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Blizzard Sues Creator of WoW Bot
Ponca City, We Love You writes "Blizzard, the makers of World of Warcraft, are suing Michael Donnelly, the creator of the MMO Glider program, which performs key tasks in the game automatically. Blizzard says the software bot infringes the company's copyright and potentially damages the game. 'Blizzard's designs expectations are frustrated, and resources are allocated unevenly, when bots are introduced into the WoW universe, because bots spend far more time in-game than an ordinary player would and consume resources the entire time,' Blizzard wrote in its legal submission to the court. More than 100,000 copies of the tool have been sold while more than 10 million people around the world play Warcraft. Donnelly says his tool does not infringe Blizzard's copyright because no 'copy' of the Warcraft game client software is ever made. The two parties are now awaiting a summary judgment in the case."
If you're creating some legitimate program that requires WoW, you think you should have to request Blizzard's permission just to say on the packaging that you require World of Warcraft? Definitely not.
They are claiming that the tool makes a copy of the game and stores it to ram to avoid their anti-cheating checks. Interesting to see if it is illegal to make a temporary copy (for your own personal use) of a program you legally purchased.
Agreed. From the sounds of it, this bot tool may impair the game, and they may have some moral or legal cause to try and stop it, but copyright and trademark infringment it is not.I think they need to find some other charge.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
The program does not make a copy of any of the game files, it simply reads the memory space that wow.exe loads into and responds to certain procedure calls and what not in the memory. For example, a monster is on the map and the client loads it in memory to prepare it for rendering. Even if the player cant see it, the program can because wow.exe loaded it into memory. The program can see and interact with the wow.exe executable by reading what wow puts in the memory.
It's much less fun when the bots are on your team.
Gold farming and grinding are much less needed these days in WoW with the daily quests giving out 8-12g a pop, and being able to do 25 of those a day. Most taking 10mins to complete.
How on earth do you load the program into memory (and once again into CPU cache) to run it if you can't???
Copies performed as an "essential step" of using the program are exempted as not infringing on copyright. So copying the program from disk into memory in order to run it is not infringement, however creating a second copy of the game in-memory to get around the anti-cheating code may not be.
Personally, I've also argued that this clause means that you are not legally required to accept EULAs, or at least that you aren't violating copyright by refusing to accept them since you don't need a copyright license to make the necessary copies to install and run the program.
Here's a link to the relevant section of the law: TITLE 17 - CHAPTER 1 - 117
The enemies of Democracy are
Wow, this reminds me of 2006.
http://www.joystiq.com/2006/11/20/blizzard-sued-by-wow-glider-creator/
Except in 2006, he was suing them.
- Donnelly made more than $2.8 million in revenue from Glider
- Blizzard spends $970K fighting bots each year
- Blizzard claims Glider costs them $18 million in lost revenue per year
Some of the legal filings have been uploaded here, they make for an interesting read: http://gameactivist.blogspot.com/2008/03/update-blizzard-vs-mdy.html"For once?" "For once?" You've got to be kidding. Blizzard litigates all the time. They successfully used the DMCA to stop bnetd, a reverse engineering of the protocol. This was the first real test of the DMCA in court on many of the provisions and gave the law so many real teeth that it became the terror it is today. There was even a huge boycott of Blizzard for a short while.
Sheez! Young'uns.
Put identity in the browser.
"Hey, enjoying the game? Could you just confirm your not a bot by answering this question, please..."
:)
Nope. The biggest bot problem is in battlegrounds, and those that are actually there, at their keyboards, fighting - the real, non-bot players - don't have the time to respond to a message. hell, they probably won't even *see* the message; lots of folks I know direct all chat text to its own dialog box, then hide that box
To explain - while what you're saying could potentially work in PvE play (player versus environment), where a player can just press a few buttons now and then and the fight goes on, the real problem is in PvP play (player versus player) in what are called "battlegrounds" - a large group of horde players versus a large group of alliance players. So what the bots do is have a character run around in stupid ways, dying, casting spells at random, whatever - but if their team (alliance/horde) wins, they get a tremendous amount of benefit from that. So the active, real players end up carrying the extra load of those that are afk or bots.
The 2.4 patch (which went live yesterday) seems to have improved this some though - I actually saw bots getting booted in battlegrounds.
Right now in battlegrounds, there is an option for reporting someone as afk. There should also be an option for reporting someone as potentially a bot, so that GMs could check those particular characters with more diligence for suspicious activity, if they are flagged often enough.
In all fairness, that lawsuit came about because BNETD's servers didn't discriminate over CD-KEYs, thus nullifying Blizzard's copy protection.
In all non-fairness, blizzard made it impossible for BNETD servers to discriminate over CD-KEYs, by utilizing encryption to prevent it.
I.E. blizzard made it impossible for a third-party server interoperable with the battle net client to _not_ circumvent their protections.
I still won't buy a Blizzard product. We ran a bnetd server because we got sick of the cheating on their servers. Every single person who was allowed on our server was legitimate because we verified them by going onto the blizzard servers. A quick chat to make sure the person logged in and all was cool. The bnetd people would have liked to have verified CD keys, but Blizzard refused to cooperate.
We weren't hurting anyone. We weren't stealing from Blizzard. In fact, we _reduced_ blizzard's costs because they had a lower load on their servers. They are just assholes. I chatted with one of the VPs at blizzard, and the way he spoke at me and my friends verified he was a complete and total asshole.
I was a big buyer of Blizzard products up to that point. I haven't bought a single thing from them since.
-- Will program for bandwidth
The bnetd authors fell over themselves trying to compromise with Blizzard, up to and including publically saying that they would incorporate key checking if they could.
Blizzard refused, and proceeded with the most trumped-up lawsuit they could.
If the GP thinks *THIS* is bad, what about claiming copyright infringements of Battle.net server code, based soley on "well, it has a similar bug", instead of just looking at the bnetd code (that's the beauty of open source - you can see the code.)
Actually, bnetd tried to discuss the issue with blizzard so they could authenticate against their CD-key servers. It's not like the effort wasn't made. Blizzard refused, because they would much rather sue them out of existence. And that's exactly what they did.
Random and weird software I've written.