Quote from: LegalEagle on October 17, 2012, 11:51:08 PM

There are property rights in WoW gold (subject to your contract with Blizzard), why should this be any different?

Do you have a cite handy for that? I can't seem to find any article - scholarly or otherwise - that reaches that conclusion.

Quote from: LegalEagle on October 17, 2012, 11:51:08 PM

I've talked to a lot of professors and practicing attorneys in the last week or so, and they all agree that the attachment of property rights to bitcoin is so obvious that it is barely even a legitimate question . . . . If you guys still don't agree, that's fine, you can just wait for the first court case involving bitcoin.

Well, that's the tricky part, right? Many people agree that taking someone else's BTC is wrong, and is (or should be) illegal.

The question is, how do we get there from here?

If A transfers B's BTC's to C, without B's permission, is that a crime? If so, what crime? Is it a civil wrong, is that a tort, or based on some sort of contract, or a statutory wrong, or ..?

If A defrauds B out of some BTC (assuming all of the other elements of fraud are present), has anything really happened?

In the course of trying to track down your reference to property rights in WoW gold, I ran across these articles, which don't appear to answer the question, but may be of interest to others:

http://www.bu.edu/law/central/jd/organizations/journals/bulr/volume85n4/Fairfield.pdf
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=962905
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1469299
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1092284
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=981755
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1100302