Hey officer, he stole my scepter! A look at crime in virtual worlds

Submitted by dillon coil last modified Thu, 08/07/2008 - 5:00pm

In the popular game Halo 2 on Microsoft’s XBOX, some multiplayer gamers caused Halo 2’s programmers headaches by modding, cheating, and exploiting glitches in the game to gain considerable advantages over other Halo 2 gamers and raise their online ranking. While this activity wasn’t necessarily illegal, it was in contravention of the terms and conditions of the online gaming agreement that gamers had with Microsoft through the online gaming service XBOX Live. Accordingly, XBOX Live moderators monitored gamer activity and suspended the accounts of those who continued to cheat despite warnings. Although the cheating was very frustrating for many Halo 2 players, it wasn't a crime. Now that online environments are beginning to introduce the possibility of buying, selling, and exchanging goods, activity similar in nature to real world crime is emerging, and the solutions to these crimes are proving elusive.

Virtual Theft of Virtual Property

Due to the obscurity and newness of virtual worlds, most gamers who have tried to take their virtual world grievances to real world courts have been summarily rejected. Until now, most actions taken by law enforcement against virtual world criminals have occured in countries like South Korea where virtual world participation is something akin to a national pastime. In 2003 alone, South Korea received reports of over 10,000 virtual world related cybercrimes.

Recently law enforcement in Amsterdam arrested five teenagers for stealing over 4,000 Euros worth of virtual furniture in the virtual world Habbo Hotel . Stealing the furniture wasn’t as simple as picking it up and walking away with it. The teenagers first set up phishing sites posing as official Habbo Hotel sites in order to collect usernames and passwords from other Habbo Hotel users attempting to log in. After they had these usernames and passwords, these teenagers logged onto Habbo Hotel using the stolen information and proceeded to exchange property with their own user accounts. While many at the time argued the teens should only be banned and not charged criminally, a Habbo spokesman stated, “It is a theft because the furniture is paid for with real money.”

Virtual Theft of Real Money

An even more egregious example of virtual theft happened in Linden’s Second Life. A Second Life user discovered that by using Apple’s QuickTime media player technology he could hack into the computers of those who came into contact with their malicious software tool in the virtual world and take control of their characters. After taking control of their characters the hacker transferred ‘Linden Dollars’ to his own account and exchanged them for U.S. Dollars online. The hacker even forced the stolen character to purchase more Linden Dollars with the victim’s credit card.

Money Laundering

Organized crime is even getting in on the action . A recent report released by Symantec explained that the largely unregulated virtual world markets are becoming attractive venues for money laundering. The report said,

"... a criminal enterprise could open several thousand MMOG accounts. Each could be used to trade with other players in the purchase or sale of in-game assets, the funds from which would ultimately be withdrawn from the accounts. Since thousands of accounts may engage in millions of transactions, each with small profits or losses, it would be difficult to trace the true source of the funds when they are withdrawn. These transactions can be conducted worldwide without the oversight that typically accompanies international bank remittances. In fact, in February 2007, China's central bank and finance ministries called upon companies to stop trading QQ coins and virtual currencies, presumably to curb the unregulated exchange of currency."

Virtual Sex Crimes?

In 2007, two different Belgian newspapers reported that a virtual patrol unit was set up to investigate virtual rapes in Second Life. Apparently no details are available just as with real world rape cases. This development troubles some because they believe it might lead to the prohibition of traditionally accepted virtual world activities which are illegal in the real world. Just imagine, no online Call of Duty 4 because virtual killing is illegal. Would Mario still be allowed to stomp on Goombas? Who knows?

What Now?

These examples illustrate the difficulties that lie ahead for law makers and law enforcement officials. Understandably, the virtual fails to seamlessly connect with the real, and the distinctions between what is legal or illegal and ethical or unethical are often blurred, leading to hasty decisions by those who understand the technology the least. During this time of transition it will important for users of these technologies to be vigilant and voice their opinion so law makers can make informed decisions.

