The UK Court of Appeal has ruled that virtual gold in Old School RuneScape is property under the terms of the Theft Act 1968, and that owners of gold can therefore seek justice in cases of theft.
By providing this ruling, Popplewell has permitted an appeal to go ahead against an earlier judgement in this case, which found that gold pieces in RuneScape were not ‘rivalrous’ because they were infinite in supply.
Popplewell disagreed with this conclusion, deciding that an uncapped supply does not stop something from being rivalrous.
He compared RuneScape’s gold pieces to paper clips, which still count as property even though “the manufacture and supply of them [is] infinite, in the sense that is not capped at any finite number.”
The judge also essentially noted that, while the supply of gold pieces is uncapped, the same players or individuals cannot own the same gold, and that transfer necessarily involves dispossession of at least one party.
The defendant in this case, Andrew Lakeman, had worked for Jagex as a content developer, with the complainants alleging that Lakeman gained access to 68 player accounts, either by hacking or by using recovery credentials.
As a result, the defendant faces five indictments, including theft, computer misuse and money laundering.
Property in British lawSpeaking to Decrypt, lawyer Ashley Fairbrother noted a distinction between British criminal and civil law that may have been missed in some reporting on this case.
“The Court held there was no difficulty in something being property for the purposes of s.4 [of the Theft Act 1968], but not for the civil law,” said Fairbrother, who is a partner at London-based law firm Edmonds Marshall McMahon.
This relates to the question of whether Jagex’s terms and conditions for RuneScape—which stated that virtual currencies are not the user’s “own private property”—made the dispute solely a matter of civil law, a point with which Lord Justice Popplewell ultimately disagreed.
“That ‘property’ in s.4 Theft Act 1968 is an autonomous criminal-law concept and need not track civil-law property, seems to me, to be both well founded and necessary in this modern world,” Fairbrother said.
While this ruling from the UK Court of Appeal may have deep implications for virtual property within video games, Fairbrother suggests that it would have limited impact on the legal status of Bitcoin in the UK.
