Preservation of evidence in case of online gaming crime

Abstract

Along with the rapid growth of network applications and digital contents, online gaming has become a very successful industry in recent years. It not only brings tremendous business opportunities but also attracts marvelous customers to be online players. However, due to the lack of virtual property protection and related information security schemes, more and more players have violated the law because of its real world profit. Unfortunately, online gaming crime has turned out one of the most serious cybercrimes in many countries, such as in Taiwan, South Korea, China, and so on. In order to solve this judicial problem and effectively protect virtual property, we propose a Virtual Property Description Language (VPDL) as the syntax to record and express virtual property. There are six models, including Identity Model, Ownership Model, Trading Model, Content Model, Revocation Model, and Security Model. It can effectively protect virtual property and strengthen the competence of digital evidence by recording the legal source, ownership, trading track, and handling of virtual properties so as to lower the cases of online gaming crime. The online gaming companies may use it in the aspects of virtual property management, tracing historic records and collecting legal digital evidence, while the existing system mechanism of online game doesn't need to be changed. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.