Second Life, World of Warcraft, and the Sims Online are some of the many popular virtual worlds that exist online. Known as Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs), these virtual worlds boast larger populations than many countries on this planet. Strikingly, these games are not only popular, but profitable. Anshe Chung, for example, was the first virtual millionaire and she earned two million dollars in just thirty months as a virtual real estate broker. 
In Second Life, for instance, avatars amass wealth by engaging in real estate transactions, and buying and selling goods and services, among others things. Unique to the virtual world, players will pony up real dollars to purchase items. And it is virtual property that is now becoming an issue in real-life courts, as players seek to enforce their virtual property rights.
Last year, for example, a Pennsylvania lawyer sued a San Francisco-based company over a property deal that went bad. The lawyer sued in court for breach of contract and unfair trade practices after he purchased an expensive piece of Second Life real estate, only to find his account terminated shortly thereafter.
Virtual goods are so valuable that the (real) world saw its first virtual sweatshop in 2002. A Southern 
California company called Black Snow Interactive realized it would be profitable to acquire more virtual property in the MMOGs Ultima Online and Dark Age of Camelot, and to sell the virtual property on eBay for real money. Black Snow’s business model entailed renting cheap office space in Tijijuana, Mexico, and hiring unskilled Mexican workers to play the games and acquire skills and gold. When the virtual sweatshop came to light, Black Snow filed suit in federal court with the goal of determining the extent of a gamers’ rights to trade goods outside of the game. Unfortunately, this suit was never resolved.
One man in China decided to bypass the courts and take his virtual property dispute into his own hands. A Shanghai gamer was sentenced to life in prison when he stabbed a competitor to death after the competitor sold his virtual sword for real money.
Enforcing virtual property rights in real world courts is a new concept and these 
examples highlight the types of disputes that may arise in the future. Breach of contract, unfair trade practices, and trademark and copyright infringement may be violations in the virtual world that are litigated and decided in the real world. For now, it appears that virtual property rights constitute real property rights, to the extent that those virtual items can be bought and sold outside of the virtual world, that is, in the real world.
