World of Warcraft Erotic Guild Disbandment Suggests Virtual Worlds May Become Virtual Countries
September 20th, 2007 by Jonathan J. Klinger
Guest Commentary
A recent guild disbandment in World of Warcraft may mark the beginning of the decline of “Virtual Worlds” into “Virtual Countries,” as conflict of law issues make it nearly impossible to fairly enforce rights and duties.
As first reported by WoWInsider, a World of Warcraft guild called “Abhorrent Taboo” was recently disbanded for allegedly engaging in erotic role-playing during gameplay. Abhorrent Taboo’s members allegedly engaged in simulated intercourse in-world, sometimes while role-playing minors (a practice known as sexual ageplay). The guild also allegedly allowed minors to participate in sexual role-play activities, and did not check whether its members were minors or adults.
WoWInsider reported that the guild was shut down on September 17, however the guild immediately reformed with a new name, “Vile Anathema.”
‘Lilith,’ one of the guild’s leaders (her name possibly referring to a Mesopotamian demon who was, apocryphally, the first wife of Adam) stated in an interview to Daily Gaming News that “the guild is back in full swing and we’re even encouraging new members to join in the fun!” ‘Lilith’ also suggests that the guild was allowed to re-form because one of the members is a Blizzard employee, saying, “I promised I wouldn’t give out their name, 
since they could lose their job. But let’s just say that not everyone at Blizzard is as uptight about what we do as the people who banned us.”
There are various legal questions arising from this incident. The first involves the precautions virtual forums may take regarding age verification: is “click and deposit” sufficient, or should game and virtual world companies use measures like Linden Lab’s Identity Verification (subject to significant criticism)? The second question regards the enforceability of End User License Agreements (EULAs) and their role as the new public law in Virtual Worlds; the enforceability of these unified contracts is still in question. These questions, and others, form the backdrop for my concern.
Different countries have different approaches to both exposure (and participation) of minors in sexual activity (whether virtual or physical) and to the presentation of sexually explicit content involving either minors or others portraying minors (virtual or physical). Facing negative press and potential legal problems in Germany, Linden Lab took steps to remove ageplay from Second Life a few months ago. Though a statute criminalizing virtual child pornography was deemed unconstitutional in the United States (Aschroft v. Free Speech Coalition), U.S. citizens (who would otherwise be allowed to engage in ageplay in Second Life) are barred from it due to the laws of foreign nations, including German and Israeli law. The implication is a constitutional tort: legal speech is barred by the private sector. This constitutes private laws made by the proprietor of the virtual world. I am concerned that these private laws may bar otherwise legal speech.
Virtual worlds span through countries, bringing together citizens from different jurisdictions. In the same manner that Yahoo! was barred from hosting auctions for Nazi memorabilia in France (and, consequentially from running auctions for Nazi memorabilia anywhere, since it cannot distinguish French users from others) and that Linden Lab was forced to ban online gambling in Second Life, which is legal in parts of the world but not in the U.S., and prevent residents from establishing online casinos. Virtual Worlds essentially wind up obeying statutes from all jurisdictions, limiting themselves to almost no conduct that is offensive to anyone, anywhere.
For example, earlier this year, Michael Carlton, CEO of online sportsbook Victor Chandler, was arrested in Israel. An Israeli court asserted jurisdiction over Carlton, a foreign citizen, and stated that as long as a portion of the illegal activity (here, gambling) occurred in Israel, there is no need for universal jurisdiction, and the website operator is subjected to the Israeli law (State v. Carlton, Hebrew decision). The court stated that it was in Victor Chandler’s responsibility to bar all communication from Israel since the activity they offer is illegal for Israeli citizens to participate in.
Using the same rationale, any employee of Blizzard or Linden Lab could be subjected to the Israeli penal code, as they are allowing illegal conduct (under Israeli law) to take place on their servers. Blizzard could face harsher liability as it distributes World of Warcraft actively in Israel, while Second Life is only available for download.
