Slashdot Mirror
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."
Bots are grossly overrated for MMOs for the most part. Sure, there are some few players that will use them in WoW and other games, but for the most part, people want to experience the game. And many bot users are very easy to spot, as their users don't put in enough to make it believable.
I am kind of surprised that Blizzard is doing this, but I think it's just a publicity thing, and they don't really care if they make any cash off of it. They are just trying to placate the masses on the forums that worry about every single little thing they can.
The reality is, bots make money for Blizzard. Once an account is banned, the player has to purchase a new box of the game to start playing again. And with the expansion, that's 2 boxes. So, Blizzard makes money off of the players that register new accounts/CDs every time they get banned.
Besides, most gold farmers are played by humans, not bots.
Maybe instead of suing people who run bots to avoid grinding, they should make grinding less boring/time-consuming? Grinding is really the only reason they aren't getting $15/mo from me.
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Maybe Blizzard should take money they're putting into suing this guy and put it into a game people don't want to have a bot play for them.
I believe the argument would go like this:
You have a right to copy the program into RAM in order to run it, if that copy is going to be used for a purpose that complies with the EULA.
However, here the programmer is using the program in a way that doesn't comply with the EULA. Therefore, he is not only violating the EULA, but also their copyright, because he is making a copy for an unauthorized purpose.
The problem is not bots, it's crappy game design. Once your paying customers start wanting to pay in order NOT to play your game, you know your designer is a complete retard. Then again, it seems that making games not very fun is a highly successful business model..Who would've guessed?
Infinite time means everything that can happen, will. You being you is absolutely incidental. You do not exist.
Yes indeed, it's the old "copy into ram" bullshit.
For an overview of the legal situation see:
http://www.bc.edu/bc_org/avp/law/st_org/iptf/articles/content/1997041501.html
It'll never work.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Now I've never played WoW, but I understand that it is very, very popular. So when you say "Who cares?" I think the answer is likely to be a lot. You may not personally care for the set up of the game, but I think we can all agree that when the structure of a game is dictated by what is and isn't easy for bots to cheat at, that's an overall negative thing. Reducing options and choice = bad.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
Can't you be glad that they're taking action, but not necessarily like the action they're taking?
No free-for-all PvP RPG server or game has ever been successfuly long term (compared to other MMOs or servers in the same year/game).
Griefers always dominate - it's John Gabriel's Greater Internet Dickwad Theory proven every day. Griefers are far worse than any amount of bots.
Eve Online is the first potential counter-example, and they've been very careful about the rules.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
The winding road up the mountain of money that Blizzard sits atop of is littered with the corpses of games that "will be" X or Y while WoW delivers a game experience that people want. Not some grand artistic or social vision, a game with just enough (and I would even say only enough) depth to keep you coming back. Hell, they're down every tuesday morning and they're still regarded as the smoothest MMO experience around.
Darkfall wants to make your items lootable, they're welcome to try it. Whether people actually enjoy this level of realism is a reality they're going to face on their balance sheet.
Me, I'm looking forward to Warhammer Online, but I don't hold any illusions that it will radically change the mechanics or culture of the MMO genre. I will throw my money at what's fun.
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
It may be a weak argument but it will require the wow Glider to hire a legal team to fight it. Its just another way them to attack.
I dont know if this is just another attack or Blizzard claiming defeat. Blizzard has been in a hacking war with bots for a long time. Blizzard was winning for a long time but wow glider is on top of the game now.
Just how do you hide from a program that is looking for you when they have access to your binaries? I don't want to say I support botting, but I have to give that dev team credit for doing such a good job.
Im a gamer, not a grammer major. This post is full of spelling and grammer mistakes.
At most it might infringe upon the terms and conditions of WoW. But that would need to be taken up with the users, not the author.
Just another example of a company aiming its litigation at the wrong target.
"Be light, stinging, insolent and melancholy"
WoW doesn't mandate it. You can never spend a single day grinding and have plenty of things to do. The problem comes from people who get in to this pissing match of having to have something just because others have it. So they want to automate it.
If people would just play the game to have fun, it wouldn't be a problem. It is a game, you don't "need" anything in it. Just do whatever it is you like to do. If you like to grind (surprisingly some people do) then grind. If you don't, don't. However don't get mad and say that you should get reward X that the grinders get.
More or less, Blizzard has a bunch of different kinds of rewards for different things. You can't get any reward doing any thing. However whatever it is you like doing, there are rewards for it.