 

"Virtual Security " shared under CC Attribution-Noncommericial-No Derivative works Generic 2.0 License by svenwerk on Flickr.com

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Congress Bows to Big Content, Scapegoats Higher Ed

Last week, after months of intensive wrangling, the House and the Senate finally agreed on a final version of the Higher Education Act (HEA). Buried in this massive bill, which touches on virtually every aspect of education, is a little provision requiring campuses to develop “plans to effectively combat the unauthorized distribution of copyrighted material, including through the use of a variety of technology-based deterrents.” Those deterrent include bandwidth shaping and traffic monitoring, but also use of filtering technologies such as Audible Magic. “To the extent practicable,” colleges and universities must also offer legal alternatives for file-sharing, such as music services like Ruckus.

There are at least three major problems with this. First, at least some of the “technological deterrents” colleges are being pushed to adopt simply won’t work. The Common Solutions Group, a consortium of 25 educational institutions, looked at the leading “infringement suppression” technologies and concluded that they were expensive, not very effective, and could suppress legitimate as well as infringing traffic. The Association for Computing Machinery found that the mandatory use of these technological deterrents would “add to the costs of education and university research, introduce new security and privacy issues, degrade existing rights under copyright, and have little or no lasting impact on infringement of copyrighted works.”

Second, the students have little interest in the “alternatives” now on offer, such as Ruckus and cDigix. It’s not hard to see why. As Steve Worona of Educause notes, “Even when offered for free, students stayed away in droves. The selection of songs was too small or the music couldn't be downloaded to iPods or the content couldn't be moved from device to device.” Now, rather than ditching these unpopular services, colleges and universities will have to promote them.

Third, this legislation is based on two fundamentally flawed premises: that college networks are the central nodes of illegal file-sharing in the U.S., and that the managers of these networks aren’t doing much to stop it. In reality, there’s no evidence that students are any more or less guilty of illegal file-sharing that the general population. In fact, last year the MPAA finally admitted that its oft-repeated claim that students were responsible for 44% of MPAA members’ lost revenue due to file-sharing was just wrong. And colleges and universities already do much more than any commercial ISP to educate their customers (students) about the risks of illegal file-sharing, and to punish those who engage in it.

But maybe this lemon of a bill could be turned into lemonade. If Congress wants colleges and universities to cut down on illegal file-sharing, perhaps those educational institutions should propose a real alternative—voluntary collective licensing.

Submitted by New Media Rights on Mon, 08/04/2008 - 8:14am

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A Question of Intent

So, a new test of the “inducement” theory of secondary copyright infringement? After all, the fact that Wordscraper doesn’t make it impossible for users to mimic the classic Scrabble board may be enough — especially if there’s a provable “intent:” On Facebook, an 11-Letter Synonym for Scrabulous Turns Out to Be Wordscraper

People who were addicted to playing Scrabulous on Facebook have migrated by the thousands to Wordscraper, a Scrabble-like game created by the two brothers who built Scrabulous, Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla. Last week the brothers removed Scrabulous from Facebook.com for North American users because of a lawsuit from Hasbro, which owns the North American rights to Scrabble.

Unfortunately for Hasbro, players are not universally flocking to Hasbro’s official Scrabble game. Instead thousands are downloading Wordscraper, which has been available on Facebook since January but attracted little attention until Scrabulous shut down, and heading to their old favorite, Scrabulous, on the game’s independent Web site at www.scrabulous.com. Wordscraper had about 80,000 daily users on Facebook as of Sunday night and the Web site Scrabulous.com had thousands of players online on Sunday.

Hasbro’s official version of Scrabble on Facebook, meanwhile, has registered about 91,000 registered users, while a version from Mattel, which owns the rights to Scrabble outside of North America, has less than 15,000.

Unlike Scrabulous, which exactly mimics a Scrabble board, Wordscraper lets players pick a board size and put high-scoring spaces wherever they like — meaning that they can, if they choose, create an exact replica of a Scrabble board.

Submitted by New Media Rights on Mon, 08/04/2008 - 3:50am

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Lea Bishop Shaver, "Defining and Measuring A2K: A Blueprint for an Index of Access to Knowledge"

The abstract:

Comparative indices are widely used in international development circles to benchmark and monitor public policy objectives. To date, however, no one has examined how an index of Access to Knowledge might be constructed. This article examines the methodological issues involved in such a project and provides a blueprint for the development of a robust and reliable A2K Index. For those new to the Access to Knowledge framework, this article also serves as a concrete and concise orientation to the ideological perspective rapidly reshaping the fields of international development, communications, technology, education, and intellectual property policy.

