The MMORPG the merrier

Abstract

Conducting an online search in late March 2006, an internet user who keyed in the curious word ‘MMORPG’ would have received more than 22 million hits. This confirms the growing suspicion that MMORPGs are a phenomenon that is of increasing social, cultural, and economic significance and that, therefore, they will soon be creating fresh problems for intellectual property law. MMORPGs (‘massively multiplayer online roleplaying games’) are typically highly interactive online computer games in which ‘worlds’, populated by players through their game personalities (‘avatars’), are created and regulated by a game controller. Players do not so much buy the game as subscribe to it on a monthly basis. Control of the games, which know no international borders, is exercised through licence schemes that generally purport to protect the game creator’s intellectual property in its software and trade marks—but which generally also inhibit or prevent players from exercising intellectual property rights in the characters and materials they create in the course of games. The article by Yee Fen Lim in this issue explains how MMORPGs function and why they are so IPsensitive. While this article explains the origins and mechanics of some specific problems of MMORPGs, this editorial considers more general issues. First, as with any other new phenomenon, the legal problems generated by MMORPGs must be dealt with by existing law unless and until the perception arises that current legal doctrines are inappropriate or ineffective. Thus the unauthorized copying and transmission of software code, of artwork, of characters, and other original works lies within the remit of copyright; the protection of names and styles may be covered by trade mark and unfair competition laws; attribution of authorship of new works, as well as the right to object to their mutilation, is provided by moral rights. Regular contract law governs the licensing of the game creator’s software and the legal relationship between game creator and players, and so on. The unique feature of a MMORPG is however that it is capable of mimicking the real world to the point that there is no clear barrier between the game and the world that lies outside it. Thus properties created in the course of play have generated value in the real world that lies outside the game; they have been bought and sold not only within the game itself but also through auction sites such as eBay, sometimes for many thousands of dollars. In time, one can envisage MMORPG-based assets being used as security for real-world loans—although their value presumably depends on the continued existence of the game itself. As in the real world there are also jurisdictional issues, as players in different countries quite literally cross swords with one another over transactions involving game-generated assets, copyright, and plagiarism. While the end-user licence agreement (or EULA) can establish both the law and the forum for resolving disputes involving the game creator as licensor, there may be no contractual relationships between disputant players. Free speech issues also arise. Can a player’s avatar say things in the course of a game that would incur opprobrium, censure or worse if he were to say them in the real world? Or does the fact that he is merely playing a game spare him from legal or political fall-out? The MMORPG is a consensual creation. No one is forced to play it and all who choose to do so, do so on the terms that they have themselves accepted. In this sense the MMORPG is the test-bed for social contract theory that nineteenthand twentiethcentury political philosophers must have yearned for. Yet disputes over intellectual property, in particular, demonstrate that there are limitations to the social contact, as individuals and groups within a game may perceive that their self-interest lies in breaking, or changing, the rules to which they have assented. In this respect, regulation of an MMORPG takes on the guise of regulating society itself.