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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.
Hmm, interesting. IANAL but if you're a host and a customer of yours is running something that violates a EULA or TOS for someone else's software I don't see that as a legal issue for the hosting provider. Normally, Blizzard or whoever would have to get a court or mediator to order the violator to shut things down. If they don't then they can tell the host to. Right? What am I missing?
[nt]
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Where did you see that they were hosting any copyrighted content?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
fuggin ip is there anything it is good for?
PING! :) ...or traceroute
The 1st commandment of Capitalism: Thou shalt not piss off people with vastly more money than thyself...
I was confused when I have read "more ham for your own company"
Blizzard TOS violations would mean you are not allowed to use Blizzard's services. It has no control over what other people connect their clients to.
I see an interesting legal challenge coming from this.
~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
Copyright infringement generally involves, you know.... copying. They didn't copy, they reverse engineered. Clean room reverse engineering is both common and entirely legal.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
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!?
The only law they broke is to reduce the subscribers base for Blizzard online services. That's just cold, man.
They probably host some map/quest/textures/models on their servers that they don't own copyright of
And will the car manufacturers start pulling the same BS to lock out 3rd part repair shops?
On first read (as a non-player of the game) the headline looked like a severe weather event had caused the server to go down (leading to the thought that this might help the game's owners find it if the routes to it were somehow hidden, as with Tor).
Did anybody else have this effect?
It's yet another example of poorly-worded articles that assume the casual reader has deep background knowledge of the subject. I consider this to be an annoying property of Slashdot. It's not fatal.
But it would be nice if posters recognized that not everybody on /. is as deeply immersed in the subject as they are - and that the not-so-clued-in faction includes many who might be interested and perhaps have something to contribute.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
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
Blizzard Shuts Down Popular Fan-run 'Pirate' Server For Classic WoW
I honestly thought it had been done in by freak weather conditions.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Players: "Why?"
Blizzard: "Because FUCK YOU that's why"
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Since the law isn't going to change any time soon, we just have to make them mobile, so they can't be shutdown. SCUD servers, more dangerous than an Iraqi missile.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
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.
The point is exactly that those 800k were not playing on Blizzard servers.
That's all there is to it, really. They don't care about private servers for outdated games; they care about not having those users playing (and paying) on their network.
Which really wouldn't make too much sense. Most of the subscribers of WoW have been there for years. They already played vanilla in many cases. There may be new people who just wanted to experience WoW as it used to be, but if they have the client, they bought the game or got the client somewhere. And they will probably want to move on to new content when they are done with vanilla. There's only so many Molten Core runs you can make, after all.
I'd think this would attract (a) people who did have a subscription in the past but wanted to play vanilla again, (b) people who never played WoW and wanted in for free or (c) someone who is just friends with (a) or (b) and wouldn't be playing WoW by themselves.
In the case of (a), Blizzard already has their money, they really haven't lost anything except perhaps a few more bucks stringing along a junkie who longs for the days of the Barrens chat and the Scarlet Monastery.
For (b), these are people who might actually sign up for a WoW subscription as soon as they play Vanilla and are done with it and want more content. Now, I haven't played in years, but is my assumption Outland and Northrend are probably a ghost town right now. Nevertheless, I can't believe these reverse engineered servers would actually have such a high pop that it would be much different in terms of play. And they would eventually hit Level 95,000,000 or whatever the level cap is now.
And for (c), they were never getting their money without their friend anyway so what's the deal?
It seems odd for them to consider this an actual threat to their subscriber base. It may well be that they are telling the truth and they're doing this simply because it is theirs and they are just that big of a set of dicks.
I'm pretty sure that Blizz knows that the party has to end soon, I doubt this is any particular strategy to keep subscribers.
And I do truly believe that they are just that big of a bunch of assholes that they'd do this to simply make a point.
Of course, the private servers may well cause a problem for their relaunch of "Classic World of Warcraft: New Game+" or some other strategy that I am not familiar with.
The servers don't run Blizzard software, they built their own.
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.
It its the same logic used by Hollywood to attack piracy, really. It doesn't matter if those users would never have a Blizzard account; in their eyes, there's a chance they would.
WoW is an addiction.
If the players have nowhere else to go, they'll pay for a subscription.
So which laws are they breaking?
Interestingly, and perhaps tellingly, the 1.12 WoW client refers to an editable, plaintext file (realmlist.wtf) to decide what server to connect to. Blizzard gave users the ability to choose which server to connect to, and now they are mad that users exercised that ability to connect to reverse-engineered servers.
