eBay Delisting Almost All MMO Auctions
Uber auction site eBay has begun de-listing all virtual property auctions. Yawn, virtual prop-a-what? Virtual property is anything digitally represented that appears to be owned by your character or account. That’s currency, items, even whole characters that could be transferrable — things you work hard for and may want to sell for cash. eBay is leaving the virtual property marketplace because buying and selling virtual property is illegal.
How can it be illegal for you to sell something that’s yours? That’s easy: it’s not yours. You may earn gold pieces in World of Warcraft while playing your character, and they may show up on your character, and you decide when to spend it on a new item or send it to a needy or whiny guild-mate, but the gold pieces are never yours. The virtual cash and items belong to Blizzard, and that is made extremely clear in the End User License Agreement you agree to not just when you install the game but when any patch is installed for it. Same goes for almost every other online game.
The only game that I think gives you the right to your intellectual property, at least, is Second Life. Second Life even goes so far as to encourage you to go after people who copy your objects or other content in the game world by using the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. This may be why SecondLife virtual property is still being sold on eBay.
So with eBay out of the way, folks like IGE will have free rein until the MMO creators come up with more of their own auction houses the way Sony has done with their own auction site. Does Blizzard have a real-world auction site in the works? They’d be foolish not to.
Seen on Slashdot. Kat Mowbray contributed to this article.
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Matt
