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Blizzard Sues Private Server Company, Awarded $88M
Cali Thalen writes "A private server company, Scapegaming (aka Alyson Reeves), was ordered to pay Blizzard Entertainment over $88 million in damages after losing a lawsuit that was concluded last week. Scapegaming was operating unauthorized World of Warcraft servers and using a micropayment system to collect money from the servers' user base, which according to the lawsuit amounted to just over $3 million. $85 million of that settlement was for statutory damages, and surprisingly only $63,000 in attorney's fees."
Doesn't anyone remember bnetd, the battle.net emulator that Blizzard C&Ded and sued into oblivion? It's obvious that Blizzard doesn't give a damn about interoperability or protocol compatibility. Just another greedy company making some spare change on the legal side. Nothing to see here, move along.
There is nothing about fair use that negates the possibility of making a profit. The only thing making a profit does is provide an easy metric for assessing damages if a judge decides what you did wasn't fair use.
"Also fair use does not stipulate you can use 100% of the source."
Your point? My comment didn't at any point include using any of the source and these server emulators don't use any of the original source either. They don't even use reversed source.