Did they also modify the client to connect to these servers? If so, then there's your copyright infringement there. If not, then reverse engineering a service seems legit. I can certainly understand why Activision-Blizzard lawyers would get all frothy at the thought of this, but it seems like there's precedent for this sort of thing.
Granted, whether or not your or I think it's legally okay to do this doesn't mean that suits won't be filed, and Activision has a hell of a lot more money to spend on lawyers. Also... they can shut down external operations because they're against the "terms of use"? So Blizzard can simply write their own laws now? Hell, maybe so.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
As if harmonizing US law with deliberately draconian globalist copyright law is an excuse.
I would argue that the spirit of the law is to protect creators of content from loosing money. From the summary:
Blizzard says the rule "isn't an issue because of 'lost' subscription fees ...
it simply boils down to the fact that private servers are illegal
So what they are saying is, it doesn't effect us but stop doing anyway, its illegal. Note illegal != wrong. How can it be wrong if it is not hurting anyone.
I expect trademark law is a better basis. It's easier to violate trademarks, and they can retreat behind the requirement that trademarks be defended or you lose them (unlike copyrights).
But terms of service are, indeed, a contract, and enforceable under the law.
Settings qualify for copyright, too, as do characters under some circumstances.
> Are they using Blizzard's artwork?
Not by running a server, they aren't. The server just handles technical stuff, it doesn't push artwork. The artwork lives in the client. Blizzard distributes the client.
> Are they using Blizzard's quests?
Not by running a server they aren't. The server just handles technical stuff, it doesn't push quest text. The quest text lives in the client. Blizzard distributes the client.
> Are they using Azeroth?
Not by running a server they aren't. Azeroth lives on the client. Blizzard distributes the client.
> the Terms of Service states you do not own your account or the software.
The EULA is what you are thinking of, and that's how they would approach it. They would say that the EULA means you forfeit all your rights, and then the DMCA applies, and they can sue that way. That's what they did before. It's bullshit.
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.
> The point is exactly that those 800k were not playing on Blizzard servers.
First, that's wrong. Many of them have accounts with Blizzard. Hell, if you care enough to run vanilla raids, you likely have more than one account. Even those with inactive accounts would likely activate them whenever Blizzard launches a new expansion.
Second, many of them are claiming they will unsub from WoW based on this, or not buy future expansions if they are not currently subscribed.
Third, most of these players, even the few that aren't playing Blizzard WoW, are hardcore fans- the experience you get on all these private servers is one that Blizzard REFUSES to acknowledge among its playerbase- progression servers (servers that go through a set of patches) and static servers (servers that act like a certain period of time in WoW's history). If you leveled a character you loved and then Blizzard changed it totally, you might still want to play that character, and a private server is the only way to do this. This entire side market exists because of Blizzard's choices in the first place!
Fourth, there's PLENTY more of these servers- this was just the generally most popular one in genre (wowlike vanilla). There's a whole bunch of subdivisions of WoW private servers, and many of them are totally legal. This one just had the misfortune to be located in France.
So there's no way they accomplished anything but pissing off their vanillaheads. It takes a lot of gall to fuck your character, guild, and game up on live, then reach across the ocean to delete the one you remade over there to play the game you want to play. Frankly, I suspect they might have had a more legit reason that they aren't sharing- they aren't even trying to hunt down all the private servers in France, after all, much less all the ones that operate legally in jurisdictions that they can't attack. But who knows. Their action, on the surface, appears totally irrational- though you have to pay attention to the private server scene to see it as anything but some DMCA garbage.
Nope - WoW doesn't work that way. All the content is on the client, distributed by Blizzard.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
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
Yep, it's default location is "C:\Program Files\World of Warcraft\Data\[locale]\realmlist.wtf" and that WTF file is still there today in the current client doing the exact same thing that it always had.
If anything Blizzard is directly allowing anyone to change the server the client uses. Or is editing the content of a completely unprotected AND unverified text file now a felony? Because if you can't even touch something that has absolutely no protection nor verification done to it, then the DMCA has hit a new low. The DMCA bans circumventing a "technological protection measure", the realmlist.wtf file has absolutely no protection on it, and the client seems perfectly willing to allow a connection to a non-blizzard server. So what "technological protection measure" has been "circumvented" here?
