大象传媒

The issue of taxation in virtual worlds has long been vexing lawmakers and a post by raises the issue again

As Reuters reports gains in many , consequently some lawmakers are looking at ways of taxing them.

Wagners post focuses on :

"Here are the first ten countries where Second Life Residents are most active, based on the average number of minutes they spend in-world per day, per user:

* 161 - Cayman Islands
* 132 - Indonesia
* 130 - Netherlands
* 128 - Canada
* 122 - United States
* 122 - Korea, Republic of "

A surprising first place to the Cayman Islands. There's no way, of course, of knowing what Cayman Island nationals were doing in Second Life and the sample is small, but Wagner raises the possibility that residents of the tax haven may be engaging in a bit of tax management. The conclusion to his post points out just how complicated it all is:

So now, with our active Cayman Residents, the circle of economic unreality is almost surely complete: real money is converted into the currency of a virtual world, which is then converted back into the real money of a semi-virtual country, where it becomes the assets of a company that only exists as a post office box by the Caribbean sea

Of course there's not necessarily anything wrong with this, people world wide struggle to minimise the cash they pay in tax by legitmate means. But it is a nice example of the potential issues raised by the rapidly growing virtual economies. As one US official put it in the Reuters article:

鈥淵ou could argue that to a certain degree the law has fallen (behind) because you can have a virtual asset and virtual capital gains, but there鈥檚 no mechanism by which you鈥檙e taxed on this stuff,鈥�

The issue becomes even more complicated when one looks beyond Second Life and at the lucrative real businesses emerging in the . Could it be that some tax official somewhere is looking at how he can charge PAYE on your Elfs gold? The mind boggles.