I'm going to quote the legal stuff because that's what interests me.
Quote:
The MMO Gamer: What is your stance on the “ownership” of virtual property?
Raph Koster: We are the network, we are not the world operator, we don’t run your world, customer service is your job. Similarly, we’re not claiming ownership of your stuff. It would be kind of silly considering that you may have links to it from some place else. It probably isn’t on our site, even.
The MMO Gamer: So if someone has a popular world, gets sick of running it, and decides to sell it on eBay for a few grand, the company wouldn’t have a problem with that?
Raph Koster: That’s essentially selling the account to access it, from an admin point of view.
The only thing about that is at that point I would have to check with lawyers to find out if there are any weird privacy questions where we could end up liable because you transferred your account with your credit card information to somebody else. So there’s weird things like that, I think the way to put it is actually we’re kind of like a hosting company.
You’re uploading a copy of information, you’re using our tools to create information. When something is created you get the copyright, so the IP is going to remain yours, whether or not it literally makes sense for you to transfer your account, or whether we need to set up a mechanism maybe for you to give your world to another active account, maybe we have to do that, I don’t know. I mean, the core of the thing is if you make a kick-ass game idea, we don’t own it, that’s your kick-ass game idea.
I’m sure there’s all kinds of legalese around that, where we have to have licenses to display it, and all kinds of crap like that, but…
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"Kind of like a hosting company."
Well, actually, this could work. Hosting companies do not claim to own the material you place on them. While they have to give in to takedown notices and obey local laws, as Raph notes, that doesn't really effect the legality of it all.
You pay Metaplace to host your little MMO, just like Blizzard could hypothetically pay a server farm to host their game. Included in that package is a proprietary coding language, which you are licensing, much like video game developers license graphic engines or something.
In all, the complicated legal questions stemming from managing an economy and a social network don't really come up, because Areae doesn't get into them.
Open Questions:
1. Raph was kind of vague about how you PAY for this thing. There's some sort of virtual currency system. How will that work? It's simple if the equation is simply Dollar In, Areaeoleans out. But that doesn't seem to be how it works. In fact, Raph is only all that specific about Metaplace taking in Areaeoleans and paying OUT real money(!)
This is a pretty big deal. We can only interact with other people online in so many ways. Talking. Shared Activities (incl. sex). Exchange. Exchange usually takes a shared currency. In Warcraft, you get gold by slaying monsters. In Second Life, you get a small stipend per week plus you can directly buy the stuff. Virtual dollars drain out of the economy through various implemented, carefully considered means. Still too early to say how that'll work in this context. I mean, can players create their OWN shared currency systems that's entirely particular to their little world?
2. Raph talks about Metaplace's relationship with its endusers, where the endusers are the quasi-Developers who build with the tools. But that's only half the story. The other bit are the people who don't build but use the worlds. What's their role with the company? Do they have to sign anything with Metaplace? How do they pay for it?
In Copernic-only news, I got sick of reading starry-eyed Technology and Law types who get wet when someone proposes extending property rights to my +3 Sword of Catassing. After consulting with my Professor, my essay has been retitled "Leave the Orcs Alone" and is now about why extending legal rights to the online world is retarded. I hope to include the following footnote:
"147. Overly utopian commentators should consider that it was the Virtual World community that coined the term "poopsocking" to refer to going to the bathroom where they sit rather then leave the computer to use a toilet."