On a somewhat related note: You can't play the original WoW anymore. The official Blizzard servers only run the most up-to-date version of the game, with no option for the user to play with only the older content. Recently, they completely changed the damn maps, quests, mobs, gameplay elements (Flight is now possible in older areas (starting areas) where it was banned previously), etc. to reflect the changes in the story brought about by their Cataclysm expansion pack, which among other things makes the story darker, and all areas (to at least some extent) more bleak. Why should people who don't want that content have it forced upon them? Now some people will read this and say: "Well if you don't like it, Fuck you." I say, if Blizzard wants to have that world fine, but if they have no interest in maintaining the older game world, they shouldn't be going after those who prefer it. Those people were discarded by Blizzard as customers when they chose to not maintain the older world. If those former customers wish to maintain the older world on their own, with their own resources, then they should be able to. If Blizzard doesn't like the inability to force it's one true vision upon the world, then it (along with those like them) can go pound sand.
Time to move it to somewhere Blizzard can't sue.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
I'm pretty sure the quest text/data actually lives on the server, or at least it used to. I dabbled with private WoW servers briefly about 9 years ago and the private servers needed constant database updates to fix quest bugs.
I poked around with running a private server for funsies at one point years ago mostly for my own use, and virtually everything is controlled by the server. NPCs' locations, models, and dialogs, any scripting involving NPCs, monster spawn locations and attacks/spells/etc, Quests, quest text, any scripting that goes along with the quests, things like levelups and level caps, skill-handling... the server pretty much makes it the game. Without that you're just running around a dead, empty world. There were quite a few database sets of quests too - from full blizz-like (advertised as such) that attempted to recreate the official experience as closely as possible to various remixes and tweaks (mostly involving massively overpowering everything).
And even for things in the client, even if Blizzard distributes it for free, it's still their client. I'm pretty sure you have to accept the EULA before you even log in. It'll be an interesting court case all the same.
"It simply boils down to private servers being illegal" is a lie and a cowardly cop-out. No, private servers are not "illegal". They may be forbidden by Blizzard, but there is no law that says Blizzard cannot allow or tolerate them.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I poked around setting up a private server a few years ago for my own use, and everything such as NPC location, models, specific skills, dialog, quests, quest text, any quest-scripting, player skills, skill handling, monster spawn areas, boss location and scripting, etc was all server-side. The raw content - images, textures, models, etc may be all client-side but at least as of the time I was messing with it (which I'll admit was several years ago) the server was responsible for the glue keeping it all together and making it a game. Otherwise you're just wandering around in a dead world. There were several databases available - those that tried to make it as much blizz-like as possible (advertised as such) plus various remixes and versions that usually played with superpowering everything.
I could see them going after them for copyright if they've directly copied the quest texts and NPC dialog and such.
I just edited the EULA to say Blizzard owes me a pizza before I accepted it.
"Tortious interference, also known as intentional interference with contractual relations, in the common law of torts, occurs when a person intentionally damages the plaintiff's contractual or other business relationships. This tort is broadly divided into two categories, one specific to contractual relationships (irrespective of whether they involve business), and the other specific to business relationships or activities (irrespective of whether they involve a contract). There is also a tort of negligent such interference."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Seems the server folks are intentionally interfering with contracts between WoW client software licensees (gamers) and the owner of the WoW client software (Blizzard).
Which really wouldn't make too much sense. Most of the subscribers of WoW have been there for years. They already played vanilla in many cases. There may be new people who just wanted to experience WoW as it used to be, but if they have the client, they bought the game or got the client somewhere. And they will probably want to move on to new content when they are done with vanilla. There's only so many Molten Core runs you can make, after all.
There's a further benefit as well -- it takes some of the rosiness off of those rose-tinted glasses that many oldtimers (myself included) use when talking about Vanilla. I've played on the Vanilla servers recently and it was kindof fun, but I realized quickly... the game really has improved since Vanilla. There are a lot of things that work a lot better, the combat is better paced, it gets boring walking slowly over lands with no actual content, and there is a lot of syntactic sugar that just makes the game "feel" better. Running around as a warrior at level 10 with heroic strike being my ONLY damaging special ability, and having to auto-attack for 10 seconds to get the rage to use it just once, then rinse and repeat... yeah, that's kindof boring!
The users modifies a plain-text file (realmlist.wtf).
