WoW needs more money to fight crime with.. I think..

Ok, here's my stance first... I don't mind botters, I think they keep prices on a server low, but I may be wrong. I don't think botters should interfere with game play, ie, they don't hog spawns of items/npcs/mobs that are needed in quest lines. This is how I think of it, if I have to go out & farm for 20 hours to get a stack of something.. that something is going to be very valuable to me. It is going to cost you A LOT to buy it from me. But a botter goes out & farms automagically for 20 hours, comes in & undercuts the players, who in turn lower their prices, etc... til the market levels out.

I'm not going to go through every step of the 2 year trial process, nor focus on the minutiae of the case, I'm going to try & give you a broad overview of the case in layman's terms.

Well, in 1996 Blizzard sued the makers of Glider, a pretty popular bot for Warcraft I'm told. Ok, I'm cool with that. It is their game, so they should have some say in it. The how & why they sued is a little dangerous to all of us though, botters or not.

They sued using the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act). Their basis for the lawsuit was that Glider was breaking making an illegal copy of the game in memory, thus breaking the EULA & causing monetary harm to Blizzard. They stated that botters were causing people to quit the game. They had to pay a staff to try & fight botters. Or as they put it, Glider was interferring with the contractural relationship WoW had with it's customers. See they're doing it for the children.

Here's the tricky part, Blizzard's argument was that Glider made a copy of the game in your computer's RAM in order to circumvent WoW's anti-cheat protection; thus Glider violated the End User Legal Agreement, & the players using the bot players are no longer allowed to copy the game into RAM, thus leading to copyright-infringement. This is worrisome on several levels, since any program being used will copy portions of itself into RAM. & if you use it in ANY other way than the way specified in the EULA, you've done the same thing that Glider had.

BTW.. WoW makes Blizzard/Vivendi (Blizendi) $55 a second ($144 million per month.) Glider's financial records showed they'd made about 4 million dollars over the past few years total.

Jump forward to 1998, & a trial dealing pretty much with whether or not Glider had actually done anything wrong, like violating Blizzard's copyright & to what extent. The judge decided they had, but they hadn't violated the DMCA in the way that Blizzard claimed.

Long story short: Blizzard won that case. Glider got hit with damages of $6+ million dollars. That's a lot of stacks of Netherweave partners.

At the end of January the judge ruled that Glider violated the DMCA's ban on "circumvention devices," & found that MDY's founder, Michael Donnelly, was personally liable for the actions of his firm. In the ruling, the judge found that WoW's Warden program controlled access to the "non-literal elements" of WoW. That is, while Warden doesn't prevent players from accessing the individual elements of the game separately, it does prevent users from accessing all of the elements together while playing the game. Which apparently Glider enables you to do. This means Glider violated the DMCA most heinously when it evaded warden's checks.

Remember the DMCA was created mainly to stop file sharing programs (Napster anyone?) from destroying the Earth as we know it. See & since file sharing has stopped, the Earth is safe now. (The bitter taste in that last sentence was sarcasm.) So Glider must be destroyed. Beside, they're probably funding terrorists. Did that make it go down any better?

Now imagine a little app you wrote to, say, put a signature on the end of emails you send in some email program, lets say, Outlook. Your program gets wildly popular & make a few bucks off it. Now M$ gets interested, & sue your terrorist ass. Now give them all the money you made, & a little more to remind you they didn’t use any lube. How do you fight a company with billions of dollars at it's disposal? (Obviously using ninja's AND pirates, duh). Many companies who make software, reverse engineer the software they want to integrate with. That’ll be illegal now. And most obviously punishable via very large stick.

So where is it all at now? Off to the 9th Circuit Court for appeal. Luckily for MDY LLC, the 9th is pretty fond of reversing decisions of lesser courts, and they seem to hate most of Silicon Valley's big guys.

Here's an article on Arstechnica that goes into much greater detail. HERE

What's my opinion on it? Blizzard/Vivendi/WoW are just making a point of this case. They want it to be known, if you f with the big dog, the big dog has enough money to drown you. Then revive you & drown you again. Even if Blizzard ultimately looses, they made MDY loose tons of money. They've been fined in a way that bankruptcy can't avoid, can't sell their code, can't use their code, probably can't participate in a business remotely like botting, and their rep has been besmirched*. What did Blizzard loose? Not much, some lawyers bill, maybe, they were probably on retainer. When you make $55 a sec, you don't worry about $ too much.

*I just wanted to add that last one because I've never used besmirched in a sentence, and now I've used it 2 times! Looks like someone is going to get a gold star today.