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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."
They're called statutory damages for a reason. It's precalculated by a statute (hence the name) or a law. Given that the lawyer's fees were so low...likely Blizzard wasn't considering asking for so much (especially given likely inability to repay such an amount), but was given little to no say in it, given that it was a DEFAULT judgement (defendant never responded despite being served/summoned), and hence not argued "in trial".
It was a lengthy, boring series of motions that was never once contested.
"A Goddess rarely smiles for she is forced by others to be an island unto herself." - Zephiris
Was the private server just duplicating the game's protocol, or was the game world actually duplicated?
Yes, they were using actual WoW data files, including player and enemy models, sound effects and all that. That is clearly infringing on copyrighted material.
Duplicating a protocol though is not wrong or illegal; it's not a file or bunch of data that could be copied and re-used. A protocol is a set of rules as to how to pass data along and thus anyone is free to implement an application or library that does pass data along following those rules. It'd be different if the protocol was patented but I doubt Blizzard has patented it; it's used only for WoW and it's not even efficient. They'd just not make money with it even if they published all the protocol details openly.
I hope this answers your question.
Blizzard charge for the client, plus separate subscription fees to hook up to their servers. There is a clear separation of the money you pay for the client, and the money you pay to access Blizzards servers. The client is typically bought or downloaded and therefore once you've bought it you are free to use it as you wish, provided you don't distribute copies.
In theory, there should be nothing unlawful against hooking up to a different server as there is a clear separation here. The protocol can and has been reverse engineered The only question is whether any of Blizzards proprietary data is held on the server and "distributed" to the clients.
Presumably, the in-game items are not transferable from a private server to Blizzards server, so no issues there either.
This judgement was not defended, so the question arises as to whether it would be possible to mount a defence so as to make non-Blizzard servers legitimate?
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
look what they did to the custom map scene. They created that incredibly powerful editor that dwarfs anything that was done before but they pretty much killed it with ridiculous restrictions. Warcraft 3 thrived on map making, i suspect that half the people owning wc3 never bothered to play ladder matches.
http://eu.battle.net/sc2/en/forum/
look at popular topics section:
- Allow authors to cross-realm publish
yup, people can't publish their maps globally, they do it on their server only
- A short rant on SC2 and general censorship
list of censored words is very long and includes such words as suicide - if by any chance you want to write 'banelings suicide attack' somewhere in your map or words like bullshit that can be found in the single player, the map can be even banned. No idea if the words that are filtered out in other places like black, white trans(port), (g)rape cause problems but i think they do
- Want "Custom Game"? Go back to WC3 or SC1.
says all - despite primitive editors you enjoy more fun and freedom in the realm of custom games. You have the control over the rules and players that join and you, also you can name your game to broadcast rules (people playing dota add a lot of codes to the game name so people know what they join) or desired skill level. People have none of that in sc2 and maps are sorted by populatity (self perpetuating scheme, new maps can't get high enough to get noticed by more than a handful of people, good luck autofilling all player slots in a reasonable time)
- The new Custom Game system? (What is wrong with it)
other problems - without lan developing multiplayer scenarios is a chore after all debugging is all about running a map, finding a problem, trying to fix it, running a map again, wash rinse repeat. To do that you need to use bnet which adds considerable amount of time to the development process, testing from the editor level is not sufficient in all but the simpliest cases
- The Real Problem with Custom Maps
5 out of 10 most popular threads on the forum touch mapmaking/publishing alone. It shows how messed up it became thanks to the control freaks in actiblizz
It wasn't defended, so they basically charged $60000 for submitting the brief.
Actually that's a bit unfair. They didn't know this was going to be uncontested so they had to make sure all the evidence was checked out and in order, and research appropriate case law. Still seems like a fair whack of cash though.
The bnetd developers had the game, which they reverse engineered, which meant they had agreed to the EULA which prohibits reverse engineering.
According to the court's summary judgement, the developers were bound by the EULA, which they were in breach of.
The developer's argued that "CD Keys" are not an anti-piracy measure, and 'battle.net' was not a valid trademark. Probably these arguments were a bit reaching... if CD Keys are not an anti-piracy measure, then what is their purpose?
On appeal... BNETD was ruled a circumvention tool based on Blizzard's argument.
Developers argued EULA is overriden by the DMCA interoperability exception.
They failed to convince the court of the applicability of the exception to their situation.