UK judge rules that RuneScape gold is fair game when suing for theft, at least in this case where an ex-developer stole $700,000 worth of it

You can't kill that which has no life, but you can apparently steal that which has no value. A UK judge recently ruled that stealing gold pieces in Old School RuneScape counts for the purposes of at least one judgment that was made on Jan. 14, as spotted by Gamesradar.

The case involves an ex-employee of RuneScape dev Jagex who's been accused of hacking 68 player accounts, seizing hundreds of billions of gold pieces which he then sold outside the game for Bitcoin. Jagex argued the gold was worth over $700,000.

You can read the ruling in this admirably lengthy document where Lord Justice Popplewell deliberates the heart of the issue: "whether 'gold pieces' as a form of wealth in a video game constitute property within the meaning of s. 4 of the Theft Act [of] 1968."

That judgment includes both an astonishingly in-depth explanation of what Old School RuneScape is (Popplewell rightly finds that achieving progress in the game "can be a time consuming process") and the conclusion that, yes, stealing a bunch of RuneScape gold and selling it for Bitcoin counts as theft.

The argument is that, even though RuneScape gold doesn't hold any value in meatspace, "property should be construed as capable of applying to any thing which can as a matter of normal use of language be described as capable of being stolen, unless there are good reasons why such a thing should be excepted." Because gold is bought and sold both in the game and outside of it, it "may clearly be the subject of dishonest dealing."

This isn't even the first time a rogue Jagex moderator has been caught with their hands in the RuneScape cookie jar. Back in 2018, Mod Jed (that was literally his name on the forums, "Mod Jed") was fired for stealing 45 billion gold, though interestingly enough, he was later awarded damages for unfair dismissal. In that case, the issue was whether Jagex's investigation into the theft was sufficient, not the stealability of in-game gold.