Out of Pod Experience

Says the person who did not read the part where it said "In this case"

No it relates to the charge of theft, please please please try to take someone to court that steals your in-game items in-games because i'd love to see you go broke trying to put together an actual case

Just because you probably didnt read it all and i've made you look stupid enough:

http://www.rechtspraak.nl/Organisatie/Hoge-Raad/Nieuws/Pages/Taking-virtual-amulet-and-mask-in-RuneScapegame-is-theft.aspx

Judgement of the Supreme court paragraph

"Within the game environment the victim had exclusive de facto control over the objects in question. He lost that control as a result of the actions of the defendant and his co-accused.
The Supreme Court concluded that these actions amounted to theft."

*you're


There are a load of other spelling mistakes in your post, but I think this one encapsulates pretty nicely what I wanted to say.

3 things, then I suspect I'll be leaving this thread for good:

1) The case did establish that virtual items are "goods"
- But this is not news. EVE has LONG contented that all in game items are "goods"
- That is why they say that THEY OWN EVERYTHING. If it wasn't a "good", they couldn't own it, could they

2) What made this a crime (you know, the things that go to COURT rather than being laughed at and forgotten):

3.6.3. The final complaint – manifestly aimed at the issue of unlawful appropriation – that taking virtual possessions from other players is one of the very objectives of RuneScape is incompatible with the fact, established by the Court of Appeal, that the rules of RuneScape do not cover taking objects in the manner employed by the defendant and the co-accused.

-Mind you, this means that ANYTHING covered by the rules IN ANY WAY is arguably not a crime - even cheating/hacking, as these generally have very clearly defined penalties in nearly every game (aka: the banhammer)
-Of course, in the case of hacking, local laws would supercede the game rules, so its still a crime if you can identify the culprit.
-Similarly, if any game was stupid enough to put rules in to cover physical violence of the sort used in this case, local laws would still apply IN ADDITION to the game's rules....but any case that is covered by the rules of the game and NOT illegal according to local laws is perfectly legal, even if it involves transferring virtual 'googs' without the owner's consent

3) Obviously the OP is either a moron or a troll....My guess is both.

I think that pretty well sums everything up.

The theft of virtual items is irrelevant from a legal perspective; the charges most likely to be presented are aggravated assault, assault causing bodily harm, assault with a weapon and/or uttering threats. Robbery charges could apply (since the defendant was technically taking things that don't belong to him), but as case law in that regard refers specifically to physical property, the prosecution will have to make a very good case for it to stick.

Taking a virtual amulet and mask from another player in the RuneScape game environment amounts to theft in this case.

Taking a virtual amulet and mask from another player in the RuneScape game environment amounts to theft in this case.

Taking a virtual amulet and mask from another player in the RuneScape game environment amounts to theft in this case.

in this case.

in this case.

in this case.

Wow! A large number of idiots in this thread who seem to lose the ability to read when the material contains data they don't like.

What was this ruling? It was a ruling against an appeal. The appeal was against a lower court's conclusion that ' the virtual amulet and virtual mask in the online game RuneScape are goods which can be the object of theft within the meaning of article 310 of the Criminal Code'. The case has nothing to do with the violent means used to extract the goods out of game. It is entirely to do with whether the lower court was right to allow that the goods could be objects of theft. It does not just apply 'in this case' but will apply in all cases involving similar types of property.

Article 310 of the Criminal Code reads as follows:
'Any person who removes any good belonging wholly or partially to any other person with the intention of unlawfully appropriating it is guilty of theft and liable to a term of imprisonment not exceeding four years or a fourth category fine.'

So, two things here. Firstly, the court has accepted that, despite the Runescape EULA, ingame goods do belong to their ingame owner ('wholly or partly'). This is quite a big deal. A particularly interesting feature of the ruling is that it denies that virtual objects are just data (rather than goods), despite sharing characteristics with data. This might put a break on both the cry that 'It's all just pixels' and that 'the EULA says everything belongs to CCP so it must be true!'. At least one national court has decided at the highest level that this is not the case.

Secondly, the goods have to be removed unlawfully in order for their removal to constitute theft and nothing in this case suggests that removal via ingame means would constitute unlawful removal. One of the grounds for the appeal was that 'the appellant argues that taking away the virtual property of other players is one of RuneScape's very objectives'. The lower court had specifically ruled (and the supreme court agreed) that 'the rules of RuneScape do not cover obtaining objects in the manner that occurred in this case: the objects were taken from the victim outside the context of the game itself', strongly implying that no crime would have occurred if the theft had taken place within the context of allowable behaviour patterns in the game.