The Company Owns the Account. It Doesn't Own What You Built.
Your videos, your accounts, your years of work online. Who actually owns them, you or the platform?
There was a guy in China who spent more than 10 years building 87 gaming accounts. Assuming he used those gaming accounts to make money, he died last year at the age of 36 from throat cancer. Then the company that ran those games looked at everything he had built and told his mother, “Sorry, all this belongs to the company.”
The court in Beijing told the company it was wrong, and I just want to walk you through why that should matter to you, even if you’ve never touched one of these games. If you’ve ever spent so many hours and so much work on something online, like a game, a social media channel, or any kind of online account, I think this story is for you.
I’m breaking these stories down the way I wish somebody had talked about them. If you’re interested, please subscribe to support my work. And if you can swing it, paid supporters help keep me independent, and I really appreciate that.
So this is what happened.
Between 2010 and 2021, this gamer had 87 accounts in games run by a Chinese company called Changyou. He put a lot of time into those games over the years, and he also spent a lot of his own money on character gear, in-game currency, and all of that.
All of that added up over more than a decade. Then he passed away, and his mother went to the company and asked them to transfer the accounts into her name.
Well, the gaming company said no. They pulled out the user agreement, the user agreement that you and I never, ever read. It says the company owns everything: the accounts, the characters, the items, the currency, all of it, as far as the gaming company is concerned.
And that was supposed to be the end of the conversation.
The Beijing court disagreed.
Back in April, the Beijing court drew a distinction. The court agreed that the company owns the accounts themselves, but the right to use those accounts has economic value because the gamer, Gu, spent years and real money building them. That value can be passed down to his family.
So the court ordered the company to transfer the accounts into his mother’s name. The judge, Zhang Yinzhou, said that a user agreement may decide who owns an account, but it does not erase a person’s legal right to inherit the value that account represents.
The court also listed this as one of its model cases, meaning other judges can use it as a reference when deciding similar cases in the future.
Look, I’m talking about this because I think it goes way beyond games.
The day he opened those accounts, they were worth nothing. They had no value. That’s the part the company created. The accounts only became valuable later because of his time, his money, and his grind.
Of course, the company built the servers and wrote the software, but the company didn’t build the part that was actually worth inheriting.
Who did? That’s the trick.
These companies run on you. They tell you they own the servers, then they turn around and tell you they own everything you create on those servers too.
The Chinese court wouldn’t let them pull that trick.
The user did the work, so the user has a claim to what that work is worth. That’s the whole idea. This is how these companies get you. They put a user agreement in front of you, you click “I agree,” and that’s it. That’s your entire say.
In this case, the company hired a bunch of lawyers to write a few lines, dropped them in front of millions of users, and claimed ownership over everything built on the platform.
They can yank it back whenever they want and tell you it’s nothing you own. You can’t negotiate. You either accept their terms or you don’t get to use the platform.
And this is more than just one guy’s gaming accounts.
Think about content creators. They spend years making videos and putting in countless hours of work. Companies like YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram can sometimes wipe out an entire account, and suddenly all those years of work are treated as if they’re worth nothing because the fine print says the company can take it back.
That’s exactly what the gaming company in China tried to do to this man’s mother.
The user made that account valuable.
The account is worth something, but the owners of the company are sitting behind their computers claiming ownership over that value. They keep pretending that the account itself and the value created by the user are the same thing.
That’s why I wanted to talk about this.
If you look at Steam, for example, it still doesn’t generally allow you to leave your game library to your children when you pass away. The law often sides with the contract, which means it sides with the lawyers who wrote it.
Everything users like you and I build online can end up being signed away because we have to agree to the user agreement before we can even use the platform.
But in this case from Beijing, they did something that I think many Western legal systems struggle with.
The value you create online comes from your labor, and that labor creates something worth protecting. Whatever you think about China, I think this case sets an interesting precedent for future disputes.
Of course, the company owns the servers. What we’re really arguing about is who owns everything you build on top of them.
That’s a conversation we should be having more and more because we’re living in a digital age.
How are we going to deal with digital assets?
