Dutch arrest "online furniture thief"
According to this Reuter's wire story, a Dutch kid has been arrested "for stealing online furniture," in the game-world Habbo Hotel; though it actually seems likely that the charge will be for breaking into other players' accounts.
Dutch police have made their first arrest of an online thief -- a 17-year-old accused of stealing virtual furniture from rooms in the Habbo Hotel -- a popular teenager networking Web site.LinkAn Amsterdam police spokeswoman confirmed a report that the teenager was accused of stealing 4,000 euros (2,833 pounds) worth of virtual furniture by hacking into the accounts of other users.
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The punishment should fit the crime. Stealing virtual goods should require a number of hours participating in virtual community service.
One not-for-profit fund raiser (I forget who it was) event in Second Life used a homeless teenager asking for donations. A more positive punishment than being banished to the corn fields.
Whenever a case of "virtual theft" arises, it's too easy to be distracted by the "virtual" aspect (but it's not even real!), and forget the real crimes required to pull off a virtual heist: account theft, identity theft, fraud, and more. It shouldn't matter whether these acts are committed via the web, virtual world, or game.
*furni
(sorry, couldn't resist)
Metaphors aren't reality and the map is not the territory. Of *course* we should distinguish between virtual "theft" and real theft. Putting everything into one bucket because it shares some salient property makes it impossible to draw any useful conclusions from it, take useful preventative action, etc.
For example, fraud, neglect, assault, pick-pocketing, and infringement can all result in innocents being unjustly impoverished.
But we distinguish between them, in the courts and in real life. They have different motives, different victims, different perpetrators, and different circumstances. If the same standards were used to prevent, judge, or redeem, say, incompetent roofers who ruin your house; Enron executives who loot your pension; and pickpockets, we'd have a very hard time indeed coming up with a coherent picture of what was going on, who should be punished, how much, and how to prevent it in the first place.
Halting State spoiler below
Maybe the thief is really a greedy agent of the Red Team who is simply trying to make a quick euro on the side.
On the other hand, to the extent that banks these days often store their fiat money as mere blips of magnetism on a computer...isn't this "new" crime essentially the equivalent of most embezzling cases in the last ten years?
Ach! Dammit Comedian! Cannae ye use a bigger font on th' spoiler part. I skipped over it to th' paragraph.
'n wuz it absolutely necessary that ye shewed th' synchronicity of th ' writin' o' Halting State an' this arrest by makin' reference to a spoiler? Ye great lumberin' git!
@ Cory
So are you another reader of Paul Watzlawick? Because "the map is not the territory" changed the way I looked at the world completely.
Other than that, I'm using my first post to say that I agree with you wholeheartedly on this issue.
imagine trying to get cops in detroit to do anything about this.
That is craazy! Look you can't eat money and you can't sit on a virtual couch.
Virtual punishment is absurd as well! Can you imagine someone sitting in a virtual prison cell for a virtual murder they committed in second life?
Haha. Talk about crazy.
Before virtual reality comes actual reality.
People are getting carried away with simulacrums.
AR
Pool's, er, been stolen.
AR, i know, if i wrote a book and sold it online as a "Virtual book" what right would i have to it. its not like you can bend the pages to mark your spot, or press leaves in it. ITS NOT A REAL PRODUCT!
oh.. wait.
"Hacking into accounts" in Habbo Hotel means asking other users for their passwords, and is ridiculously common. The users are young, many in their early teens, and this is how they learn about password security.
Sure it sucks to lose a virtual jacuzzi, but at least the victims of this crime are less likely to fall prey to more serious phishing in the future. (Unlike some grown-ups, who get their first lesson of this sort through a Nigerian letter.)
In most cases the value of the furniture stolen from one individual user must be negligible - a couple of euros, a couple dozen at most. If some of the victims had actually spent more than that on make-believe stuff, maybe it's time for parental intervention.
This Dutch kid should have to return the furniture to its rightful owners, and then be given a medal for teaching those kids a lesson.
Cranky Old Woman: Watzlawick, nope never read it! Will have a look!
DOGGO: I did try to use a <font color="FFFFFF"> to hide the spoiler, but I guess the allowed "HTML tags for style" don't include font color.
I'll put you down as glass-half-full.
Aye, Funny Man, put me down for a glass half-full. Ah, well, it's th' journey, not th' desti-nation. And a fine journey Halting State is. Thanks to Le Boinger for the reccy on it.
The queer thing about virtual theft is that the ability to steal is a property of the underlying system. That is, the developer needs go through effort to make it even possible to steal something.
The ability to steal relies on uniqueness - the lack of copies and/or the lack of copiers. If you don't have a copy, you lack the required information to produce another (which gives us e.g. theft by encrypting the victim's non-backed-up files and selling the key.) Similarly, if you don't have a copier, you can't copy existing copies, which is what happened here.
And the lack of copiers is Habbo Hotel's business model. Given the choice between hacking Habbo's servers to use their copier or paying them a couple of euros to have them create you a copy, most people are going to go for the latter.
@Cory
The book I referred to is "How Real Is Real." I only bother to mention this because he has several others.