Posted by Eugene Volokh:
"Online Divorcee Jailed After Killing Virtual Hubby":
http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2008_10_19-2008_10_25.shtml#1224778885
The [1]AP reports:
A 43-year-old Japanese piano teacher's sudden divorce from her
online husband in a virtual game world made her so angry that she
logged on and killed his digital persona, police said Thursday.
The woman, who has been jailed on suspicion of illegally accessing
a computer and manipulating electronic data, used his
identification and password to log onto popular interactive game
"Maple Story" to carry out the virtual murder in mid-May, a police
official in northern Sapporo City said ....
The woman used login information she got from the 33-year-old
office worker when their characters were happily married, and
killed the character. The man complained to police when he
discovered that his beloved online avatar was dead.
Again, seems like a sensible legal theory, because it focuses on the
illegal access to the account when signing on to the system -- much as
would be the case whenever you accessed another person's computer or
computer account without the person's authorization -- and not conduct
within the game that is supposedly the virtual equivalent of murder.
Had she engaged in the "virtual killing" from her own account, by
using a feature of the game that made such action possible, or even
exploiting a bug in the game that made such action possible, it seems
to me that this would just be an interesting extra twist in the game's
narrative. Such action should be dealt with by whatever mechanisms the
game's operators provide (perhaps including expulsion of the
misbehaving user, if the operators view such conduct as misbehavior),
or at most by a breach of contract lawsuit for violating any user
license agreement terms -- not by the real-world criminal law.
References
1. http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081023/ap_on_re_as/as_japan_avatar_murder
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