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their software,\" to let malicious software delete arbitrary files from their systems.

So far, very few of us have been really bitten in the ass by EULAs, but that\'s because EULAs are generally associated with companies who have products or services they\'re hoping you\'ll use, and enforcing their EULAs could cost them business.

But that was the theory with patents, too. So long as everyone with a huge portfolio of unexamined, overlapping, generous patents was competing with similarly situated manufacturers, there was a mutually assured destruction -- a kind of detente represented by cross-licensing deals for patent portfolios.

But the rise of the patent troll changed all that. Patent trolls don\'t make products. They make lawsuits. They buy up the ridiculous patents of failed companies and sue the everloving hell out of everyone they can find, building up a war-chest from easy victories against little guys that can be used to fund more serious campaigns against larger organizations. Since there are no products to disrupt with a countersuit, there\'s no mutually assured destruction.

If a shakedown artist can buy up some bogus patents and use them to put the screws to you, then it\'s only a matter of time until the same grifters latch onto the innumerable \"agreements\" that your company has formed with a desperate dot-bomb looking for an exit strategy.

More importantly, these \"agreements\" make a mockery of the law and of the very *idea* of forming agreements. Civilization starts with the idea of a real agreement -- for example, \"We crap *here* and we sleep *there*, OK?\" -- and if we reduce the noble agreement to a schoolyard game of no-takebacks, we erode the bedrock of civilization itself. 

$$$$

World of Democracycraft

(Originally published as \"Why Online Games Are Dictatorships,\" InformationWeek, April 16, 2007)

Can you be a citizen of a virtual world? That\'s the question that I keep asking myself, whenever anyone tells me about the wonder of multiplayer online games, especially Second Life, the virtual world that is more creative playground than game.

These worlds invite us to take up residence in them, to invest time (and sometimes money) in them. Second Life encourages you to make stuff using their scripting engine and sell it in the game. You Own Your Own Mods -- it\'s the rallying cry of the new generation of virtual worlds, an updated version of the old BBS adage from the WELL: You Own Your Own Words.

I spend a lot of time in Disney parks. I even own a share of Disney stock. But I don\'t flatter myself that I\'m a citizen of Disney World. I know that when I go to Orlando, the Mouse is going to fingerprint me and search my bags, because the Fourth Amendment isn\'t a \"Disney value.\"

Disney even has its own virtual currency, symbolic tokens called Disney Dollars that you can spend or exchange at any Disney park. I\'m reasonably confident that if Disney refused to turn my Mickeybucks back into US Treasury Department-issue greenbacks that I could make life unpleasant for them in a court of law.

But is the same true of a game? The money in your real-world bank-account and in your in-game bank-account is really just a pointer in a database. But if the bank moves the pointer around arbitrarily (depositing a billion dollars in your account, or wiping you out), they face a regulator. If a game wants to wipe you out, well, you probably agreed to let them do that when you signed up.

Can you amass wealth in such a world? Well, sure. There are rich people in dictatorships all over the world. Stalin\'s favorites had great big dachas and drove fancy cars. You don\'t need democratic rights to get rich.

But you *do* need democratic freedoms to *stay* rich. In-world wealth is like a Stalin-era dacha, or the diamond fortunes of Apartheid South Africa: valuable, even portable (to a limited extent), but not really *yours*, not in any stable, long-term sense.

Here
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