Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with C0ven in any way, so this entire post is written from an outsiders point of view.
Normally I wouldn’t post information such as this, because in EVE Online people loose ships to explosions, scams or theft every day. And most of them don’t make into headlines. This one however seems more than just a corporation theft. According to EN24, one of the accounts in holding corporation of C0ven Alliance have seemingly been compromised and accessed by a third party. The original owner of the account was able to obtain IP information and most likely the matter will be handed over to the police (CCP saves the last couple of IP addresses, which were used to access an account – you can check your own log on secure.eveonline.com/LoginHistory.aspx)
While losing a ship to a corp theft or a scam in game is completely legal from the EULA point of view (and police will laugh if you tell them someone has stolen your internet spaceships), hacking another account is not. It’s not only a breach of EULA, but in most countries is also illegal to do so:
EVE Online EULA 2.B
You may not obtain, attempt to obtain, use or attempt to use the password of anyone else.
This however can not be treated as a theft, because according to EULA, the only owner of all in-game items is CCP Games:
EVE Online EULA 10.B
Your Account, and all attributes of your Account, including all corporations, actions, groups, titles and characters, and all objects, currency and items acquired, developed or delivered by or to characters as a result of play through your Accounts, are the sole and exclusive property of CCP.
In polish law the most appropriate one seems to be “unauthorized access to information stored in a computer system“, because internet spaceships is actually a kind of information – its a couple of bytes stored in EVE Online relational database:
art. 267 of Penalty Code
§ 1. Whoever accesses the information not intended for them, by opening a closed document, tapping to a wire used to transmit the information or by breaking electronic, magentic or other specific means of security
shall be punished by a fine, restriction of liberty or imprisonment for up to 2 years.
§ 2. The same penalty shall be applied to a person who uses eavesdropping, visual or other similar device.
§ 3. The same penalty shall be applied to a person who shares the information obtained by the means described in § 1 or 2 with another person.
§ 4. The offense specified in § 1-3 shall be prosecuted at the request of the victim.
Some of the players, who commented under the EN24 news mentioned up to 5 years of imprisonment, which would be correct for interference, such as a DoS attack, but cannot be used for unauthorized login:
Art. 269a of Penalty Code
Whoever, while not being not authorized, by the means of transfer, destruction, removal, damage, access handicap or modification of computer data, significantly interferes with a computer system or network data communications
shall be punished by imprisonment from 3 months to 5 years
What if?
What if the account information was actually shared among the directorship of C0ven Alliance? EVE News 24 suggests it has been a renegade director, who self destructed four Titan class ships + capsules.
From EULA point of view this is a breach and might result in a swift ban.
EVE Online EULA 2.A
You may not share your Account with anyone, or allow anyone other than you personally (or your minor child, if you have registered an Account on behalf of your minor child) to access or use your Account. Joint or shared ownership or use of an Account by more than one user is prohibited.
Now from polish law view point of view this case might be easily defended (or lost) depending on the evidence provided to the court. If the perpetrator is able to provide evidence that he has been given the login information by the original owner, he can’t be proven guilty of unauthorized access (as the access has been authorized by the original account owner).
In any case, involving RL authorities over a metagame misconduct in online game sounds childish at best.
PS. Please excuse my translation of polish law, I’m not a lawyer myself and my legal english is nearly non-existent…
EDIT
News went viral, one of the polish public TV networks TVN24 has already put it on their website: http://www.tvn24.pl/internet-hi-tech-media,40/ktos-okradl-kosmiczny-sojusz-polakow-zniknely-statki-warte-dziesiatki-tysiecy-zlotych,312916.html
Afterwards, some other major news websites have published the same information.
EDIT 2
Rumour has it that the Titans haven’t actually been destroyed. Instead, NCdot is said to have scooped the Titans, after they have been removed from a POS bubble by a renegade C0ven director, who was angry at his fellow directors.