Blacksnow was a company formed by MMORPG veterans, essentially for "full-time farming" ("farming" being the activity of playing a game to get valuable items to sell offline). Mythic, developers of the successful second-generation MMORPG Dark Age of Camelot (published by Universal/Vivendi) were taking steps to prevent the sale and trade of in-game items. Blacksnow sued Mythic in California District Court: "The plaintiffs charge those actions constitute an unfair business practice and interfere with 'prospective economic advantage' to the plaintiffs. BlackSnow sells game currency and characters at a fixed price on its CamelotExchange site and also sells in-game items through eBay. Along with unspecified punitive and compensatory damages, the suit seeks a court order declaring that the sale of items and accounts outside the game does not infringe on Mythic's copyrights." (CNet: Game exchange dispute goes to court).
That suit was settled by the summer of 2002 in favor of Mythic. UnknownPlayer.com has the most extensive coverage of the Case.
more...From the OtherWorld Express: RolePlay and Intellectual Propterty is a heartfelt essay by a role-player from Everquest, Nepenthia, posted in response to the fallout from evil elf backstory controversy. She (?) oberves in herself and in other players the feeling that role-playing requires storytelling, but if these online games are going to take such a strong stance on owning and policing users's content then players can not feel like they are a part of the project.
more...
Sadly, already some fan-sites are suspending publication simply because they feel it is not worth sharing their role-play stories with others if it means that they might be prevented from playing at all. Also and equally sadly, players are deciding to remove their characters from Everquest because they feel that the invitation to role-play there has, in essence, been rescinded or weighted with such restrictions and tonalities of possible censorship that it makes playing there an ethically untenable position. Role-players are perceiving that the activities traditionally associated with their gaming, if used in a virtual world created for profit, may endanger their ability to play in that world. They are also finding that, in fact, the expression of the creativity that is the mark of excellent role-playing may actually become a barrier excluding them seeing themselves as a part of a game community. As the famed bard Jythri stated in his goodbye message, "It's clear to me now that it is 'your world'. I will never be able to call it mine."
March 2002: It's My Time and I'll Sell if I Want To by Gavin Carter
A fan response to auction controversy surrounding Dark Age of Camelot: "I have no formal legal training, however, and will not make an exhaustive review of the lawsuit's legal issues. Instead, I want to put forth reasons why it would be beneficial for Mythic to allow out-of-game sales of characters and other properties to continue instead of restricting them, as they have done with Blacksnow."
more..."In this paper I argue that it is inappropriate to use property law to settle disputes over player-characters in MMORPGs as there is neither the legal nor philosophical basis to support that view that player-characters are property. Moreover there is a strong argument to suggest that a player-character is an extension of self, thus it is human rights that should be extended to cover them and thus by implication any other instantiation of self within a virtual environment. This paper is fully referenced and covers contemporary intellectual property law as well and an application of Locke's theory of property to virtual worlds."
A paper the author, Ren Reynolds, submitted to a conference. Sounds like an interesting fellow, someone we might run into again in our studies. This paper is a Word document available for download (I have it - let's print it) or you can view it as HTML (kinda sloppy) through Google.