The Lawbringer: Mailbag 2.0

Pop law abounds in The Lawbringer, your weekly dose of WoW, the law, video games and the MMO genre. Running parallel to the games we love and enjoy is a world full of rules, regulations, pitfalls and traps. How about you hang out with us as we discuss some of the more esoteric aspects of the games we love to play?

I love getting emails with questions in them! Incidentally, people also love mailbags. Right? Right? Of course you do. Also, based on my images, can you tell that I've been leveling through Grizzly Hills?

After the last two weeks of gold selling/hacking and crazy currency discussions, I found my email littered with questions that I had neglected. At the end of last month I also ran a mailbag feature, but some of these questions were so fun and provoking that I had to answer them publicly. One interesting thing about legal questions and answers is that you're obviously not getting the whole answer, because there are a million and one factors that go into questions and answers in the legal world. Rather, you're getting the beginnings of a concept that you might want to further your knowledge of. Fun times! Learning is fun! Let's learn together.

If you have a question for the column, please email me at mat@wowinsider.com, and include a subject with "Lawbringer Question" or something easily categorized/sorted like that!

Barter me gently

The first email we've got today is from Blacklance on the Kirin Tor server. He wants to know why gold just can't be made account-bound like heirloom items to stop gold farming, selling, and hacking.

Thanks for the email, Blacklance. Making gold account-bound is certainly an option but not an option players would like, I would think. The purpose of gold is to be liquid, to be spent on a variety of items and easily traded. One of the purposes of liquid currency is having an ascribed value that makes it a trading medium. "Liquid," for our purposes here, just means that you can turn gold into other items through purchase or items into gold through sale.

A bartering system, which would most likely replace a liquid currency system, uses the item's inherent value and the need/want from each member in the transaction. I need flasks, and you need armor. It's harder to make a piece of armor, so you give me more flasks for this one piece of armor. We come to an agreement, make the trade, and the "worth" of each item does not translate out of our single transaction, for the most part. Everything is very self-contained.

There is a reason human beings invented currency: Bartering sort of sucks. It works in small economies where people roughly have the same ins and outs, needs and wants, as it were. Larger economies, like World of Warcraft's, thrive on currency because of the mechanisms that perpetuate said economy. The auction house would be a serious mess without currency -- people would suggest a trade and you would have to go through each one until you found the right trade you would want to make. It would be an unwieldy system, and currency just makes things easier.

Sure, with currency you get the gold selling and hacking problem, which is why getting rid of currency for an already established game is a blessing and a curse. The curse, of course, is that players would now have to not only keep everything they would ever want to barter in their bags, but the entire nature of the game would have to be changed.

Gold as currency is here to stay. Fighting gold selling is about limiting the importance of gold on character progression and fighting the security loopholes, not necessarily changing the system in such profound ways.

This space for rent

Our next question is from Ryan, who wants to know about guild sponsorships.

Thanks for this great question, Ryan. The reason gold selling is against the Terms of Use and EULA is because you are selling something for profit that is explicitly stated in the Terms that you aren't allowed to do if you want to retain access to the game. Real money transactions on that grey market are against Blizzard's rules. Illegal? We don't really know yet. Against the rules? Definitely.

Guild sponsorships don't actually have a nexus, basis, or any kind of focal point in World of Warcraft itself. The contracts signed and the deals made are all about out-of-game representation, for the most part. Take Paragon, a guild that advertises Asus and Steelseries on its website and uses products at its events from these companies. None of that really affects WoW or Blizzard's terms, that I personally know of. When Blizzard has Paragon play the live raid at BlizzCon, there are most likely contracts in place for that, with advertisers' rights and compensation and all that. For the sponsorship stuff, though, it's not really in the game's terms.

If Blizzard is in a similar mindset with guild sponsorships as it is with machinima sponsorships (i.e. very relaxed, for the most part), then guild sponsorships are perfectly fine. An email to Blizzard, however, is always advised before doing anything with its game, just for safesies.

Making noise

Our final email comes from Caboose, who wants to know a little bit about sound effects and copyrights.

Thanks for the email, Caboose. Sound recordings are protected under U.S. copyright law as sound recordings. This questions opens a huge can of worms, so I'll keep it simple and address your points quickly.

Sound effects are usually licensed out; you pay the copyright owner a requested fee for a license to use those sound effects as described. Sound departments can also license whole volumes of sound effects, like libraries, and those come with what rights you have attached. It's all nebulous and depends on the copyright owner.

Some sound recordings are also in the public domain. The most famous sound effect, I believe, is the Wilhelm Scream. You'll know it when you hear it.

As for sound effects and copyright in other countries? Well, they don't care, for the most part. China, especially, is copyright theft central, which is why a ton of knock-off electronics and technology comes out of factories in that area of the world. Copyright law in the United States is not always honored everywhere else in the world. So your Korean-based MMO just might be stealing WoW sounds and doesn't think that any action can really be taken against it. Again, it all depends on whether Blizzard is even interested in going after companies stealing its sound effects. It would be easier to do in the United States, however.

Thanks for the emails, guys!

This column is for entertainment only; if you need legal advice, contact a lawyer. For comments or general questions about law or for The Lawbringer, contact Mat at mat@wowinsider.com.