Japanese Woman Arrested For Virtual Murder
October 23, 2008 (2 Responses)
ONCE AGAIN Japan hits the height of weirdness as a woman gets arrested for killing her husband online because he divorced her – in the online game.
As mental as this sounds there is some small amount of legal sanity behind it, but before we get to that let’s just examine what happened. A husband and wife had been playing an online role playing game – as a virtual husband and wife within the game – for a year and then recently the husband divorced her without warning, in the game.
You still with me on this? They are married in real life and were playing as a married virtual couple in some online game for nearly a year, but then he virtually divorced her in the game without any notice. Her reaction? She hacked into his account and killed off his virtual character!
As harmless as this might first seem (no one died in the real world!), the police took a different view and arrested her on suspicion of illegal access on a computer and manipulating electronic data. Now to really wipe the smile of your face have a guess what the penalty for this type of crime is in Japan? How about a maximum of five years in prison (if the judge is in a particularly bad mood)? If she is lucky she might get off with a fine of approx £3100.
I’ve written many many times about how weird Japan is, and to be fair it’s actually one of the reasons I love the place so much and constantly think about going back out there, but even I’d be surprised if they give this 43 year old virtually-spurned wife a custodial sentance for such an offence.
I mean, seriously… what about backups? Even if someone does hack your online account for these role playing games, aren’t there server copies from the regular backups somewhere that you could retrive your character details from, even if it is a week or more old? Hell if there aren’t I’d be offering such a service as a way to generate even more revenue for the game developers and pay for the infrastructure hosting and upkeep!
Beats me. But then I’ve always preferred the more immediate action of a good shooter to any online role playing games. Still – I wonder if there is any way to provide a backup service without full server access for these virtual worlds? Anyone know the score on that?
thats just fked up
I fear the Matrix is here..