Gamers Rights Law

Tracking your virtual character to track YOU!

Pixels and Policy has a great article about using a guy’s WOW profile to arrest him in real life. Extraordinary piece of reporting about interaction between police and WOW support system.

This is a link to a somewhat related story where Blizzard (WOW-maker) was sued for the way the program worked with personal information.

Some other interesting ideas that use the Metaverse to reveal something about the person behind the character.
There’s an article on Hypergrid Business about “Virtual Drag a Thorny Issue for Employers”.
I especially liked the quote, “A company can require that employees present themselves in a consistent and professional manner while at work and make clear who they are, she said, but can also decide to be flexible on this issue.”

Here’s a link to an earlier story at Poe News that describes an earlier arrest using simpler technology.

There is an interesting story in Networking World magazine describing how DNS tools helped track down the “Craiglist killer”.

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As always, the authoritative peer-reviewed type of article here below the fold.

Levin, Avner and Sánchez Abril, Patricia, Two Notions of Privacy Online (2009). Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law, Vol. 11, pp. 1001-1051, 2009. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1428422
My favorite quote: “According to network privacy, information is considered by online socializers to be private as long as it is not disclosed outside of the network to which they initially disclosed it”.

Jay Moffitt is a Tennessee attorney. This blog is for entertainment and educational purposes only and does not consitute legal advice or create an attorney/client relationship. Jay Moffitt is not certified as a specialist in this area by Tennessee and Tennessee does not certify specialists in this practice area. All comments will be answered promptly and courteously as long as they are germane to the discussion and do not contain specific game names or incidents.

Tags: Blizzard, extradition, lawsuits, privacy, tracking, World of Warcraft