The virtual world of Second Life can be a place where people make new friends, listen to concerts and even campaign for president — but German investigators are looking into a more dangerous use: as a platform for real and virtual child pornography.
A German, whose avatar — or online character — is a 13-year-old girl has been offering to provide real photos that contain child pornography to other denizens of the online service, said prosecutor Peter Vogt on Thursday.
Authorities are investigating, and hope to uncover his or her identity within days with help from San Francisco-based Linden Lab, which runs Second Life, said Vogt, head of Germany’s Halle-based Central Agency for the Prevention of Child Pornography.
”Linden Lab has been working very hard here against this abuser who misuses this game as a platform for child porn,” Vogt said.
Oliver Habel, the Munich attorney who represents Linden Lab in Germany, said the company is cooperating fully with the police. ”It is the very clear policy of Linden Lab that something like this cannot be tolerated,” he said.
The misuse of Second Life by purveyors of child pornography came to Vogt’s attention after German broadcaster ARD’s Report Mainz aired a report this week highlighting the problem. Beside the offer of real child porn, ARD also documented that online characters depicting children were being virtually abused.
Child pornography using computer-generated images is illegal in Germany, punishable from between three months to five years in jail.
In its blog, Linden Lab said on Wednesday it had identified a 54-year-old man and a 27-year-old woman as being behind the acts uncovered by ARD — using avatars resembling an adult male and a child engaged in sexual activity together.
”Both were immediately banned from Second Life,” the company wrote on the blog. It gave no further details.
In the case of the distribution of real child pornography, Vogt said it is almost certain there are more out there who are using the game for similar purposes, and that Linden Lab is working on ways to crack down in general on the abuse of the system.
”Linden Lab is very agreeable to help me contain these criminal activities,” he said. ”One can probably never totally stop them, though, just like one cannot totally stop the other criminal uses of the internet.”
In its blog posting, the company said it has ”zero tolerance for depictions of child pornography within Second Life”.
”We were outraged to see the images that ARD showed us, and will cooperate fully with any legal authorities that choose to investigate the individuals involved in such activities,” the company said.
”Child pornography is, of course, illegal and as such is a breach of our terms of service. It goes without saying that anyone engaged in this activity will be permanently banned from Second Life, and subject to legal consequences.”
Second Life is a virtual world in which players — called ”residents” — interact with each other through their avatars. They can do basically anything that people can in real life, including buying and selling property, participating in group or individual activities, or socialising.
There are more than six million registered participants and many real opportunities in the virtual world. Companies have rushed in to place advertisements for real-life products, musicians such as Duran Duran and Suzanne Vega have broadcast virtual concerts there using the world’s lifelike animated characters, and Democratic presidential hopeful John Edwards even has a campaign headquarters set up there.
People and companies are also using Second Life as a place to offer ”regular” pornography and since it is against the law in Germany for pornography to be offered to people under 18, authorities are also seeking to determine what can be done legally to stop it, Vogt said. Though Second Life bans minors, critics maintain it is easy for people to fake their ages.
Linden Lab said in its blog that it is in the process of implementing an electronic age-verification system that will use different forms of identification — such as national identification numbers, passports and social-security numbers — to help prevent abuse.
”The company doesn’t want to be involved in trafficking child porn; they just want a good game,” Vogt said. — Sapa-AP