Slashdot Mirror
Wizards of the Coast Sues Rumor Site
foo fighter writes "Wizards of the Coast is suing the owner of MTG Salvation, a site that posts rumors and spoilers about upcoming releases of Magic: the Gathering. This suit has come as a disappointing and disturbing shock to Magic's large and diverse community and raises several questions too familiar to Slashdot readers: Do leaks of upcoming products really hurt sales of those products? Do these kind of lawsuits damage the companies initiating them more than they help?"
Since the article summary posed the question: Do leaks of upcoming products really hurt sales of those products?
You've got to compare similar things. A leaked image of what a new Magic card looks like will get people talking and strategizing and whatnot. A leaked version of a complete game gets people downloading and playing.
For one thing, you can't play a tournament with cards you printed yourself. You'll get laughed out of any serious match I can think of, too. Hell, my friends would laugh at me if I tried to play with Xeroxed cards. If I fire up a leaked version of a single-player game, nobody knows but me. Assuming the game is complete, I could play through the whole thing. Magic is a game that is played in person with tangible, physical things. That changes everything.
e2 | LJ
I put this on the level of the NHL striking for a full year. It hurts your profits, damages your customer relations, and costs the trust of your fans. Way to go WoC!
more likely they have to sue in order to find out who on their staff leaked the info, then the real suing can begin.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
Looks like Wizards has someone on the inside leaking information. Why would they not want to ferret out this piece-of-crap and fire him? As an employee, you have an obligation not to reveal information your company doesn't want revealed. Once you've proven yourself to be untrustworthy, well, what's your limit? Why wouldn't you sell trade secrets to Wizard's competitors? Why wouldn't you sabotage a database or server or printing machine? Integrity has to still mean something.
As a representative member of the Magic playing community, and a member of multiple message boards dealing with the game, I find that this lawsuit could be seen in many ways by a fan base that is as diverse socially as it is in mental capacity. Though it would be low of me to suggest as much, the members of certain popular gaming message boards have been known to function strictly on reactionary levels. They mere seek what they believe is in their best interest and do not seek to find out what is legally binding, or even logical for that matter.
While I can honestly say that, yes, I did repeatedly view the spoilers for the most recent set of trading cards; I do not feel any qualms about it. Much as many members of this community may not experience pangs of guilt from p2p networks or bit torrent file sharing. The theft and proliferation of intellectual property with this day and age is strikingly active. Record sales are dropping, box office numbers dwindle, and all around the entertainment industry, for lack of a better expression, pooches are getting screwed.
What does that have to do with the matter at hand? I wish I knew. Sometimes I just type things up to entertain myself and quit thinking mid-sentence. It's an issue that neither Ritalin nor manual stimulation has solved. To get back to the point though, the release of undisclosed information to an outside source about a product before the release of it could just breach some nondisclosure agreements that many of the persons with leaked information may have signed.
In which case Wizards of the Coast is justified and right in suing for the information provided. The website in question may be taken back by such a claim and rest indolently on journalistic anonymity of source. Not that it matters to me. A thief has to fill out a police report before selling a stolen radio to a pawn shop, and so should the rumor mongers who provided the website in question with the offending information.
No, I do not work for or favor the interests of Wizards of the Coast, or Hasbro Inc., though I would willing accept money from them to support their products and likely would engage in corporate espionage against rival companies for a nominal fee. This is not an offer of services, but if it were, then any pertinent party could easily find my e-mail within my member profile and establish a line of contact from there. I do not wish to cause any malice within the gaming community, but will for price consider many things, much like the mercenary employees and contacts within the Hasbro organization that sold company information to a third party rumor mill.
For those that would argue the accuracy of this article, I hardly think it matters. No one involved in the matter is going to sue Slashdot for inaccuracy or libel, at least until a couple of weeks after their current deposition and subsequent trial has ended. Far be it from a site that markets unsettled hearsay on a daily basis to argue over minced words with a truly respectable website. That kind of complaint would be little more than bolstering of voice and being general internet busybodies. I, for one, don't care if Slashdot had mistakenly implicated Santa Claus in this whole debacle, and, really, what does it matter if Santa is? He never gets me anything that I like anyhow.
Rambling on, and on about one's matter on legal opinions, corporate allegiances, and the interminable jabbering of net-savvy jackanapes is hardly what one would like to be doing with his free time. Perhaps one could read a book, work for minimum wage, lie on one's taxes, insist on extra pickles, or just be a productive member of society. Were any of the members of the Magic community are legal council, or have a vested interest in the matter beyond the game itself, I would heartily encourage them to seek the fullest and strongest involvement in the perpetuation of this case, though I very much doubt there are many that fit that bill.
I am a gamer. I enjoy playing them, buying them, meeting people to play them with, buying
The role of the writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say. -Anais Nin
Since it's about someone in-house leaking info about stuff coming out a year hence, I suspect they'll offer to drop the lawsuit in exchange for being told who the source was. Of course any news about them dropping the lawsuit will get them some further inexpensive publicity too!
Furcadia - A free online game with user created content, DragonSpeak scripting, & more.
With stuff like Combo Winter lurking in Wizard's collective nightmares, and the more recent Affinity debacle (the reason I stopped playing Magic altogether) rearing it's head, Wizards needs to have their sets designed as far in advance as humanly possible, so that they can test the bajeezus out of them, so that these ridiculously broken cards and combos are identified as early as possible.
There's apparently an internal Magic league in the design department of Wizards designed to help these kind of broken things float to the surface. Most of the time it works well enough. It kept them going well up until Mirrodin, where they were 100% blind to the fact that they had printed Skullclamp, the most overpowered card since Memory Jar. Now everyone is looking for the next sure thing card, and rumors make the market, both primary (preorder) and secondary markets go batshit insane.