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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."
The 1st commandment of Capitalism: Thou shalt not piss off people with vastly more money than thyself...
Players: "Why?"
Blizzard: "Because FUCK YOU that's why"
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Blizzard does not care about private servers for an old game. They care about the 800k users which are not paying to play on their network.
My understanding is that Blizzard would say the server operators are inducing the users (the people playing the game: the clients) to commit copyright infringement.
The Blizzard case way back was fascinating, and they won in court. That was the case where Blizzard essentially claimed they have never, ever sold a game. Not a single copy. "Title was not transferred" is how they put it, because the EULA was magically invoked and retroactively made the sale not have happened.
You probably didn't follow the preceding sentence, because IT'S FUCKING INSANE so go read up. But anyway, from there, it goes like this:
If a user connects to a non-Blizzard server, then the user is violating the EULA. If the user is violating the EULA, then they aren't authorized to possess a copy. If they aren't authorized to possess a copy, then they violated copyright when they installed the software.
MPAA never did anything so evil. Please, people, don't ever pay Blizzard for anything, and if you ever meet an employee of that company, kick them in shin. There are thousands of other game makers.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Even if the Terms of Service say that you can only use the client with Blizzard servers, they have no grounds for shutting down the Nost server. You don't have to sign any EULA to put up a server that speaks TCP and answers questions.
--Welcome to the Realm of the Hawke--
That might have been the original spirit of the law. That is most certainly not the spirit of the DMCA. The intent is to ensure that digital products are kept artificially scarce, so that the rights-holders (not the content creators) can extract continual revenue streams from them.
Especially in the case of computer software, the goal is to pay cheap programmers in foreign countries pennies to make software which America then owns and can demand that those same countries pay big bucks to use.
This is the spirit of the law, and its enforcement is made clear by even the most casual of reviews of case law on the topic. I know you don't like it, I know you think it is philosophically absurd and completely unjust. But it's the law, and this is the spirit of the law, and this is exactly what is being enforced, as the present article demonstrates.