eBay exempts Second Life from ban on selling virtual items

Adam Turner
Tuesday, 30 January 2007 20:29

Your IT - Home IT

eBay claims Second Life's exemption from its ban on auctioning virtual items is not linked to the fact eBay's founder is a Second Life investor.

Over the weekend eBay stepped up a ban on listing virtual items, such as characters and weapons from online multi-player games World of Warcraft and EverQuest II. Virtual world Second Life has been exempt from the ban because eBay does not consider it a game, not because eBay founder Pierre Omidyar is an investor, reports Auction Bytes. Other Second Life investors include Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos and Lotus Development founder Mitch Kapor.

The ban is due to concerns over the legality of virtual property, with eBay's policy on digitally delivered goods stating: "The seller must be the owner of the underlying intellectual property, or authorized to distribute it by the intellectual property owner". This would not appear to distinguish between games and other virtual environments although, unlike with many online games, Second Life's creators specifically condone economic interaction between the virtual and real worlds.

The move further fuels the debate as to whether virtual world participants legally own their virtual possessions. The trading of virtual items in the real world is believed to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars, much of which until recently took place on eBay. World of Warcraft alone has 8 million subscribers across the globe, with an exchange rate calculated between gold units and real world currencies. Currently World of Warcraft gold is trading at an average of 9.8 US cents per unit, according to GamsUSD.com.

Participants take virtual possessions seriously, with Legend of Mir 3 player Qiu Chengwei stabbing friend Zhu Caoyuan to death in 2005 after Zhu borrowed and then sold Qiu's dragon sabre. Qui had reported the theft to police but was told the weapon was not real property protected by law.

Second Life commerce is also taken seriously, with in-game real estate agent Anshe Chung becoming the Second Life's first real world millionaire last year. Second Life's Linden dollar (names after Linden Labs, which operates the virtual world) is current trading at $L269.1 to the US dollar, with over $US1 million spent in Second Life in the past 24 hours according to news agency Reuter's Second Life correspondent. Sweden has even gone as far as establishing an embassy and information centre within the virtual world.

The eBay ban on trading non-Second Life items is expected to be a major boost for dedicated virtual item traders such as IGE, which allows virtual world players to buy, sell and trade items and characters within the games as well as pay others to increase the skill level of their virtual characters.