The only solution to these legal problems is to separate players according to countries, or even states (as some state laws in the US differ regarding pornography and violence). Any other solution may cause a conflict of laws, and subject the industry to liability twice: the first is the constitutional tort, where legal expression is barred though there is no local legal reason to bar it (e.g. ageplay in the U.S.) and the second is potential criminal prosecution by another state which may prosecute company leaders for user actions that are actually legal in the home country of the company.
Jonathan J. Klinger is a Cyberlaw Attorney from Israel, writing his LL.M Thesis on speech norms at The Interdisciplinary Center In Hertzelia. You can find more of his articles in his blog, 2jk.org (English, Hebrew).
Guest Commentary on VB solely reflects the opinion of the author, and not necessarily the opinion of VB’s editor, other VB writers, or VB’s sponsors.
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24 Responses to “World of Warcraft Erotic Guild Disbandment Suggests Virtual Worlds May Become Virtual Countries”
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I am excited to welcome Virtually Blind’s first contributing author. I’ve been reading Jonathan Klinger’s blog for a while, and he has a really interesting perspective on a lot of the issues VB covers. I can’t read the site in Hebrew, but he makes the blog available in English as well (see links above). Do check it out.
Want to write for VB? If you are a lawyer other legal professional, a legal scholar, or just someone with an interest in virtual law, shoot me a note. I’m looking for regular writers to cover virtual worlds and games that I’m not as active in, and also writers, like Jonathan, who have an opinion about a current issue in virtual law to do guest commentaries now and then.
Please join me in welcoming Jonathan to VB.
Very interesting concepts indeed.
Great post! Thanks.
I will always admit that the law and myself are speaking different languages. But this is beyond my comprehension:
When one country block access to some parts of the internet, like China does, that is a violation of citizen’s rights, but expecting that multinational company that operates on intrnet filter their product for each and every country of the world makes no sense at all. This is an extreme of what’s going on in second life. U.S. residents are forbidden to gamble on-line, but what I (as an European) have to do with it? But SL case with gambling is a bit easier to understand because LL’s servers are on the teritorry of U.S. so I guess that U.S. companies are forbidden to provide gambling services too.
Sure, this is going out from law and gets into international politics. If one community (state) has rules (laws) that is OK, but forcing other people and communities to bend in the shape of those rules is no good thing at all.
Dandellion,
I think so as well, that’s why the Carlton ruling in Israel upset the legal community. It meant, at least here, that if you engage in activities which are illegal in Israel, you must block Israeli traffic (or just ban Israeli IPs).
International politics or not, it means that if Blizzard is operating a server where ageplay is engaged (and if the Israeli authorities actually cared about it), It might be banned here and prosecuted.
[...] Check out my guest commentary on Vitrually Blind, where i discuss how the recent disbanding of a guild in World of Warcraft may affect international law and may mark the end of Virtual Worlds as we know them. [...]
[...] פוסט אורח שלי באתר Virtually Blind מדבר על הנושא. התרגום לעברית [לעצלנים] יבוא אחרי יום כיפור. בינתיים אני אשמח אם תנהלו את הדיון שם. [...]
Linden Lab already know the solution to this problem, as Gwyneth Llewelyn pointed out a while ago: decentralisation. Just like the internet itself, if platforms such as SecondLife or eBay can be detached from the specific companies running them and distributed all over the world. SecondLife is doing this with its open source initiative, and eBay looks to be doing somthing similar with its private auction systems. The decentralised model already works well for the web and e-mail.
We all know that decentralization can solve the problem. But it brings its own problems. Scalability of such system will fall (and even now it is very poor). Though I guess there is something more that prevents LL from setting couple of farms accross the globe.
Dandellion,
I didn’t say it was a good thing to decentralise, i think that either the law needs to be changed or that the businesses will start to fall. It will take some time, though.
Dandellion,
why do you think that decentralisation reduces, rather than increases, scalability? The web and e-mail scale very well.
I agree that laws need to change.
