Someone will go to jail for stealing a Bonebiter

Here's the relevant quote:

You may have heard about a guy who recently was convicted of murdering a man during a dispute over a rare, valuable sword. That sword that was not made of metal or anything solid, but rather of 1s and 0s inside a computer hundreds of miles away. It was a sword he had won in the MMORPG Legend of Mir 3.

Insane, right? I mean, let's say our friend John has his Bonebiter (one of countless powerful weapons in WoW) and a man steals it somehow. Should the thief be convicted of a crime and punished in the real world? Did you snort with laughter at that question? Why?

Let me see if I can sort this out. Possession is nine-tenths of the law. By extension virtual possession is nine-tenths of virtual law. Let's consider the difference between the virtual and the real worlds.

In the real world you can steal my (real) sword and lock it up in your garage. If I break in to get it back, there are laws in the real world that will deal with me. But then, there are laws in the real world for dealing with your initial theft. How is this different from a virtual theft?

In the virtual world my sword, regardless of how much time and money I invested to acquire it, is just 1's and 0's in a computer. It's a record in a database. So, we'll say there are laws (virtual laws) to deal with virtual theft. Correcting the wrong stemming from the theft is easy: simply change the sword's owner back to me. Problem solved. If I have been "damaged" by the virtual theft in some way, recompense me virtually. Take virtual property away from the thief and award it to the victim. It's stupidly simple.

The article's authors attempt to draw an analogy to the "theft" of digital music. Note the quotations I have applied, because this "theft" is really just copyright violation, not theft. They do point out that no one is deprived of the song when it is copied, but in reality the theft of a virtual sword doesn't involve deprivation, either. We can simply correct the computer's records and everything is back the way it's supposed to be.

We don't need laws to protect virtual goods, regardless of the means people will go through to get them. When virtual activities spill over into the real world, then real world solutions should be pursued. For the same reason virtual "crimes" should be remedied by virtual "punishments."

Here I will proffer an analogy of my own: What if we recognized someone's "heart" as a valuable item. Certainly we worked hard to obtain it. I dated my wife for three years (and supported her for about two of those years), and let's not forget the emotional investment I made to ensure I "owned" her heart. Work with me, here.

Let's say someone came along who was better looking and rich (not hard to imagine). Now my amour sees him as more suitable than me, and elopes to Las Vegas to marry the cad. I can pine away over my "loss" as much as I want, but if I don't then go and physically accost the man (or the woman, as the case may be) then there is no one who will stand by me in my hour of loss. I mean, get real--we even use the same terminology to describe it.

Notwithstanding that we may have once had laws "protecting" things like promises to marry and all that, there still isn't any reason to now go and enact laws to protect things that do not exist in the real world. Sure, argue all you want that a person's heart (ostensibly something in their brain) has a physical component, it's not much more physical than magnetic bits on a disk drive, somewhere.

That's the way I see it. Your mileage may vary.