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
There's no Blizzard copyrighted material on the server,
Yes there is. The data is copied from the clients (which is why it's possible to create such servers in the first place), but the server does need a copy of them. Things like mob locations, walls, vendors, banks, etc. all need to be known to the server. That means using Blizzard data, unless you want to replicate the entire WoW map from scratch (and that would violate copyright, anyways).
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
1st Commandment of Capitalism Rebellion: If you or people you like have been screwed over by capitalism and have bugger all, pissing people off who have vastly more than you by taking steps to ensure they end up with less, is OK, as long as costs them far more than it costs you ie you might have to spend thousands but as long as it costs them billions, that's cool (consider it capital redistribution). So how much did the Panama papers person spend in order to cost others billions.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
over the skin-suit wearing Activision business Nazis. I didn't even know this was still a thing. I heard of pirate servers years ago and I thought they were all sued in to oblivion then.
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.
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.
For the Americans, remember it was the Clintons that signed DMCA into law.
So vote Republican.
Ooh, moderator points! Five more idjits go to Minus One Hell!
Delendae sunt RIAA, MPAA et Windoze
Blizzard did not handle this very well even compared to other gaming companies, while they could have either ignored it like Ultima Online or made an old school server like Runescape.
It's never just "harmonizing". It is always "harmonizing + a little/lot more", so other countries then need to "harmonize" to your laws, but they also do the "harmonize + more", then you have to do it.
It's always sold as "just making it an even playing field", but it always actually is tilting the table more and more towards large corporations relying on copyright for their existence.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
I wish I'd known about these servers. I would play WoW again if it was the 2006 vintage instead of the crap its become. To answer your criticism, if Blizzard wants to keep WoW going forever, roll back to 2006 vintage, and focus entirely on new and interest dungeons and gear. Also put the level cap back to 60 and keep it there. New and interesting PVE dungeons was the only thing that made WoW great. Making the game "easy" for casual players was another tragic mistake.
2006 vintage WoW would be right before Burning Crusade came out and BC would be just about the time WoW started to suck and I quit playing. In 2006 there were 64 player raids, no constantly shifting level caps that constantly trashed all your gear, you lived to get to get to level 60 and collect PVE gear.
Every good guild on the server I was on, including my own, blew apart about that time, people wandered off to PvP to get the gear Blizz was handing out like candy to distract from the fact all their hard won level 60 PVE gear was being trashed and running Molten Core and BWL was officially pointless. It had become a waste of time doing PVE raids entirely which was the whole point of WoW.
In those days you only ran dungeons with people on your server, yea it sucked waiting to get groups sometimes but you actually made friends and learned to trust or not trust the people you played with on your server. When they started jumbling together pick up runs from all servers you didn't know and couldn't trust ANYONE you were raiding with. Dungeons just became a whirlwind you ran through as quickly as possible and half the time someone in the group would be a total ass and get away with it.
@de_machina
Only problem...
you can't play the version being offered with blizzard.
Everquest, Wow, and many other games have a flow and a golden age.
The flow comes from the timing and release of expansions.
The golden age is a moment when everything is perfect.
For EQ it was probably the plane of time. After that things got weird and repetitive. But everything thru the plane of time was just incredible and part of a a big story that culminated there.
I never played wow but knowing this is a historical server-- the same thing is probably true.
Blizard doesn't offer the game this way. I.e. starting with the base game and then ever 6 to 12 months offering the next expansion and stopping right before things got silly or weird.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
And if it had been a republican in office, they'd have done the same. The DMCA was a required law to meet obligations under a WIPO treaty, and as copyright law was a subject of approximately zero public awareness at the time (and barely more than that now) neither side had any reason to resist the influence of the entertainment industry - a sector both politically influential and generous with campaign contributions.
So what they're saying is: "It's not about the money, we just like being dicks"
Wouldn't they (Blizzard) actually benefit more from being good sports and allowing this service to continue? Perhaps even by sponsoring them or condoning them officially - there are probably many who wouldn't spend the money to try WoW because they think it isn't their thing, but who might get hooked this way. And I don't think they loose customers - people who are this dedicated would probably also invest in the official game. I'm not a player myself, but it seems like common sense to me.
US case law has spoken, and France is a US state?
And yet, even in the US, it doesn't seem to be illegal to emulate a server. The Samba project is doing the exact same thing emulating Windows servers, as these guys are doing emulating WoW servers.
