’ and the ‘Dark Age of Camelot’ are hugely popular and fiercely competitive. Over 60% of gamers in China have had their virtual assets — including online currency, weapons used in games and even virtual costumes used to dress up their online ‘avatars’ — stolen by cyberthieves, most often to sell to other gamers for real-world money.
In 2005, a 41-year-old Shanghai gamer stabbed a 26-year-old competitor to death following a dispute over possession of a ‘cyber-sword’ used in ‘Legend of Mir 3’, a bloody but popular online game that features sorcerers, magic potions, warriors and deadly weapons.
It was the most deadly repercussion in the real world of an online dispute, and although not all such disputes have fatal consequences, in recent years there’s been an explosion in the number of ‘game crime’ incidents.
That’s because credits, artifacts and weapons in games are rewards for gaming proficiency and hard to win, and some gamers are willing to pay thousands of dollars for such ‘stolen’ merchandise.
The Internet Crimes Division of the Shenzhen Public Security Bureau says it receives about 10 complaints of theft of ‘virtual assets’ every day, but finds itself hamstrung in its investigation by the lack of legal clarity over the status of such assets.
Experts are divided on how to treat ‘virtual assets’. There are those who say that such assets should be given legal protection: a court in Nanshan district in Shenzhen, for instance, has ruled that the ‘QQ coins’ — online currency used by gamers — “have the attributes of property” and should be protected as such.
And in 2003, a 24-year-old gamer successfully sued an online video company for compensation following the theft of his virtual property, which included a stockpile of ‘virtual biochemical weapons’.
Others, however, claim that since the assets have a value only in the context of a game (and only for gamers), they do not hold universally recognisable value and don’t have a legal status.
Earlier this year, the legal status of virtual property came up for consideration at a meeting in Shenzhen of the China Forum on Internet and Intellectual Property Rights Criminal Protection. Both points of view were heard, but the jury is still out on that one.
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