Comments on: Grand Theft Auto emulators

By: evenhead

evenhead — Tue, 06 May 2008 01:04:32 +0000

I may have to retract part of a my statement earlier. See I’m doing a research essay on MMORPGs and from what I understand that there are countries in asia that do have laws and statutes concerning theft of characters and items. To quote Edward Castronovas Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games “In Asia, people who have lost virtual items because of game-server insecurities and hacks have called the police and filed lawsuits. The police have made arrests; courts have heard cases, and plaintiffs have won”. Now it’s true that those have happened in Asia but you might check with a lawyer on if there are any statutes concerning online game crimes in the US. I doubt there are politicians are really too busy with other stuff to worry about online games but you might check just in case

By: ScratchyPDX

ScratchyPDX — Fri, 02 May 2008 19:38:09 +0000

To add to what evenhead said, you could also get them for “theft by deception.” That is because they were asked to give something of perceived value (their passwords) in exchange for a promised service (upgrading the avatars.) When the JH guys failed to come thru on their promise, then the theft occured. The fact that the attempt to extort money my elevate this to aggravated theft.

However, I hope your mentorees learned a real world lesson, DON’T EVER GIVE ANY YOUR PASSWORD. It sound like a really tough lesson for them, and I’m pained that they would lose something they worked so hard to build. My son had a similar thing happen to him on RuneScape.

It not always easy to start over. But, look on the bright side, at least is was only an avatar, or a virtual identity. Something like this later in life could have ended up with their real identity stolen.

BTW – Tim, if you give me your MobilitySite password, I promise to give your article a 5-star rating. hehe :)

By: evenhead

evenhead — Fri, 02 May 2008 19:09:38 +0000

Really all you could prosecute the Junior high boys for is the physical threat, if they had used the online characters to gain real monetary value, such as getting away with the extortion or selling of the characters items for real money, then you might have been able to get FBI in on it but since none of that happened you probably couldn’t. Really these characters are products of time voluntarily given with no possibility of monetary reward given back for time spent thus really you don’t have any chance of prosecuting them for stealing the characters. So as I said the only thing that you could probably prosecute the jr. high boys for is the physical threat

By: Noah

Noah — Fri, 02 May 2008 18:32:35 +0000

What was the online game? You can’t “remove stats” from any online game I’ve ever played…

And how this relates to GTA IV… I just don’t see it. If anything, I would go directly to the Sopranos first. (Holding something for Ransom.. or Hollywood for that matter, not a game released a few days ago).