If it was actually illegal, and not just a couple of confused or bribed judges, Microsoft would have been able to put and end to Samba before Linux became large enough to hurt them.
I guess they figured out how to expand their reach to France.
Probably wasn't a stretch for them since the European realms' server hardware has always been in France.
What I find odd is that the many private classic-wow emulating servers clearly proves a market for them exists. 800k accounts is tiny next to official WoW numbers which still more than an order of magnitude higher but they are a potential customer base and many existing players would likely join them but for loyalty to blizzard. So why not make money ? Blizzard could add a revenue stream by partnering with these guys and it would cost them nothing (not even legal fees). Or have one server running classic which players could opt into for little expense to them and likely improve their subscription retention rates.
Whether or not you approve of what pirate servers do American companies really are excessive in running to lawyers first. This is a missed opportunity to make ready cash from willing customers with no expense.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
If i was to reverse engineer Lotus 123 that existed back in 2001 while never seeing any lotus 123 code - does that allow me to put out my own Notus 123 version and not expect to be sued by everyone and their brother?
Er, maybe a bad example since the Lotus name was purchased by IBM and they have an army of lawyers so you'd really be putting yourself in the crosshairs.
And also, lots of people want to play vanilla WoW but would a 15 year-old spreadsheet be that popular?
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 *
Was it only Bill Clinton who signed it. I don't see any statement that the First Lady had any responsibility in executive functions.
As anyone who is married knows your SO doesn't always sees eye to eye with you.
Judging Hillary Clinton for what her husband does isn't really fair.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
It's a valid neologism that is very common in the information technology field. Learn to adapt.
I would argue that "setup" as a noun is a valid neologism, and that "setup" as a verb is simply sloppy and arose from a failure to understand basic grammar. If "setup" is a valid verb, then "goover", "cometo", "passon", and any such other bastardizations should also be considered valid. There's really no good reason to create a new, awkward, and entirely redundant class of verbs.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
It's a bit unclear - but assuming you're right, from the article it seems clear the quest data was recreated to match vanilla, a lot of that would have to be done from scratch - but if so, that would actually be valid copyright infringement. The text of the quests are clearly copyrightable, so are characters and some of the names are likely trademarked.
This may well be more about trademark protection than anything else though - if you allow somebody to offer a product substantially similar to yours, with a similar name who isn't you - that can mean losing your trademarks, which are valuable to blizzard. They really wouldn't to allow EA to be able to create EA-WoW "the not similar at all game with no reused content but the same name".
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Copyright ? No. Patents: possibly, but if the car you recreate is more than 14 years old any patents would be expired.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
> If it acts the same and looks the same? Somehow you all are delusional thinking you are legally allowed to do this.
Yes... like all the times Microsoft sued OpenOffice.org for looking and acting exactly like MS-Office (often an earlier version)... or that time they sued IceWM for looking almost exactly like Windows95 (hell it even had a win95 theme). Or when Broderbund sued kgoldrunner for recreating the classic 80's loderunner game exactly. Or the lawsuit from Nintendo against Supertux for a near identical play clone of Mario.
Actually what you describe is not only perfectly legal - it's done all the time. A clean-room reverse-engineered recreation of a product is not only legal, it's specifically protected as a right by the law.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
In case you were unclear- all those lawsuits I spoke about never happened, and were never attempted - because they can't be. Those were all perfectly legal software and not even a copyright monster like Microsoft (and this is Balmer's microsoft) thought they could get away with it. All that software exists, is regularly used and downloaded - and is perfectly legal.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
What... like the old pirate-radio stations that broadcast from ships ?
Forget the boat-that-rocked, this is the 21st century... here comes the boat-that-torrented (actually - don't most boats do that on a regular basis already ? ... or is that just the worst pun ever ?).
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Co-sponsored by 6 Republicans and 3 Democrats. Plenty of blame to go around.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/...
Just another day in Paradise
Yes, Clinton sucks
Doubtful, or Bill wouldn't have had all those girlfriends.
Just another day in Paradise
daybreak company that now owns everquest just gave blessing to emulated servers not all mmo companys are bad http://www.project1999.com/
There's no such thing as intellectual property. This violates nothing, not even copyright law- when they sue private servers, they use the EULA and the DMCA.
Certainly not in your mind, but in the real world, you know the one with judges, lawyers, etc., they'll gladly remove funds from you to make you suffer for being an IP denier.
