If The Truth Fits

A quick apology and explanation about the lack of posts of late. At this very moment I’m typing from a house in the South of France (right next to the sea!) where I’ve been working for the past week, and will be for the next couple of weeks. The work day here from from about 8:30 to 19:00 and its usually pretty physical stuff, so by the end of the day my brain isn’t ‘all there’ if you know what I mean. Also, I haven’t got as much time as usual to be checking out the news to see what’s happening in the world (I have literally no idea how the stock markets are doing), so that’s why you haven’t been getting your daily dose of my opinions recently.

One story that I have seen in a few places is a rather unusual one that concerns property rights. I know, property rights, you know this post is going to be a barrel of fun. Oh, it also concerns murder, ahhh, you’re hooked now aren’t you. Okay, its not actual murder, its virtual murder, but despite the murder being virtual it is having some very real ramifications.

In Japan (of course), a 43 year-old woman who was ‘divorced’ by her online husband in a MMORPG (Massive Multiplayer Role Playing Game) called Maple Story may face time in jail after logging onto her former “husband’s” account and killing his character. Yes, apparently in Japan doing something like that could result in you going to jail, or getting a rather hefty fine at the very least. I’m sure that if it happened in the UK it either wouldn’t make the news, or would be a laffer on page 9, but the police would probably have better things to do. Not so in Japan, where digital life has very much integrated with ‘real’ life and these matters are taken pretty seriously. In cases like this it isn’t actually the ‘murder’ itself which is the crime, its the woman illegally accessing the man’s account, but that wouldn’t be as interesting of a story now, would it?

Personally, I’m undecided as to whether I can really think about this act as a crime. If I opened an account to play Maple Story, and then someone hacked into it and killed virtual Andy I’d probably be quite annoyed, but I wouldn’t think it was a crime. However, if I had played it for months and months, going around completing quests and making friends, I’d probably be pissed off if one of those people I’d met hacked my account and took their revenge, maybe not to the point of calling the police, but still pretty pissed off. If someone hacked into my e-mail, that would be a crime, if they hacked into my Facebook profile, it would be inconvenietn but probably not a crime, if they hacked into one of my websites, I’d be scared to death of losing many years work, and it probably would be a crime, but I don’t think anything could be done about it so I wouldn’t get the authorities involved.

As you can probably tell from this article, this news story has confused me greatly. I spend a lot of my time working on the internet writing articles, blog postings, and designing websites every so often, so I know exactly what the guy was going through when his character was killed (I’ve lost work in crashes before), and yet I can’t quite bring myself to think that someone should go to jail (or even receive a fine) for a virtual murder.

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