Downloadable here. Via Jurisdynamics.

Submitted by New Media Rights on Fri, 08/01/2008 - 6:54am

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Senators Announce New Intellectual Property Enforcement Bill

Last week, members of the Senate Judiciary Committee introduced S. 3325, the "Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights Act of 2008," a bill that proposes a number of alarming changes to copyright law. The bill is the Senate's gift to big content owners, creating new and powerful tools -- many of which will be paid for by your tax dollars -- for the entertainment industry to go after infringers. But it doesn’t offer a lick of protection for legitimate innovators and technology users that may be buried by the copyright juggernaut.

One of the bill's most disturbing changes would give the Attorney General new powers to sue individuals on behalf of rightsholders like the MPAA and the RIAA. Bill proponents claim that these new powers, which would allow the AG to bring "milder" civil as well as criminal actions, are necessary because some offenses don't rise to the level of criminal conduct. This justification just doesn’t make sense. If it's a low-level offense, why should our top cops pursue it? Traditionally, those types of offenses can and will be pursued by the parties who believe they have actually been harmed, namely the copyright owners. The real "problem" may be that some so-called "offenses" can't be proven beyond a reasonable doubt, the standard for any crime. This new provision would allow the AG to sidestep that high burden of proof -- a burden that gives the average citizen an important measure of protection from the overwhelming power of the government.

The Attorney General of the United States surely has better things to do than serving as muscle for the entertainment industry, especially when that industry is clearly well-capable of enforcing its copyrights on its own.

The bill follows the House's Pro-IP Act in creating an Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator position in the Executive Office, with an advisory committee consisting of members from various government departments and agencies. Given the extraordinary budget pressures lawmakers now face, it is shocking that they would consider funding a new layer of bureaucracy that appears designed to interfere with responsibilities that have already been established and delegated in previous legislation. In fact, there is already an IP czar role in the government -- the U.S. Coordinator for International Intellectual Property Enforcement -- who coordinates intellectual property enforcement efforts alongside a council including the Director of the United States Patent and Trademark Office; the Assistant Attorney General, Criminal Division; and others.

There's more: another provision creates new categories of infringement at the border, suggesting that individuals need the permission of copyright holders to bring copies of music or movies with them overseas, or even through the United States. If the bill is passed, something as simple as taking your iPod to Mexico could be considered an infringement of the copyright owners’ distribution right. The bill also proposes to lengthen the list of items that can be impounded as part of a civil copyright infringement suit, while broadening the list of articles that can be seized and destroyed by the government. (Meanwhile, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) is being negotiated in secret by a number of countries, pairing this unprecedented public threat with a potentially catastrophic secret one.)

While the entertainment industry and the politicians pushing the bill complain about piracy, those complaints do not amount to the kind of crisis that might require these drastic measures -- indeed, the MPAA recently celebrated record box office returns and record-breaking single-title revenues.

The Senate should firmly reject this invitation to expand copyright law's reach once again and make the Attorney General the lackey of big content owners.

Submitted by New Media Rights on Tue, 07/29/2008 - 6:00pm

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Filterband is not Broadband

A group of us filed formal comments with the FCC arguing that “free, filtered broadband,” as the FCC proposed to mandate in the AWS-3 spectrum auction, is not “Internet.” Comments here, in WT Docket 07-195.

Commenters strongly support the deployment and ubiquitous availability of broadband services across the country. We are concerned, however, that the Commisson’s proposed rule requiring content-filtering on broadband offered over the AWS-3 band destroys the “Internet” character of the service. The Internet is distinguished by its flexibility as a platform on which new services can be built with no pre-arrangement. While requiring filtering of known protocols in itself raises serious First Amendment conflicts, forcing the blocking of unknown or unrecognized traffic hampers both speech and innovation. We therefore urge the Commission to drop the filtering conditions from its Final Rule.

Thanks to all who helped with the Comments!

