When you were making plant pots in RuneScape and selling them to other players, you might not have thought you were laying the groundwork for a UK legal precedent that would define in-game gold as intangible property covered by the Theft Act 1968, but, well, here we are.
Lord Justice Popplewell has ruled on appeal that RuneScape’s gold pieces are legal property, which is important for the ex-Jagex developer accused of stealing 705 billion of them.
According to the judgement handed down by the Court of Appeal, while working as a content developer at Jagex, the developer Andrew Lakeman is accused of accessing 68 different players accounts and “stripp[ing] those accounts of hundreds of billions of gold pieces” worth £543,123 if converted into RuneScape bonds, an item that can be bought for gold and exchanged for game membership. Jagex alleges this all took place in 2018. Lakeman and his solicitor dispute the charges.
When the case first went to trial last year, however, the judge dismissed the case agreeing with the defence’s argument that RuneScape’s in-game gold couldn’t be legally defined as property under the Theft Act 1968.
While the law does exclude certain items from being considered property, such as wild mushrooms and animals, it doesn’t, oddly enough, list in-game currencies. However, to be considered a legally stealable item, something also has to be “rivalrous” and not “pure information”. Meaning, as quoted within the case report: “if the use or consumption of the thing by a person, or of a specific group of persons, necessarily prejudices the use or consumption of that thing by one or more other persons.”
The judge ruled in favour of the defence because Runescape’s in-game gold isn’t “rivalrous”, because if one player has gold, it doesn’t take away another player’s ability to get it. “Gold pieces within [Runescape] are not sufficiently rivalrous to be classed as intangible property,” the judge said. “One gold piece is the same as any other, and their supply is infinite. The fact that existing players have wealth does not preclude new players from joining the game and getting more wealth, without taking it from existing players. This means, in my judgment, that even if the Crown is able to prove every single factual assertion that forms the basis of its case, the offences currently charged are not made out in law and I would not be prepared to leave them to a jury.”
However, the judge left their ruling open to appeal and appeal the prosecution bloody well have. The ruling went to the Court of Appeals, and ended up in front of Lord Justice Popplewell. Hold onto your legal pads, reader.
“We differ from the Judge in his reasoning for reaching the contrary conclusion on rivalrousness. The two reasons which the Judge gave in his ruling do not, with respect, bear analysis,” Popplewell writes. “The first was that ‘one gold piece is like any other, and their supply is infinite’. This does not, however, distinguish them from many other forms of rivalrous property. One paper clip from a given manufacturer is like any other; and the manufacture and supply of them infinite, in the sense that is not capped at any finite number. Yet each paper clip constitutes property. The same is equally true of gold pieces.”
Effectively, just because each gold piece in RuneScape is identical and functionally the same, does not make it something that a player can be deprived of.
“The Judge’s second reason was that ‘[t]he fact that existing players have wealth does not preclude new players from joining the game and getting more wealth without taking it from existing players’,” Popplwell continues. “However this too is no answer to the rivalrousness of the in-game wealth which a particular player already has at any given time. It focuses only on different assets which may thereafter be acquired.”
After all, if you had had 100 million gold taken from you and someone said, ‘Don’t worry, at least it won’t stop other players from earning gold’, you might say that doesn’t make a jot of difference to you.
In their conclusion, Popplewell lays out their reasons for granting the prosecution’s appeal, saying that RuneScape’s gold pieces “are properly described as something which can be stolen as a matter of normal use of language. They do not fall within any of the established exceptions. They are not ‘pure knowledge’: functionally they exist as identifiable assets distinct from the code which gives rise to them and outside the minds of people. There is no good policy reason for excepting them from the category of property which can be stolen. On the contrary, they are assets which have an ascertainable monetary value and which may be traded for that value both in the game and outside the game. Within the rules of the game they represent money’s worth as the product of purchase of a bond. Outside the game they are regularly traded for money’s worth. They are capable of being subject to dishonest dealing which deprives their possessor of their use and value. It would be surprising and unsatisfactory if such dishonest dealing did not amount to the offence of theft.”
While you may not want to read the whole case document, as it is a pretty extensive read, it is full of interesting examples of other legal precedents. For instance, there was the Oxford student accused of theft for taking an exam paper, even though they returned it, because they now possessed the questions that were in the document. Or the discussion that compares forbidden real money transfers in games to theft of Class A drugs.
With the Court of Appeal’s decision now handed down, it would appear that the original case can now proceed.
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