What many people may not know is how quickly these small scams add up and how often they lead to more complex cons.  Below is a 30-minute interview with a former “professional” scammer.  He discusses the techniques he used to rip off EVE Online and World of Warcraft players and how fraudulent account sales eventually turned into more elaborate scams, including identity theft and old-fashioned grifting.

Patrick, the scammer being interviewed, claimed that he easily made between $10,000-20,000 in his first year of scamming, but he worked with other individuals pulling in over $100,000 a year.  I highly recommend giving the interview a listen (you can play it in the background, as I can’t think of a good reason to actually watch an interview over the telephone)  in order to understand the types of scams occurring online.  While we tend to focus on IP and licensing issues on Laws of Play, Patrick’s interview highlights the increasing importance of criminal law to the average gamer.

Forbes.com posted a fascinating interview with Gary McGraw, chief technology officer at Cigital and author of Exploiting Online Games: Cheating Massively Distributed Systems, wherein McGraw discusses how companies and security firms can learn from activity in digitally distributed games. The interview is full of interesting points that link virtual activities to real life issues and consequences, for instance:

From a sociological perspective, you probably have to have some cheating in a game because there are a lot of people who want to play the game but they don’t want to “live” the game. So you need some level of corruption and graft in the system to satisfy those people. The real question is, how much of that is necessary? Clearly if you look at the real world there is crime, corruption and graft and that keeps the skids greased. We could wipe out all crime, but the world would be a police state.

The real answer is not to eradicate all cheating and adopt all sorts of Draconian software security but to do just the right amount so that everybody is not cheating. It’s a balance. Security will become a differentiator in the marketplace that it isn’t now.

Head over to Forbes.com for the full interview.

California State Senator and outspoken critic of violent video games, Leland Yee, recently sat down to answer questions about the medium and his policies. GameCyte has a full transcript of Sen. Yee’s interview. Read on to watch the two part interview.

Part 1:

Part 2:

Today is particularly busy here at Laws of Play, so most of our updates won’t be arriving until later this evening. In the mean time, GamePolitics has posted an exclusive interview with Rep. Lee Terry, co-sponsor of the Video Games Ratings Enforcement Act, which we discussed the other day.

In the GamePolitics textual summary, Rep. Terry seems to come off generally well informed on some of the issues surrounding game ratings. However, he was off-base on a few points and I still find the legislation to be misguided. Regardless, head over to GamePolitics for the full interview and stayed tuned to Laws of Play this evening and tomorrow for an onslaught of updates we have simmering on the back burner.

Today I had the rare honor of not only attending a Supreme Court argument, but also spending an hour and a half with Justice Scalia, the Court’s second most senior Associate Justice.

Those of you who are familiar with American jurisprudence are probably familiar with Justice Scalia’s reputation as an extremely conservative justice who is a strict originalist when it comes to constitutional interpretation. For those that are unfamiliar with the different schools of thought in constitutional interpretation, originalist believe that the terms of the United States Constitution should be interpreted as they were intended at the time they were ratified. The critical question asked by originalist is, “What would a reasonable person at the time of ratification have understood these words to mean?” (For a look at opposing schools of thought Google “interpretivists” and/or “living Constitution.”)

While the bulk of my time with Justice Scalia was focused on matters that are largely unrelated to video games, I did take this rare opportunity to ask the Justice his feelings concerning recent state video game legislation. In particular, I asked him whether as an originalist he believed that state laws banning the sale of mature-rated video games to minors ran afoul of the First Amendment.

In his most succinct reply of the day, Justice Scalia replied that he did believe such legislation was constitutional. He began by explaining his belief that sound constitutional precedent holds that minors may be subjected to prohibitions that adults are not — he instantly drew the parallel to regulation of pornography sales. However, Justice Scalia emphasized that unprotected speech, such as obscenity — which he was unwilling to define for reasons that are immediately evident to any constitutional scholar — can be prohibited from sale regardless of the purchaser’s age. Justice Scalia did not suggest that violent and/or sexual content in games rises to the level of unprotected speech. In fact, he did not even suggest that video games themselves are not protected by the First Amendment (as some have suggested) and, instead, seemed to agree with numerous lower courts that games are entitled to First Amendment protection.

The implications of Justice Scalia’s answers are multi-dimensional. First, he suggests that upon appeal to the Supreme Court at least one of the nine justices would affirm state laws that ban the sale of mature-rated games to minors. Second, his remarks suggest Justice Scalia believes that video games not qualifying as obscenity¹ are protected by the First Amendment.

Essentially, this means that one of nine Supreme Court justices believes the sale of mature games to minors can be regulated, but the context of his answer suggested that the overall regulation of the medium would most likely be unconstitutional. Such a holding would not place a ban on parents buying mature games for their children; it would simply prevent minors from buying the games on their own and would leave parents to be parents.

It is important to note that several state and federal courts are in disagreement with Justice Scalia. In particular, an opinion penned by Richard Posner, a judge I hold in the highest regard, as well as opinions in numerous other Circuit Courts have held that the government cannot prevent minors access to mature arcade games or from purchasing mature-rated console titles. What does the Laws of Play community think?

Ed. Note: As this article has been gaining a lot of attention, I think it is important to make a few clarifications.  First, despite Justice Scalia’s belief that video game laws banning the sale of mature games to minors could be Constitutional, there are many other factors that could change his mind.  American jurisprudence is firmly grounded in the idea that suits are decided on a case-by-case basis and a generalized response in an informal conversation is hardly a definitive answer.  Second, as my language suggests, much of the latter half of this article is conjecture based on how Justice Scalia answered the question.  Take that for what it’s worth.

1. The current test for obscenity was established in Miller v. California, 413 U.S. 15 (1973), and is typically referred to as The Miller Test. The test sets forth three prongs that must be satisfied in order for a work to be considered obscene. The three prongs are: (1) Whether the average person, applying contemporary community standards, would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest, (2) whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct or excretory functions as defined by applicable state law, and (3) whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, and scientific value.

Star Jones discussed gaming law on her Court TV show last week with Craig Scott, a Columbine survivor, Sen. Leland Yee, architect of California’s unconstitutional video game law, and Katherine Fallow an attorney who has defended the video game industry against multiple legislative challenges.

Despite the thirteen minute segment being full of talking heads, it comes out incredibly even-minded and fair. Jones actually seems to have a grip on the legal aspects of the video gaming world and allows for all participants to have their say. Also, in a twist on your basic “video game violence television discussion,” people stay level-headed and don’t start making outrageous claims. Some pretty valid points are made on both sides of the argument. Give it a watch, see who you agree with and decide if you think Jones actually plays games on her phone.