Submitted by New Media Rights on Fri, 07/25/2008 - 3:47am

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Marshall McLuhan: The Medium Is The Message - Video Mashup

For those interested in understanding media beyond their immediate appearance Marshall McLuhan remains without a doubt still one of the richest and most inspiring resources. His books and writings offer a wealth of insights into the media transformation and changes we are witnessing now, over 30 years after he described and anticipated them. Marshall-McLuhan-241857251_231946c430-333.jpg Author of several books including the famous The Medium is the Message, Canadian-born McLuhan was also director of the Center for Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto. Of Marshall McLuhan I am offering you today a short clip that I recently stumbled upon. It contains Marshall McLuhan's voice as recorded on a TV show of the early seventies matched to visual imagery that has been added at a later time. Originally aired on PBS-TV, 4 January, 1971 at 8:00 p.m. (Philadelphia, PA area), it was recorded over 35 years ago during the "Speaking Freely" show hosted by NBC's Edwin Newman. Here is the full original recording in MP3 format. Observe how alive much of McLuhan's message is and how relevant it stands in today's Internet world. Here this short video and a full text transcript of McLuhan words:


The Medium Is A Message - 1971 - Marshall McLuhan

Speaking Freely hosted by Edwin Newman features Marshall McLuhan 4 Jan 1971, Public Broadcasting/N.E.T.
Full English Text Transcription

Visual Space Is Not Continuous

...that is perhaps another way of coming to this medium in a message thing. In visual space, we think of things as continuous and connected. There is no connection in auditory space or tactile space. To the sense of touch, there are no connections. There are only resonances, beats, rhythms, closures, and to smell to all (the) other senses, kinetic movement and so on, there is no continuity and no connection only discontinuity. This idea of the visual man, the Euclidean man, that space is continuous and uniformly connected does not apply in the electronic age to any of the senses except sight and under electronic condition, even the visual has lost that continuous character. Under special television conditions, it becomes once more a mosaic, a collage of resonant dots, spots.

Speed Up

The idea of pattern recognition one of the peculiar new awarenesses of our time is the result of speed up. When things move very quickly, their pattern or form of them appears very plainly whereas when things move very slowly, it is not so easy to see a pattern. This so has something to do with a lot of the confusions of our world and when people who had previously been quite content in a fixed position, in a job, or a career, are suddenly confronted with very fast-moving situations where they can see overall patterns, they suddenly become very discontented with their place, with their fixed position. So the dropout is a normal kind of response to pattern recognition... not that I mean in all aspects of our society, the people who were dropping out right, left, and center are people who suddenly have seen a pattern in their lives instead of just a fixed position; visually oriented, everything in its place, a place for everything, a classification, a job.

Audience Participation and The Instant Replay

People suddenly want to be involved in more dynamic patterns. Packaged material whether it’s in the advertising world or in the educational world is no longer acceptable. The consumer status has been greatly downgraded. We live in a world in which the consumer habits have been yield instead the producer involvement and so the TV audience acts now as a producer. Had you ever thought of the instant replay in football as creating a totally new form of audience participation in the dynamics of the game? In an instant replay, in effect you say: "let us stop this action, halt it, arrest, hold it." Then you say now, what has just happen in this game had this effect. Let us see how we achieve this effect. Let us replay that action and observe how this particular effect was attained. Now, this is the attitude of every artist to every artistic production. He says in effect "hold that action I want to capture it in another medium". Now in the case of a playback, you are in the presence of the artistic process. An artist always says how could I get that effect? I must go back and replay it. So what has happened to football since the replay is that the public now demands that the game be changed so that they can see the process by which the effects are attained. The games are even halted until the replays are completed on TV. It isn’t just halted for the ads but for the replays, and sometimes they have to wait until the replay is completed. The public sometimes bring their own TV sets to watch the replays during the game and they use the sets in the stadium, in the lobbies and so on eagerly during the game too.

Participation as Process

Now this is a new form of participation in the game as process. In our time, the public has demanded access to the artistic process in every field including school. The learning process is now something in which children expect to participate not just as consumers, but as producers and they get this from TV. TV is in a paramount way a medium of processes. It reveals processes as never before. Not just products. So that you’ll only have to watch the more effective forms of advertising to see that the ad is never presented as a product, but always as a process; a participation. This is what Sesame Street has shown, made by Madison Avenue experts. It shows the entire learning process in action and in the best advertising style.



Want More of Marshall?

Video credit: MyCluein - YouTube
Video credit: DrFallon - YouTube

Originally written and prepared by Robin Good for Master New Media and first published on July 25th 2008 as "Marshall McLuhan: The Medium Is The Message - Video Mashup"

Submitted by New Media Rights on Fri, 07/25/2008 - 1:48am

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