Allegation of slave labor in Chinese prison lodged in news media

At the very least, major US & UK news media outlets - and others - have picked up a story that touches a lot of wires:  human rights, slave labor, direct violation of national laws in the country they occurred, and who knows what else will pop up in coming days or weeks?

• Chinese prison hard labor includes MMO gold farming (Geek.com)
• China used prisoners in lucrative internet gaming work (Guardian.co.uk)
• Gold-farming in a Chinese forced-labor camp (BoingBoing.net)
• Video Game 'Gold Farming' and Chinese Prison Labor (TheAtlanticWire.com)
• Chinese prisoners forced into online 'gold farming' (GMANews.tv)
• Inside the economy of virtual currency (IBTimes.com)

As you probably heard by this point, a man has said that he was a prisoner in a China and that his guards forced him and others to play WoW in a manner known as "gold farming".

Gold farming is playing WoW for profit.  Illicit profits, it turns out.

Gold farming is illegal in China.  You are not allowed to trade virtual currency there for real currency.  So it is going to be a little inconvenient, if not downright cognitive dissonance if guards at a state-run prison forced people in their custody to do it.

It also interferes with the game.  Some things gold farmers do negatively impact a bunch of the players on the realm (server cluster) where the misconduct occurs.

The activity is misconduct because it breaks the terms of service that let you get onto the game in the first place.

But it gets even worse if the gold farming activity - the collection of the virtual assets or vending of them for real assets - is facilitated by computer hacking.  And then if the income is not declared but hidden, then that is another can of worms.  And if it violates international trade agreements - and I have no idea what they are or if it does, then that aggravates more people.

It seems like it is a human rights thing too.

• Business & Human Rights: Forced Labor
• Slavery and Forced Labor

I do not know what the US government or UN stance on this particular event is.  I have not read if it has been investigated yet.

Once it is, I imagine the US State Department would say something about it.  They seem to be the voice of the US regarding non-military situations in other countries.  It would be interesting to see if this is a UN human rights issue or not.

The last time the US brought up a serious harm being perpetrated directly against people by Chinese institutions, the Chinese government executed its product safety minister.

So it is a little hard to predict what will happen in prison administration officialdom if the allegations turn out to be really true.