Source: Tom's Hardware – Keywords: blizzard, wow, warcraft
Categories: Business
Syndication:
Cheating is bad, but does cheating infringe on a video game publisher’s copyright? World of Warcraft-maker Blizzard, a subsidiary of Vivendi, is trying to argue in court that it does. If this argument succeeds, it could change the way all software copyrights operate in the eyes of the law.
Blizzard is currently wrangling in court with MDY, a small company that makes a software bot called Glider that helps WoW players with tedious aspects of character leveling. While it is pretty clear that the MDY software helps users cheat, and even violates the contract Blizzard makes players accept before playing (known as the End User License Agreement), Blizzard goes a step further and says that violating the agreement violates the WoW copyright since players, after accepting the EULA, automatically create a copy of the game in their computer RAM. If the courts agree, and MDY and its customers are found guilty of copyright infringement, Blizzard could reap statutory damages at the rate of $750 per infringement. The company says about 25,000 copies of MDY’s Glider software have been sold.
A variety of organizations are chiming in with briefs to convince the courts that if they accept Blizzard’s argument, it will imply that all media companies with End User License Agreements (software companies, music labels, and movie studios) can prevent the existence of all interoperable software in court. One of these groups, called Public Knowledge, writes that if Blizzard’s argument wins in court, it would prevent any company from selling used media, such as CDs and video game discs.
Blizzard is focused on winning its case against MDY and stopping the WoW cheaters, but it is unclear if the company has fully evaluated the way its argument could change the law for all copyright-holders. The argument hinges on some unusual legal logic: Blizzard’s EULA allows users who accept the agreement to make a copy of the game in their RAM, but people who accept but violate the agreement and still make a copy of the game in their RAM are copyright infringers.
However, all software when run copy and utilize data in system memory, and buyers of any kind of software already have the implicit right to make a copy of the software in their RAM. This is an issue of a copyrights and owner’s rights. Blizzard doesn’t want to treat Wow players are game-owners, but rather as license-holders. Blizzard might have trouble in court with this part, since in past legal issues with video games, courts have treated players as owners.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation and Public Knowledge imply that rather than pursuing the argument that these cheaters are copyright infringers, they should stick to a simple contract violation suit. However, contract violations don’t come with built in statutory damages, and would win less money from Blizzard.
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I think users should sue Blizzard for ruining their life with the addiction that the game causes.
Botting doesnt hurt no one IMHO. The ones abusing it are the ones raking in Blizzard all of its money. Some nerd running 5 bots at a time is a nice chunk of change.
If Blizzard is that concerned they should detect the software and ban people doing it. But they would have to ban 1000s of people. Either way banning or getting rid of botters, they are still gonna loose thousands of players if they dont leave well enough alone.
bnetd lives on: http://pvpgn.berlios.de
The only thing blizzard is upset about is the fact that this guy sold 250,000 copies of glider and they didn’t make a sent from it.
Buy the way… Glider is amazing, I don’t know if I would risk running it now, but back in the day I used to run a toon from 1-60 in 14 days, needless to say I HAD 5 maxed toons.
One day I got banned at which time Blizzard kindly threatened me with lawyers as I objected. They could not have obtained the information they were claiming without breeching my privacy. Yes I know we agree to allowing “warden” to run on our machines however I had all processes hidden, “Warden” could not have seen what I was actually doing, unless it infringed upon my privacy and went beyond what they claim Warden does. (I did deserve to be banned, I just hate the way they did it)
Free Michael Donnelly!!
gamers/parents should sue your company for releasing an addictive product, just wait and see.
however, i never played wow, not even once, it just does not interests me, doesn't make any sense pay to play, endless leveling, endless patches, endless monthly fee, pointless game play~!! getting 0 out of it.
every time i tell my friends about that, they all went flame-on, and burn me. They changed, after this many years, they realized that i was right!
blizzard, cry more, noobs. at this point, who's gonna be a tard play wow w/o botting from level 1????
I still think it's rediculous. If we -were- buying a license, then we should sue them for false advertising as we also thought we were buying the game. I mean, hey, kudos for Blizzard for trying to stop cheating, but hell, they could go about it a different way, and it's not like they really need that much money.
That is the bottom line here, this is not about the players, this is about Blizzard's bottom line.
Oh, and to Mr_Man.... they should not be able to detect a Logitech keyboard in a game. If they truly have put the programs necessary into the game to detect that...... why bother with a lawsuit, as you said.
But the way they are trying to do it is daft, and could have far reaching implications. They should stick to the contract violation angle or not open this can of worms!
Hyperbole (although I wonder)
Next we will need to take short-term memory suppressing drugs while we play a game, listen to music, or watch a movie in case we remember something about it and store those memories in our head!
/Hyperbole
1. “Blizzard doesn’t want to treat Wow players are game-owners.” It’s as game owners not are game owners. It’s grammar we’ll let you slide. A quick read would have exposed this.
2. “However, contract violations don’t come with built in statutory damages, and would win less money from Blizzard.” Correct me if I’m wrong, but don’t you mean for Blizzard since they are the ones that are doing the suing? Of course you do. This is a pretty substantial change that would have also been exposed with a three minute read.
