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Blizzard Sues Creator of WoW Bot

Posted by Zonk on from the kind-of-defeating-the-point-of-an-mmo dept.

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."

5 of 701 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Copyright infringement? by clampolo · · Score: 5, Informative

    How? Unless he stole source code and used it in his program, I don't see how.

    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.

  2. Re:Copyright? Maybe not, but maybe trademark? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative
    Blizzard is in over its head if they lose the suit; their employees admitted in sworn statements that Glider cannot be detected by any anti-cheat methods they use. There's a lot of little easter eggs hidden away in the legal filings, for example:
    • 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
  3. Re:neither copyright nor trademark by Daengbo · · Score: 5, Informative

    "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.
  4. Re:neither copyright nor trademark by mysidia · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  5. Re:neither copyright nor trademark by Cecil · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

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    Random and weird software I've written.