The problem is when people aren't playing it to have fun, but playing it because they want to have all the best of everything. Well, that's pretty hard, since you have to do a whole bunch of different things. So they'll get bots to grind and such. That is just stupid. If all you care about is having the best, what's the point? The point should be to do whatever is fun. It is all just a game, none of it matters, other than to have fun.
In the case of an EULA or a subscriber agreement the agreement is with the player, not the bot creator. I don't see any way they can go after him with either of those. They could sue their subscribers with them if they could reliably detect which users are using a bot, which they seem to be asserting they cannot do.
I also like the part where they say it interferes with their design expectations. Who cares? The fact that they didn't accomodate someone playing the game 24/7 doesn't have any bearing on the legality of the bot. The only way i can think that that would be relevant is if the terms of use limited the time a user can play. Even then, they'd have to sue the player, not the bot maker.
I'll be surprised if this doesn't get thrown out of court. I'm a little surprised that after he blew off their legal threat, they didn't try to just buy him out to get rid of it.
I'm not a lawyer though, so i suspect a lot of things happen in court that would surprise me.
Darth --
Nil Mortifi, Sine Lucre
Since World of Warcraft is a game where players simulate fighting wars, presumably World of Chorecraft would be a game where players simulate doing chores. Which, now that I think about it, is pretty much what The Sims is ... and yet it's weirdly addictive, unlike doing the same things in real life.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
To see that this is what is always likely to happen. Looking at human history, it has historically been the strong dominating the weak, the few privileged exploiting the poor many. You come to realise that the relative stability and equality we enjoy in some nations is an anomaly of history, and took some incredible circumstances and efforts to create. For all that, they still aren't perfect.
So it should be ho surprise at all that is what happens in unrestricted games. Perhaps if some great leaders played the game they could inspire the masses to band together and overthrow the griefers. A George Washington of the gaming world. However, that isn't real likely since the masses can simply take their money to another game. There's no reason to put up with crap and try to make it better, there's other companies who'll be happy to do that.
My response to all the people who claim what a "problem" the design of WoW is and how much better their pet game is is the same one another poster made in this thread: 10 million users. They are doing something right.
As a long time gamer, I have to say WoW is the first MMORPG that has held my attention for more than about 6 months. Everquest was just awful, I quit that one after a month. DAoC was fun for awhile, I played for a few months, quit for a year, came back for a few months, quit again. Eve Online was... Well... Really boring. Tried it in beta, never signed up. Starwars Galaxies had a lot of promise, but it seemed as though Sony had a team dedicated to tracking down and eliminating anything fun. Lasted about 4 months.
WoW, however, I've been playing since a month after it came out, and I still play to this day. Is it perfect? No, of course not. However it seems to be able to keep things fun. I continue to be amused by it, and find that it is enough amusement to justify $15/month.
It seems to me that the people who primarily have a problem with WoW are the asshole griefers, who are mad that they can't become infinitely more powerful than everyone else, that they can't totally dominate. Well, I'm ok with that. If that segment has to be excluded, that's fine, because a whole lot of the rest of us find it fun.
And that is really what matters. Games are not about some magical standard of purity, they are not about perfect realism, they are not about testing you as a person. They are entertainment, pure and simple. So if they are good amusement for the money to you, then your money is well spent on them. If they are not, then your money is better spent elsewhere.
So a good game is quite simply one that people find fun. If people find it fun, they'll buy it and play it, and that is success.
For once, Blizzard has definitely done something wrong...sued for the wrong things all the way around here. Sue for damages? Sure. Copyright? No. Trademark? No.
The guy has disclaimers on his site about using MMOglider that pretty much state "Blizzard doesn't like this", so no, Blizzard can't really do a lot about it.
Unless the guy doesn't have the resources to pay for the lawyer, I would suspect that the odds are in the mmoglider guy's favor.
Maybe even an Electric Monk to read Slashdot for you.
"The Electric Monk was a labour-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder. Dishwashers washed tedious dishes for you, thus saving you the bother of washing them yourself, video recorders watched tedious television for you, thus saving you the bother of looking at it yourself; Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe."
D Adams
This "kooky business model" draws about 10,000,00 subscribers world-wide into PC gaming.
Explain to me your god-given right to disrupt a legitimate business, enable and profit from the cheaters, and spoil the fun for everyone else.
Explain to me why your argument won't drive developers to program exclusively for the tightly enclosed console game platforms. Explain to me why it won't drive developers to employ ever-more-rigorous-DRM.
The reason people dislike griefers stems from the fact that it's essentially an infringement on their ability to enjoy the game. It's not necessarily an emotional attachment that causes others to be unhappy with you.
- first, getting killed in that fashion is frustrating, as it's often impossible to have a fighting chance against a griefer (they're high enough level to safely grief others).