I wouldn’t say anything, except it appears that this sloppy work has become rampant. I assume you guys are college graduates so please act like it.
I guess Blizzard wants to do their part to kill off gaming, or damage the computer industry itself.
They will loose.
USA is ridiculous anyway, why not move MDY to a different country and sell online from there?
Don't take anything I said seriously.
if they remove the people who have it, then they will own all the souls of the people who no longer need them.
Who's to say society is not morally corrupt
That's not going to work.
Not only does everything get copied to memory, but swap files also.
Web pages that have copyrights get put in temp files, etc.
Everyone that owns a computer has broken copy write laws.
I get they don't like cheaters in the game, but cheating has nothing to do with copywrites. You have to copy the game to play the game. They made the game that way. The game uses memory, works with the operating system, they know that, they made it.
I mean the copywrite that you agree to, is already copied to your memory before you even agree...
This is bull sh*t.
Screw blizzard and to hell with WoW.
I'm making sure blizzard never sees another dollar from me again.
I guess all the money they have made just isn't enough.
This isn't about cheating, it's about money as always.
The poor gaming, software, movie studios, record companies, and stars...
I mean their soooo poor, how ever will they be able to buy their 50th car...
Greed.
Hey guys, I don’t mean to bytch, but does anyone even read these things before they are posted. Come on, it's only six really short paragraphs. Take the three minutes and proof read the damn thing. There are two errors, one simple grammar and one really bad. We can all figure it out, but you embarrass yourself. Don’t you guys have any self esteem?1. “Blizzard doesn’t want to treat Wow players are game-owners.” It’s as game owners not are game owners. It’s grammar we’ll let you slide. A quick read would have exposed this.2. “However, contract violations don’t come with built in statutory damages, and would win less money from Blizzard.” Correct me if I’m wrong, but don’t you mean for Blizzard since they are the ones that are doing the suing? Of course you do. This is a pretty substantial change that would have also been exposed with a three minute read.I wouldn’t say anything, except it appears that this sloppy work has become rampant. I assume you guys are college graduates so please act like it.
grow up conTROL freak!
Which means, by a simple legal hop-skip, that your mom is liable for the copyright infringement by gestating you and that terrible copyright violating machine of yours.
As an unintended fallout from Blizzard's court victory - from now on you can "enjoy" music by physically examining the grooves on the CD with a microscope after downing a couple of state-issued "roofies".
If Johny buys WOW-glider and uses it to break laws is another story, Johny is to blame.
This is no different then charging gun manufactures with murder1 for murders there weapons were involved in. Creating the gun is not against a law… killing someone with it is. Creating a bot program is not against the law, running it in WOW is.
On another note “the_man” said earlier that WOW can detect a key being pushed… This is true however it must be known that Glider is a “key-pusher” bot… It has complete control of your keyboard and send commands to the keyboard as a person would… there is simply no way Warden”wow detection system” could tell the difference between a person hitting buttons or the bot hitting buttons.
grow up conTROL freak!
You are the reason that it has become acceptable. You probably oppose kickball in grade school as well. Clown.
In terms of Blizzard, they are trying to cut back on people who use Glider to quickly level up and then sell the character. These people are doing none of the effort required in leveling up the character, and thus they have no sentimental attachment (or relationships) associated with the character. They are making money off of Blizzard's intellectual property using methods forbidden in the EULA. It's also probably how "those Chinese leveling farmers" accomplish the same task. Also, I believe people are selling in-game items for real-world cash; items that require high levels and epic quantities of play time to obtain, even from simple tasks. This is similar to character-selling, but not quite as bad. But seriously, anyone who needs to "buy" a maxed-out character doesn't even qualify to be called an ub3rn00b. They play for a few months and leave because there's nothing to do, thus Blizzard makes very little from a player who cheated himself out of the "opportunity" to catch the addiction.
And Stuart72, you can get fined for defacing a book from a library or any other property that is licensed (like software), loaned, leased, etc. Hence, you get arrested for altering your driver's license, even though it's "yours".
Nobody sells software, they license it.
What next? Suing me if I buy a book and write in the margins?
That's a very stupid analogy. So you think that there should be no standards? Maybe you will be happier when all articles are written in textonyms. Your attitude is why the world is going down the tubes.
I've seen how Bots and certain cheats throw the game economy all out of whack. I wouldn't mind if there were servers for cheaters and servers for legit players.
Companies put cheats in single player games (supposedly for development purposes) and leave them in there in the final game. Whats the different if I cheat in single or multiplayer. just force cheaters to player with other cheaters so it's a level playing ground.
side note:
Personally i've written my own Cheats/bots for online games but i did it for the programming and did not release it to ANYONE else. I find it fun to manipulate a program while it's executing. (I need to get out more)
Instead of banning gold/account farmers have a dedicated server and move all the accounts there. Bliz keeps the monthly fee coming in, farming is abolished everywhere.
I would think those people would abandon the accounts though...The economy on such a server would be atrocious.
I would make my Bot PERFECT on the the "sheater" server and then create an account on a production server.
bad idea.