Just another day in Paradise
The game that existed in vanilla WoW is long gone and doesn't resemble the product they peddle. Someone who tries these pirate servers then gets a WoW account will likely give Blizzard one month's subscription. The market for these servers is not new WoW players. It's veterans that have become disillusioned by where the game has gone and yearn for the 'good old days' of vanilla WoW.
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
How much was Blizzard losing off of people playing a version of the game that is no longer for sale? I sincerely hope that all of these players just move onto another hacked server and don't pay a damn cent to Blizzard to get into an official server.
"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."
What a load of trite, cowardly, disingenuous crap!
A cat can't teach a dog to bark.
I had been a frequent player on Nostalrius. I did play on Nostalrius because I wanted to save a few bucks on the monthly fee; I just prefer the game as it was before the expansions. That being said, I think you are oversimplifying just what the game server does. Blizzard's copywriter extends to more than the game art, object models and audio. There is also lots of copy (quest dialog, NPC dialog etc.), as well as world geometry that is indeed stored on the game server. At times this information may be sent to the client. Much of this information is extracted and generated from the WoW client data, but much of it has also been reproduced, copied verbatim from various sources. Nostalrius are violating the copyrights held by Blizzard, and that's a fact. It's a shame, though. I was really enjoying the vanilla WoW experience that I had loved when the game was in its infancy and shortly after the first expansion was released.
*didn't want to save a few bucks on the monthly fee. Oops. To clarify I'd gladly pay the 18 bucks to Blizzard to play a version of WoW that I enjoy.
Case law says otherwise.
Totally agree with the parent. But I think there's something that all you techies need to understand (and I don't say that as a slam, just that there is a wide divide here). Lawyers look at this case and see a long, rich tradition of people taking a series of arguably lawful steps to accomplish an unlawful goal. Judges have very little patience for this type of obfuscation; instead, the judge in a case like this is going to ask a couple of fundamental questions:
1) Who owns the intellectual property at issue here?
2) Is the allegedly infringing party doing something that feels like an invasion of the owner's intellectual property?
If the answer is "yes" to both questions, then it just becomes a matter of examining affirmative defense (such as Fair Use) and then developing a legal justification for why the infringing activity should be stopped.
This case seems like a slam dunk to me. Blizzard invested its capital to create a product. Blizzard has the right to profit from that investment. I have little sympathy for parties suggesting that because what they are doing isn't technically "copying" that they aren't trying to recreate the look & feel & enjoyment provided by the product. Listen, I despise the DCMA as much as the next lawyer, but does anyone really think Blizzard isn't entitled to stop people free-loading?
This isn't the first time that Blizz has went server emulation. They shut-down bnetd years ago, which has since been succeeded by PVPGN. I'm not sure what makes PVPGN less of a target than bnetd, as far as I can tell it's an updated fork.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Saying "it's illegal" is a stupid argument when you're the only one trying to make it illegal
The file is one line in length, a couple dozen characters. You're literally changing all except the first 8 or so characters of the file; more is changed than unchanged. That falls under fair use no matter what, in the worst case. It would be similar to trying to publish a book where that was nothing like "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" except for one of the characters being named Dumbledore.
I don't even play WoW; I just did 45 seconds of research before I spoke. Try it next time.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
Sir (or ma'am) I do understand a thing or two about how the cmangos server that Nostalrius is based off of, and yes it absolutely does require many hundreds of megabytes of client data. This data is extracted from the WoW MPQ files and placed alongside the game server daemon. some may argue that, because it's actually a transformed version of the pack files that somehow it does not violate copyright. That argument will fall flat. The next issue is that - and if you knew anything about how cmangos worked you would know this - the quest text is stored on the server in a SQL database. This text is in nearly every case a verbatim copy of the original created by Blizzard. In fact, the cmangos server is so highly specialized to run WoW that I doubt there would be any way to bring it into compliance without a great deal of work as there are many hard-coded elements in the C++ source code for individual locations, NPCs, events, etc.
originalPost.replace('cmangos', 'Mangos Zero');
You.
There are still 'pirate' servers of the discontinued Starwars Galaxies MMO. Unlike the present 'The Old Republic' MMO which is entirely combat and story focused, the old one was totally free form, i.e. you could choose professions and create and trade items without getting into any PvP/PvE.
Now that The Mouse is in charge, expect them to also get shut down like this.
"..One hosts to look them up, one DNS to find them, and in the darkness BIND them."