Focus

Real rights coming to the virtual

By Wang Wen (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-07-23 11:25

Tao said many of his friends have encountered fraud.

Usually, players are asked for virtual property before they get the recharge cards they traded it for and the cheaters disappear as soon as they get the virtual property.

"Players like us get used to the cheating," Tao said.

Another major problem with online games, critics say, is with the operators who have the power to suspend players' game accounts.

Zhu Shiqing, an online game player living in Beijing, said game accounts are usually suspended after they are stolen.

"I play online games in an online community with more than 100 people and, almost every month, some players' game accounts are suspended after being stolen," Zhu said.

He explained that hackers often steal other players' accounts to do things such as screen flooding and illegal plug-ins, and game operators usually suspend the accounts for breaking regulations in the games.

"Although players get their accounts back, they have to change them as a result of the suspension," Zhu said.

Zhu said they have not complained in the past because there was no law in place to protect players' rights.

"We have no rights. We only have an agreement offered by the operators, but they only supply some protective measures and only when they want to," Zhu told METRO.

He said the agreements include many arbitrary items. For example, in one online game, the operator announced that all the virtual property belonged to the operator and that the operator also had the right to suspend players' accounts whenever there was doubt about a player's behavior.

"Players like us have to sign this unequal agreement because we want to play the games," Zhu said.

Although the interim measures will regulate the operators' actions, there will still not be a law in place to supervise such one-sided agreements, said Qiu Baochang, director of the Consumer Rights Protection Committee within the Beijing Lawyers Association.

Qiu said the law should respect equity as well as freedom to sign a contract and suggested regulation is needed to correct the unreasonable terms of such agreements.

Game players are like consumers, Qiu said, even though the consumption environment is different from the real world.

"Virtual property is also valuable and protected by law," Qiu said. "But it is still difficulty to protect players' legal rights because of the difficulty in keeping evidence."

Qiu noted that the interim measures issued by the Ministry of Culture demand real names for online games. The measures also regulate operators' responsibilities and ask them to keep trading records for more than 180 days.

"The measures may provide an opportunity for online players to protect their rights," Qiu said.