Berlin - Concern was growing in Germany this week that
images of real-life child pornography have been posted on the Second
Life online game, a virtual-reality world where players create
colourful characters and their own landscapes.
Created by the US company Linden Research and funded by sales of
virtual real estate, Second Life has been under a cloud after media
revelations in Germany that subscribers have invented paedophile
characters who graphically molest child characters.
More than 6 million users have registered to act as puppeteers
over their characters, known in the game as avatars, who chat, shop,
dance and lie on the beach. Big companies have opened branches in the
Second Life world as an advertising gimmick.
Concern was expressed earlier that a few avatars were being
instructed to have sexual encounters with one another.
Report Mainz, an investigative programme on Germany's ARD public
television, said Monday that prosecutors were seeking a German player
who had exhibited real-life paedophile video files in a Second Life
clubroom.
It quoted a Second Life executive saying Linden would help police
identify the offender.
Peter Vogt, the prosecutor in the German city of Halle, told
Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa on Tuesday, 'I assume we are going to
catch this user fairly quickly.'
He added, 'I don't believe it's a one-off case and would assume
there are other spaces where child porn is being traded.
Ludwig Waldinger, a spokesman for state of Bavaria police, said
'cyber-cops', real-life German police who hunt online for offenders,
were doing spot checks of Second Life. They had not discovered the
law being broken, but would act if they did.
Waldinger conceded it was difficult to stop pornographic images of
avatars involved in under-age sex. Where kiosk images of real
children were posted, these provided evidence that a real child had
been abused.
Germans have overtaken Americans as the nationality most likely to
be met in the controversial game.
Comscore, a Reston, Virginia based internet research firm, said
last week its March tally showed 1.3 million users were 'active' with
209,000 of them from Germany compared to 207 000 from the United
States.
This represented an increase of 46 per cent in the number of
active 'residents', as the users are called, from January 2007.
In March, 61 per cent of active Second Life residents were from
Europe, compared to 19 per cent from North America, and 13 per cent
from the Asia Pacific region. In addition, 61 per cent of residents
were male while 39 per cent were female.
© 2007 dpa - Deutsche Presse-Agentur 
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