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Blizzard Shuts Down Popular Fan-run 'Pirate' Server For Classic WoW (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Blizzard is threatening legal action against the popular "pirate" servers for World of Warcraft. The Nostalrius servers have been operating for nearly a year, running version 1.12 of the original World of Warcraft as it existed in 2006. Admins say that 800K registered accounts and 150K active players were working through quest progressions reproduced to precisely match the game of a decade ago. Nostalrius' team says its French hosting provider has been issued a formal letter asking it to shut down the servers or face a potential copyright infringement lawsuit as hosting private servers is explicitly against Blizzard's Terms of Use. Blizzard says the rule "isn't an issue because of 'lost' subscription fees from players choosing these illegitimate servers over the real WoW servers -- it simply boils down to the fact that private servers are illegal, and that's that." Nostalrius' servers will be shut down on April 10, but the team says it "will still be publicly providing everything needed in order to setup your own 'Nostalrius' if you are willing to."
It isn't doing that. It's just emulating what a Blizzard server would do, and an official Blizzard client interprets the results. There's no Blizzard copyrighted material on the server, and the clients that do all this are distributed by Blizzard themselves. This is more DMCA crap, and I guess they figured out how to expand their reach to France. Mirroring a service is still legal in most of the world, after all.
This is more DMCA crap, and I guess they figured out how to expand their reach to France.
For the Americans, remember it was the Clintons that signed DMCA into law.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
For the people like yourself, the person who wrote the bill was a Republican Howard Coble and it had unanimous support from all Senate Republicans
Calling Nostalrius a pirate server is not accurate. Nostalrius is a reverse engineered server that works with the official Blizzard WoW 1.12 client. I've played on Nost for the past year, and the overwhelming majority of players I've played with paid for retail vanilla WoW subscriptions back in the day. Sure, I can't find my original discs and had to download a copy of the 1.12 client, but I still contend that I have both a legal and moral license to still use that client.
If Blizzard were to offer a vanilla subscription, I would gladly sign up. (Well, maybe before they C&D'd Nost.) However, since they don't offer such a subscription, running a private server should be allowed as an exemption to the DMCA. The EFF previously petitioned the Library of Congress to add an exemption to the DMCA to allow users to reverse engineer server-side controls once games have been abandoned. The Library of Congress granted the exemption for simple matters like server-side authentication methods, but it was limited to allowing local, single-player gaming to continue. It does not apply for MMORPGs that require server-side interaction. However, this ignores the possibility of using a paid-for client with a reverse-engineered server, something I feel should be legal.
Actually, the spirit of the law was to provide a limited period of exclusivity in order to entice people to create, with the ultimate goal being to enrich the public domain. We all know how well that's working out...
FC Closer
In fact, if I owned stock in the company, I'd be at the next stockholder's meeting asking some pointed questions about why they're throwing this revenue stream away instead of taking advantage of it.
I'll save you a trip...
"Thank you for your question.
While there is an untapped revenue stream there; there are several associated costs to your proposal; and we are confident we can tap it without these costs.
Maintaining a few larger groups of players is simply more cost effective than maintaining support and systems for more but smaller communities. Before we would open a new property we would need to show that it was substantially different enough that it would attract players not already on our existing properties.
A classic WoW ruleset doesn't meet that criteria. Those players can be served by the existing WoW servers, and we are confident that if we shut down these criminal enterprises that many of the players will return to the existing official servers, requiring virtually no outlay of new resources."
Case law has spoken.
Here's a good one. People tried to work around copyright law by saying things like "we don't provide infringing content, we just provide a data-sharing service" and got slapped down. Also, people said "this is fair use because we are just sharing our copies with our friends, not selling them." and got slapped down.
Here is a surprising familiar example, from 6 years ago, when blizzard won this same case for this same reason.
Here is an earlier instance of the same thing, but this time emulating battle.net for private games of starcraft and diablo. Same result too: the technical workaround didn't actually work around the law.
The attempt to evade law through technical workarounds is much older than computers. For example, people try to gain citizenship status by marrying a citizen, only to learn (the hard way) about shame marriages, and how the government can and will split you up and deport your spouse, and slap you with a conviction on top of it.
Or the fun trick of escaping student loans by transferring the debt over to credit cards, and then declaring bankruptcy. This is fraud and it will land you right in jail.
The justice system has seen every scheme you can think of, including every with-computers "not technically illegal" scheme you can think of, and have slapped the grifters down for it every time. When you try to pit your technical cleverness against the government's lawyers, expect a beat-down.
Also....the present article is just another case to add to the above list.
As far as I can tell - there was no copyright violation by the servers. The users agreed to a T.O.S. that prohibits them to connect to the server however. So I suspect the actual legal argument here is something akin to "provided the means to circumvent" ala DMCA - which really shouldn't have ever been illegal.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Co-sponsored by 6 Republicans and 3 Democrats. Plenty of blame to go around.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/...
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