- second, it can render a large amount of time to be completely wasted - in Eve, losing your ship is a huge deal for a new player, and can set them back hours or days.
- third, it can go against the spirit of the game - when you grief someone in WoW or Eve or any other similar MMO, you're not doing it primarily for experience, money, honor, etc, you're doing it because it's cheap and easy entertainment for you at the expense of someone else.
LegendMUD
Blizzard DOES need to do something about WOW glider, it's very disruptive to the game environment, but they are arguing the wrong legal angle entirely. They SHOULD be using an argument that the program in question is disruptive to the game environment (and "encouraging" players to violate the contract that lets them use the online service) rather than trying to claim some sort of copyright violation. The legal angle they are using in this case is extremely lame, and they definitely need better laywers. Surely the fact that this product is sold promoting and encouraging people to disrupt the game environment would be enough for a court without having to drag some crazy half brained copyright argument into it.
"Police are stupid anyway. I can wave around whatever I want in my hand in whatever direction I want to." Perhaps a poor analogy, but god damnit, you're not just running it in your memory. You're also wasting CPU time, memory, and storage space on their machines for a character that you're not even playing with most of the time you're on. You're going against the rules of the game (the ToS), you're automating exactly what the game's centered around because you find it boring and, most importantly, you're just being an ass.
I just read Slashdot for the articles.
However, as received by the player, it does not contain any of the WoW code. If there is any derivative work here it isn't created until the player uses this WoW Glider program, in combination with the player's own copy of the game, to create a combined in-memory executable. Ergo, if Blizzard wants to sue someone over creating an unauthorized derivative work they should be suing the players that use this mod -- not that I think they would succeed, given a competent judge, since the combined work is not being distributed. Likewise, any ToS violation should be the player's responsibility, since it was the player, not the maker of this program, who agreed to abide by the terms of service.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
The bot writer might actually be entitled to write his program without regards to how it is used.
It is certainly not illegal for someone to cheat at a video game, even though it violates the EULA. Blizzard would have to prove that this man selling a cheat program causes them damage, and that he is liable for that damage. Currently, cheat programs do not fall under the spam or malware category, they are not malicious code. It will be hard for Blizzard to convince a judge that a paying customer running a bot is costing them money.
On the one hand I root for blizzard to weed out griefers and farmers, they can hurt the gameplay experience. On the other hand though i'm not sure that what this man is selling is actually criminal. It's not very sportsmanlike, but i don't think it's illegal.
Unfortunately, people do not care if they get any value from a killing a 20 with their 70. They do it for their enjoyment. It is a grief tactic, and the level 20 can do nothing. I personally do not plan to buy any MMORPG game that does not have balanced PVP. Between the bunny hopping, gear differences, and level differences, I think that WOW is a terrible PVP game. People are much better off playing shooters, which is what I choose to do now that I know better. I also think Guild Wars PVP is much superior to WOW, and Guild Wars 2 should be an incredible advancement in the genre.
By your logic Blizzard is suing the wrong party. To continue your analogy, they are suing the gun manufacturer. To win outright they have to prove the Glider software violates the law.
If the extra resources used are such a problem for them, why don't they just do the sensible thing and have a tiered pricing structure? If bots really use a lot more time than real players do, then it should be pretty easy for them to pick a number of hours per month which is sufficient for 99% of their actual players, and then charge anyone who uses more time a higher fee. It's a bit like all the ISPs crying foul over P2P users using "too much" data on their "unlimited" plans. If their pricing structure is untenable, then they should fix the pricing structure.
Also, if the bot doesn't do anything a player couldn't do anyway (if they were sufficiently skilled) then what does it matter? If it does do things the client doesn't allow, then it's reasonable to pursue him over that, but it seems like it'd be more straightforward to fix their server to not allow it.
The game already has to deal with a large range of players, from casual gamers who maybe get in a few hours a week to the obsessive teens who spend their every waking moment in the game levelling their character. A bot that does the tedious work gives casual players a chance to experience the game as a high level character that they probably wouldn't get otherwise. If Blizzard doesn't want people doing this, maybe they should make the game less tedious.
On the other hand, if Blizzard is successful at pursuing anyone using bots to make the game less of a chore, hopefully it'll result in a few less WoW addicts. Possibly they don't want people to experience the "end game", as then they might realise how boring and pointless the whole thing is and stop paying the monthly subscription fee.
On the whole, it does seem that they don't have a very strong case against the program's author, only against its users as they're the ones violating the ToS and so on. Possibly they could get him for reverse engineering the game code, which I presume he would've needed to do in order to write the program; but proving that could be difficult.
