Selling Gold, WoW Insider, and workers' rights

I'll probably take this up in length in a forthcoming post, but figured I'd include what I posted to WoW Insider here to remind me to go ballistic later.

From The Lawbringer: Fighting the gold fight -- the world as it is:

At one time in the history of MMOs, gold and item selling was a quaint notion. We had not yet been introduced to a world of horse armor and new mission DLC.

I had a hard time getting past this, in the intro. Did you ever install Ultima Online? They allowed to the point of *encouraging* your eBaying items. When was this quaint time of gold and item selling, exactly?

There's nothing quaint about Blizzard deciding that selling bits is illegal. That's a very calculated move designed to ensure players don't own the fruits of what is, at times, very tedious labor.