[P2P-F] Fwd: Article : "Chinese prisoners forced to produce virtual gold"

Sat May 28 17:18:12 CEST 2011

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Dante-Gabryell Monson <dante.monson at gmail.com>
Date: Fri, May 27, 2011 at 9:00 PM
Subject: Article : "Chinese prisoners forced to produce virtual gold"
To: econowmix at googlegroups.com

Chinese prisoners forced to produce virtual gold, real profits for their
guards
By Vlad Savov <http://www.engadget.com/editor/vlad-savov>
<http://www.engadget.com/editor/vlad-savov/rss.xml>
 posted May 26th 2011 5:14AM

http://www.engadget.com/2011/05/26/chinese-prisoners-forced-to-produce-virtual-gold-real-profits-f/

The virtual goods
economy<http://www.engadget.com/2011/04/09/world-bank-report-finds-selling-virtual-goods-in-games-more-prof/>
 of massively multiplayer<http://www.engadget.com/2010/11/24/chinese-man-plays-mmo-on-titanic-screen-pleads-for-higher-pixel/>
online
games may be thriving, but it's also stimulating an undesirable side-effect:
exploitation. A former detainee at a prison in Heilongjiang province, China,
has told the *Guardian* about how he was habitually forced into playing MMOs
like *World of Warcraft* for the collection of loot, which the prison guards
would then resell online for as much as ¥6,000 ($924) per day. Such totals
would be the product of up to 300 inmates working 12-hour daily shifts,
though predictably they saw none of the profits themselves. The unnamed
source was at a "re-education through labor" camp where the usual toil would
involve actual, rather than virtual, mining. The profitability of the online
market has seemingly inspired prison bosses to move with the times, however,
with business being so brisk that the computers "were never turned off." A
Chinese government edict from 2009 is supposed to have introduced a
requirement that online currencies only be traded by licensed entities, but
it's believed that the practice of using prisoners in this fashion continues
unabated.

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