THANK YOU
eR
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVLIXyJltw4
The Legit's Haven't Died ,
The Game has once again Changed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKjkDZ9DR14
I Would Like Everyone to Meet TheCoolness,
Mr. SmallWood, He Gave us Script, and he was a threat to FREEDOM
It did not come from religious extremists, and it did not involve violence. Instead, it emerged from a placid courtroom in Hawaii, where federal Judge Alan C. Kay recently issued a 49-page decision allowing one Craig Smallwood to pursue his case for damages against NCSoft Corporation, the maker and marketer of a computer game to which Mr. Smallwood has allegedly become addicted.
Lineage is an interactive fantasy game set in a virtual medieval world of elves, dark elves, knights, princes, and magicians. Players can play with or against other online players as they lay siege to castles, impose and collect taxes, kill monsters, and (in avatar form) kill other players. At its height, the game had over 3 million subscribers, most of them in Korea.
According to his complaint, Mr. Smallwood began playing Lineage II (a prequel to the original game) in 2004 or 2005. Over the next five years, Mr. Smallwood played for over 20,000 hours, or roughly ten hours per day, seven days per week. Mr. Smallwood experienced "great feelings of euphoria and satisfaction from persistent play." Soon, he was "psychologically dependent and addicted." NCSoft banned him from internet gameplay for allegedly scheming to create real money transfers with other players, a charge Mr. Smallwood denies. The expulsion has upset Mr. Smallwood. For one thing, he is out the $65 he prepaid for playing time. More importantly, Mr. Smallwood's expulsion has caused "extreme and serious emotional distress and depression." He has suffered "psychological trauma, he was hospitalized, and he requires treatment and therapy three times a week."
In short, Mr. Smallwood is now a mess, and not at all the well-adjusted fellow he was back in those halcyon times when he was playing Lineage ten hours per day.
Mr. Smallwood may have relished his years as an inhabitant of the Lineage kingdom, but when he was expelled, he remembered his real roots and did what red-blooded Americans are bred to do when confronting disappointment. He sued. His complaint sets forth eight claims, four of which Judge Kay dismissed on various procedural grounds. But he allowed Mr. Smallwood to pursue his claims for negligence, gross negligence, and negligent infliction of emotional distress. All three claims rest on the premise that NCSoft was negligent in designing and distributing the game and in failing to warn Mr. Smallwood of its "dangerous and defective characteristics." (Judge Kay also allowed Mr. Smallwood to proceed with his defamation claim based on the allegedly false accusation of real money transfers.)
The most disturbing aspect of the opinion was its treatment of the First Amendment. There wasn't any. Defendants, in their motion to dismiss, did not raise it. Judge Kay, in his opinion, did not discuss it.
The court and counsel proceeded in their own virtual world, where castles, dragons, and elves are real, but the First Amendment is not. Locked in this fantasy, they ignored several decades of state and federal precedents holding that television programs, movies, magazine articles, and other forms of entertainment are subject to constitutional protection. Unless, under the Supreme Court's test in Brandenburg v. Ohio, they are "directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and are likely to incite or produce such action," these works are shielded by the First Amendment and furnish no basis for tort liability.
The facts underlying these precedents are far more heart-wrenching, and the victims far more sympathetic, than those in the Smallwood case.