Don't be silly. If I write an application that requires Windows, I'm not making a derivative work, and Microsoft can't sue me for requiring windows.
That's a bad analogy; Microsoft releases and documents APIs just for that purpose - just look at MSDN sometime.
The equivalent to what you said would be Blizzard suing someone over writing a LUA script, which they aren't - somebody hijacked their entire program.
The "suing Apple and Microsoft because their operating systems copy the game to RAM" is a non sequitur. You bought the license to do that - run a copy in RAM. You did not buy a license to run two copies so you can cheat the game - on top of violate the EULA.
Granted, it would be easier to go after the individual players - but better to attack the problem at its source. I have zero sympathy for people who spend money to cheat at a game, nor do I have sympathy for the $millionaire who makes it all possible.
DATABASE WOW WOW
They should terminate his subscription post haste. I don't have the terms handy but that would be pretty crappy if they stated that Blizzard could sue you for playing a game in a way they didn't like.
Just another example of a company aiming its litigation at the wrong target.
Or... the right target. They could cut off every individual botting user... and they've tried that. But, these users are impossible to find because of this one individual millionaire who managed to make his program (currently) undetectable.
So... they could sue every individual user. But, we run into the "finding them" problem again.
So... they could sue the one person making it all possible, and profiting handsomely for it. This is the logical target - go for the one person responsible rather than lots of individuals - but also, apparently, the most difficult. Going for WoW Glider's maker solves the problem; going for his customers doesn't. So, you can't fault them for trying.
DATABASE WOW WOW
Agreed.
And as far as I'm concerned, the best games are those that do not require a considerable investment of my time. (Clearly, this is not the case for everyone and I can certainly identify with longer-playing games with goals and missions that often do require a considerable time investment... I have been hooked on quite a few games in the past!)
Largely, I view games that inspire THIS level of investment in time, money and other resources, to be absolutely harmful to people with vulnerable personality types. I have a nephew that had wasted his high school career on up through his 21st birthday so far by living this obsessive gamer lifestyle. He now works more than one part-time job, still lives with parents and is trying to 'catch up' with junior college and such. He's a VERY smart kid and could have done a lot better if the time and energy he put into the game were directed elsewhere.
I know another guy who, as far as I can tell, is still an addictive gamer. So far among his list of major losses has been his wife and kids, two houses, and numerous well-paying jos. (No, this guy is NOT me, but I don't find it difficult to imagine myself in his place... the main difference is that somehow I can see the harm coming and know when to stop playing before harm occurs.) His other friends have been talking "intervention."
I blame the highly successful gaming industry in general. There are people who are vulnerable to gamer addiction and people who are not. (There are people like me who are somewhere in the middle... I can see both ends of the extreme.) I think gaming on this level should come with warnings and disclaimers and the like. And much like tobacco and gambling industries, I think they should morally provide assistance to those who have been damaged through the use of their products and services. (Some casinos have banned particular people specifically because they are addicts and as such run some serious liabilities if they allow addicts to play and lose money.) And I think it is undeniable that gaming on this level is designed with the addictive/obsessive gamer in mind. Just as with tobacco, it is engineered to exploit addicts. It's a proven effective business model, but it's also immoral to exploit such personality weaknesses for profit. They cannot be blind to the fact that their business model is largely supported through people wasting their lives and at some point, they should be held accountable for it.
Perhaps I'm straying too far from the topic which is about this game automation enhancement. But I think of it this way: it would be like marketing some sort of pill that allows a smoker to smoke fewer cigarettes while maintaining his addiction and then having the tobacco industry sue you for essentially exploiting their business model for your own profits. It doesn't alleviate all of the symptoms and harmful effects of being a smoker, but it does have some affect to mitigate some of them and most certainly interrupts their income. Bots make the gaming experience less involving while still feeding the addiction and craving for the results of play.
I'm against bots. I'm against gaming at this level. I'm against both sides of this dispute. But I believe that ultimately, Blizzard's real complaint can't be issued in court which is that someone else is exploiting their business model and 'tapping into' their stream of income. So now they're fabricating bullshit legal claims in an attempt to cut off this leach.
I wonder if they'll try and force him to give up his source during discovery. That might very well be the angle they're looking at in this whole thing.
The world you experience is only a close approximation of reality.
The article says that 100'000 copies of this tool have been sold, which implies ~100'000 users. While it is strictly speaking the fault of the user that Blizzard is suffering damage, the root cause is the creator and vendor of the tool.
