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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.
[nt]
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
The 1st commandment of Capitalism: Thou shalt not piss off people with vastly more money than thyself...
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!?
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...
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.
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.
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.
What contract?
Between what parties?
And how is breaking a contract illegal?
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.
> What contract?
Correct, the server operators have no contract with Blizzard.
> Between what parties?
Correct. The only contract is between the clients and Blizzard. *That* TOS prohibits Clients from Accessing non-Blizzard servers.
> And how is breaking a contract illegal?
ALL Law is based on Contract Law.
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
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.
I just edited the EULA to say Blizzard owes me a pizza before I accepted it.
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
Ahh, but their EULA doesn't supersede my SPLA, which is clearly printed on the side of my computer.
It boils down to this.
By allowing your software to install on my computer, you, the software provider, agree to the following terms and conditions.
Your EULA is null and void.
Your software is fit to be used for any purpose I choose and if it fucks up my server, you will be held fiscally responsible.
The copy of "your software" installed on my machine now belongs to me. I can do anything I want with it and you have no legal recourse available.
If you attempt to prevent me from doing what I want with my software in any way, shape, or form, you will be held accountable to the tune of $5,000,000.00 USD an hour until I regain control of MY software.
Any attempts by you to supersede my SPLA is strictly forbidden and falls under the penalty clause described above.
If you do not wish to submit to my SPLA, then you must follow the following method to notify me.
Fill out a postcard with "We do not want our software to submit to your SPLA.", addressed to my home address, which you will need to hire a private investigator to determine.
That postcard must be stuffed into a self-addressed stamped envelope to be mailed to the post office with the U.S. Zip Code of 00001. That has to enclose another stamped envelope addressed to the post-office at zip code 00002.
Repeated stuffing of each envelope so that zip codes increment from 00001 to my zip code without skipping any zip codes in between.
Failure to follow these procedures will also activate the penalty clause.
Your notification must reach my home address within 15 days of your decision to disagree with my SPLA, after which you cannot cancel the SPLA and you will forever more be bound by my terms and conditions.
Any attempts to bring legal efforts against me will also activate the penalty clause, though it will be doubled just because you chose to piss me the fuck off.
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.
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!
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.
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