Web and e-mail scale well, but web and e-mail are (compared to SL) very simple technologies. This page (before posting this comment) is 267.5KB. It has no more than 10 queries to the database at a time. That is nothing to compare with a simple 512sqm parcel with 3 avatars listening to music and chatting. This page connects to two dbases (hosting MySql and AdSense). Second life is feeded from two farms of 2500+ servers…. (For description what is going on behind one night in SL club check http://metaverse.acidzen.org/2007/centralized-networks-or-p2p )
I am not against decentralization. Actually, the post above states that P2P organization would reduce the lag. But that is impossible without making SL system from the scratch. And there are problems with how to organize money and assets in such system. Those problems are also the problems which LL is facing in the program of opening the code of SL. And those problem the OpenSim project will face very soon ( http://metaverse.acidzen.org/2007/problems-of-the-opensim )
I’m not sure that P2P would solve all the problems. It is possible to decentralize, without going the full measure of P2P, though in their current architecture plans there are some parts that could be relegated to P2P distribution (like textures on the first link you posted)
Your example of 10 queries and 267.5 K may seem trivial now, but it wasn’t all that long ago that sending that much data was non-trivial.
Check out http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Proposed_Architecture and http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Architecture_Working_Group to see how the system is moving towards improvement.
Just a few thoughts on Law of the Game, speaking perhaps more to the theoretical “better alternative” than to actual current jurisdiction application:
http://lawofthegame.blogspot.com/2007…virtual-nations.html
And Benjamin, my offer still stands if you want a copy of my Gaming Law Review article. Just e-mail me.
[...] An interesting piece was recently posted on Virtually Blind by Israeli attorney Jonathan J. Klinger. The crux of his argument was: More Here> Permalink [...]
Mark – I’d love a copy of the article. Sorry I missed the offer earlier. I’ll shoot you an email.
[...] Jonathan J. Klinger on Virtually Blind: Earlier this year, Michael Carlton, CEO of online sportsbook Victor Chandler, was arrested in Israel. An Israeli court asserted jurisdiction over Carlton, a foreign citizen, and stated that as long as a portion of the illegal activity (here, gambling) occurred in Israel, there is no need for universal jurisdiction, and the website operator is subjected to the Israeli law (State v. Carlton, Hebrew decision). The court stated that it was in Victor Chandler’s responsibility to bar all communication from Israel since the activity they offer is illegal for Israeli citizens to participate in. [...]
THis is why the United Nations needs to declare the Internet (And virtural worlds or any kind of software on the internet) to not be part of any nation.
@17: I’ll go with that. I think the closest metaphor in Law relates to laws related to International Waters.
@3: well, what is funny with your comment is that it should work both ways – and in this case, ‘those guys’ did what service providers normally do: Force the issue on their own turf.
These problems are Internet-wide and can be solved thru next gen Identity initiatives.
The idea is to create Internet-wide, machine-readable identities where the individual have control about what to disclose to whom and for what purpose. Blind signatures can be used to preserve privacy and avoid to turn these systems into a creepy, covert world-wide ID card scheme.
Virtual worlds – and in general any IT system – can use the information that we decided to disclose to choose what kind of services we can legally access.
This allows all combination of acceptable behaviour between parties to happen, instead of restricting it to the least common denominator of all possible parties.
I personally wish that an harmonizing movement will surface at the end, to push personal liberty and personal judgement as the only limit of our behaviour (using Identity 2.0 tools to selectively disclose personal information that allow others and us to make informed decisions). I do however realize that it won’t happen soon nor easily.
[...] interesting piece was recently posted on Virtually Blind by Israeli attorney Jonathan J. Klinger. The crux of his [...]
[...] העיקרי המובע בנייר העמדה שלי הוא מאיסור על קיומם של עולמות וירטואליים רק כיוון שאותם עולמות מאפשרים לשחקנים מסוימים בהם [...]
[...] primal fear in the brief is from banning virtual worlds in Israel just because those virtual worlds allow certain players to initiate sex for money; another problem [...]
[...] interesting piece was recently posted on Virtually Blind by Israeli attorney Jonathan J. Klinger. The crux of his [...]