May 8, 2007, 16:03 GMT
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.
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