Blizzard vs. Glider Battle Resumes Next Week

trawg writes "You paid for it, you have the DVD in your drive and the box on the floor next to your desk, but do you own the game? That's the question the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals will rule on next week in the case between Blizzard, publisher of World of Warcraft, and MDY, publisher of the Glider bot. The Glider bot plays World of Warcraft for you, but Blizzard frowns on this, saying it voids the license agreement — you don't own the game, you only have a license to use it, and bots like Glider invalidate the license. The EFF has a good summary of the case as well. The case is due to be resumed on Monday."

Comments

Perhaps I'm missing something

[RogueyWon]

Perhaps I'm missing something here, but isn't the summary a bit misleading? It's not ownership of the copy of the game you've bought that's being contested; it's the right to play it on Blizzard's own servers. Now, admittedly, the game isn't much use if you can't connect to those servers, but it's not as if you didn't know that when you bought the game.

However, Blizzard is not talking about going into anybody's home and taking away their physical copy of the game, or requiring them to delete it from their hard drive. People like to say that piracy isn't theft because it doesn't deprive the rights-holder of their original copy of the software. Ok, I can buy that. It doesn't mean that piracy isn't A Bad Thing (TM), but I can agree that it isn't theft. So by the same token, Blizzard isn't contesting anybody's ownership of the game - just the right to play it on Blizzard servers.

As a former WoW player (quit cold-turkey 6 weeks ago due to needing my life back) I'm supportive of Blizzard. Stuff like Glider just ruins the experience for legitimate players and I'm glad they take steps to guard against that.

Incomplete summary

[mwvdlee]

You paid for it, you have the DVD in your drive and the box on the floor next to your desk, but do you own the game?

Yes you do. ...but do you also have the server in your room?
You can add any bot or cheat you want to the game, as long as you don't connect it to the official server.

Ugh. They have no case.

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

Yes. You own the client. Not the server. You pay for access to the server. This is how Blizz makes it's cash. Why hasn't this been thrown out?

You paid to agree to certain rules. If you don't like it. Don't play on their servers.

What about servers?

[Yvan256]

What happens when Square-Enix decides to shut down the last Final Fantasy XI server? I'm pretty sure they won't release the server program, the server source code or even the game protocols.

What the hell is wrong with Square-Enix? I can still pick up a used copy of Astrosmash and play it on an Intellivision but I won't be able to play FF XI in a few years? We have to rely on hackers who do reverse-engineering on the protocols to try and emulate the servers to keep the game alive?

Grinding is a waste of time

[naz404]

Grinding is a waste of time.

I once wrote several bots in Javascript for a MUD to get around horrible time-wasting grinding. The funny thing was that bots were illegal in that MUD and I got around it by having my bots notify me with audio cues on the different events happening in the MUD so I could take over manually when the admins started to suspect I was botting. Got away with it... hybrid cyborg chatbots can pass turing tests :) The cool thing about it was that my little pets were running around the dungeons, fighting, eating when hungry, heading to the well when thirsty and resting when tired, etc while I was free to code away and work and do other more practical tasks.

Oh, btw: how to get away with botting more: roleplay that your character is a bot! ;) Had fun playing with my pet GIR from the Invader Zim cartoon series :)

Also, question: Who is more robot-like? The person who does meaningless repetitive motions for hours or days at a time (grinding) or the person who sets a bot to grind, thus freeing himself to do other things and enjoy more of life?

From Wikipedia, origin of the word robot: The word robota means literally "work", "labor" or "serf labor", and figuratively "drudgery" or "hard work" in Czech and many Slavic languages.

So who is the real robot here? It's the people who waste their time meaninglessly grinding especially when it's no longer enjoyable.