What if you pay a lot of money to someone and then they get banned?

Next time, buy FIC

Do business with trustworthy and good people. Your odds will go way up that they will act honorably and not get banned. Of course death, injury and illness miht still play a part in sudden absenses.

Do business with trustworthy and good people. Your odds will go way up that they will act honorably and not get banned. Of course death, injury and illness miht still play a part in sudden absenses.

Whether or not someone acts honorably is not always the case involving getting banned. If there is a concerted effort to get someone banned through massive amounts of complaints, then their honor will not protect them.

I agree that we need a binding contract and warranty system and I believe the Lindens are working on this. It will make things a lot easier, of course, now we will have lawyers as profession in SL.

Another thought, I believe it is against TOS to transfer your acct to another but what if you had a successful business or Club or anything you thought was of value and you wanted to see it continue. So you Will it to your spouse, friend or relative. Would this be permitted or would LL just delete your acct if they found out you were deceased?

I live in a joint property state which means that if my husband and I were to divorce, we'd divide things equally (including the debts). Will courts eventually be forced to split up game currency and creations if they equate to a lot of money?

Oh, I can't wait to see how future legal battles play out; it should be mighty interesting.

When people think about "regulating" a game with real-life law, they tend to tell one of two stories. In the first story, someone in the game gets mad at someone else and brings a suit in a real-life court. This story leads to a long philosophical brouhaha about interlocking legal systems and comity and the metaphysical nature of gaming. But most of that brouhaha that turns out to be more heat than noise, because almost as soon as you fill in the story with case-specific details, the right answer is usually obvious. Thus:

"Your Dark Elf killed my Lizardman!" fails to state a cause of action in any game with explicit player-killing. Dark Elves kill Lizardmen all the time, and Lizardmen kill Dark Elves all the time, and everyone accepts that such things are part of the game. This kind of "killing" isn't wrongful from a real-life point of view.
"You hacked the server and stuck my Lizardman in a wall for four hours!" also fails to state a civil cause of action, because this hack was a straightforward Terms of Service violation. Sure, it was wrongful, but there's also someone already ready to come down on the wrongdoer with vengeful fury. The game's owners are likely to boot the Dark Elf and fix the hole.
"You defamed me with your comments to other players!" does state a cause of action. There's nothing very game-specific about defamation or other speech torts. The real-life court will have no conceptual difficulty utterly ignoring the fact that the false accusations of real-life child molestation took place in a virtual world.

It's not easy to figure out the right general principle by which to draw the line here. People have been going at it now and then since Jennifer Mnookin's Virtual(ly) Law, and are going at it still. But however hard it is to figure out the underlying principle, the actual decisions are almost always easy. As long as the disputes are strictly between players, you have to strain to find an even moderately difficult decision. The only tough calls seem to involve conduct that was against game "rules" but for which there is no remedy available. But such conduct implicates the game owners, since they're the ones who failed to supply the remedy.

Which brings us to the second story, the one that actually keeps people up at night. This is the story of the player who is angry at the game owners and sues them. Now, under current law, these cases are almost always trivially easy to resolve: whatever conduct the player was annoyed at was probably explicitly allowed under the terms of service. The player loses. But this "answer" seems too pat for a lot of people at the conference; it starts to seem openly wrong in many cases. A lot of other people at the conference think these "openly wrong" results are in fact openly right -- and suddenly you have an interesting conversation.

You may be asking yourself what kind of crack I'm on to be thinking seriously about the possibility of players suing game owners. Let me try to explain why this isn't such an outrageous proposition. The first reason is that players have sued a game owners already. A group of Ultima Online guides -- the players who run around getting other players out of walls in exchange for free accounts -- sued Origin, claiming that they were employees, and entitled to minimum wage. The game designers at the conference bewail the suit, saying that companies making virtual worlds have had to divest themselves of reliance on guides for any significant roles, lest they too be sued. So we have a palpable acknowledgement that, where real money and real laws are at stake, the game-i-ness of games stops seeming so important, and the Terms of Service stop seeming so sacrosanct.

More importantly, though, as the game designers repeatedly point out, there are lots of game designers out there who do stupid, harmful things to their users. The conference opens with Raph Koster discussing his Declaration of the Rights of Avatars, which is basically a catalog of the stupid, harmful things game owners do to their players. Something about the power of being an admin, Raph observes, corrupts. Invested with god-like powers in-game, the admins eavesdrop on intimate conversations, arbitrarily pick on hapless players, and generally screw with players' minds and positions in the game.

It might not matter so much if the only thing at stake were bruised egos. But Dan Hunter and Greg Lastowka have been pointing out, players in virtual worlds are acquiring things that walk, talk, and quack like valuable property. If I have a Bone Crusher mace in Ultima Online, I can sell it to you for about $225. If you steal it from me, I'm out $225. If the person who steals it from me isn't you, but is instead the UO administration, I'm still $225 poorer. If the "administration" does it to me because some junior sysadmin didn't like the cut of my avatar's jib, we're edging even closer to something that sounds like an actionable tort. Why actionable? Because it just seems wrong, and that sense of wrongness is like a beacon, inviting judges to cut through the fog of claims that "it's just a game."

Whether or not someone acts honorably is not always the case involving getting banned. If there is a concerted effort to get someone banned through massive amounts of complaints, then their honor will not protect them.

Whether or not someone acts honorably is not always the case involving getting banned. If there is a concerted effort to get someone banned through massive amounts of complaints, then their honor will not protect them.

It's trivial to export an object's properties to email. I coded one such script recently so we could import SL objects into OSMP.