:-)
As such it certainly makes sense for the Blizzard to go after Donnelly, since
a) if they stop him, they stop further sales of the bot
b) it's lot easier to litigate against one person than 100'000
c) you get much less bad press for litigating against one person than 100'000
d) the 100'000 are still bringing in income (as paying customers), just less of it. Blizzard probably doesn't want to scare them off with litigation. Donnelly, on the other hand, just costs them money.
Blizzard's in a lose-lose situation: litigation against Donnelly is legally unclear, but litigation against 100'000 users would cause an uproar.
The choice of target is in fact quite rational from a game-theoretic perspective. And from an emotive perspective, you could always compare it to going after the crack dealer rather than the addict
Antiquis temporibus, nati tibi similes in rupibus ventosissimis exponebantur ad necem.
This is one of those cases where the "end user license" is able to (supposedly) enforce a contract that can't be proven that the user has in fact agreed to.
I, for one, consider anything in a license agreement that goes beyond the strict authority to copy the software and attempts to ascribe "rights" to the publisher that are not granted in copyright law to be illegal.
For instance, I can purchase a "license" that would allow me to re-publish major excepts from a book, or in the case of computer software I can buy a license that would allow me to incorporate a major subroutine library into a computer software product that I am in turn re-selling. These kind of licenses are quite common, and are entirely within the purview of the concept of who has "the right to copy" the copyrighted product. They can have some restrictions, and there are even "regional" licenses that you can offer a "right" to distribute a product in a certain region of the world, like separate licenses for distribution to North America vs. Europe.
If I violate the license terms, my "rights" to republish and sell that software then also terminate. But customers I've sold the software to previously under the license terms still have legal software.
The problem here is that the publisher, in this case Blizzard, is attempting to retroactively revoke the previously granted authority to copy the contents of the game from the CD-ROM (or via network download) to the hard drive of the computer after the copy has been made. Furthermore, it is presuming that the first sale doctrine doesn't apply to electronic media. Yes, I know that is currently disputed, but it hasn't been proven to be invalid either.
Even if a "formal contract" was entered into the mix between the customer and the software publisher that goes well above and beyond conventional copyright licensing terms, you still have to prove who signed the contract in the first place. Were the terms to the contract understood and legible? Was the contract even valid? Can anti-reverse engineering clauses even be added to such a contract of any kind, much less introduced as a mere copyright license arrangement?
This isn't unique even to the software industry, as I got involved with a technical specification contract that had some similar kinds of clauses that involved a physical dead-tree book. But in that case I had to physically sign my name as the recipient of the book and there was a documentation trail in terms of even legal custody of the material. I'm certain that Blizzard can't prove that sort of documentation at all.
Another issue to be raised by the defense is the issue of being able to understand what some other individual has done which is impacting the operation of the computer which you own. Blizzard doesn't own the PC that the defendant is using, and a legitimate use of reverse engineering is to understand how a piece of software may cause harm to the operations of other software or the general performance of their equipment.
This is a weak case for Blizzard, even though I sympathize deeply with their wanting to keep 'bot makers off of their servers. I personally think that invoking copyright law is entirely the wrong way to do it, particularly license agreements that are shaky to begin with. Real harm can be claimed by Blizzard in terms of the impact of the software upon their servers, but that is something similar to a denial of service attack and something more along the lines of vandalism, not necessarily anything that has to do with contract or copyright law. I'm sure criminal law statues could be read to apply here, but that is something else entirely different.
No, the root cause is the undelaying model of WoW: it is impossible to create content fast enough to keep people playing, so Blizzard keeps adding the modern equivalent of mazes in old adventure games, obstacles whose only purpose is to take time. This might not be fatal in itself - for example, mining for resources in Star Control 2 was exciting and fun - but Blizzard has failed utterly to make their speedbumps fun rather than just plain tedious. That is why this program exists: to fix a perceived problem in WoW.
The real-world WoW gold market, leveling services, and this program are all symptoms of Blizzards's failure, not its cause.
Besides, Blizzard isn't "suffering damage", they're at worst losing revenue due to users canceling their subscriptions. It is not illegal for a company to benefit at the expense of another company; and if it is, then the entire foundation of capitalism and market economy needs to be reviewed.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
The problem I had with LOTRO was the quests. There were too many simple quests and not enough complicated multi-part quests. Also, killing mobs for exp isn't always fun, but I love dungeon exploration and I like getting experience for the mobs killed. I also prefer to skip quests as most of the time they are meaningless gather/fed ex. If I remember correctly (it's been a while since I played) LOTRO gave no experience for mob kills. It was either that or I got upset at the lack of underworld areas that I so desperately wanted to explore (ie: no dungeons.) Either way, I got bored of it quite quickly.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.