WoW BOT creater fined £3.36M

[Plow]

I still think its sad to sue someone beyond their means over a video game.

WoW really did ruin his life.

Uh... it's not beyond his means by much, he made a couple million off glider before this >.>

[guartz]

You can even say, Bliz raided his company and found 3.36mil in loot.

[Demetrius*]

This is where I say, no, he's damn right, fuck Blizzard.

You see, Blizzard had a choice here. Certain companies (google) would've made the right choice, Blizzard absolutely did not.

The choice was between making this a real case for MMO property value, viable, legal protection from people cheating others who are paying real money for a service, and control (or risked loss of control) of services providing power leveling, in game gold etc.-- or stopping 1 guy that's making 1 bot that they want out of their game and not giving a shit about anything else.

This is where you lost me. Because his program didn't cheat others or affect other players in any way. There were no player rights to protect the way i see it. The bot makes you level faster and gain gold faster, how does that impact anyone else in the game? They willingly paid for a service to change their personal character, where does mmo property value etc factor into this?

[Charla]

So the $150mil monthly in subscription fees we pay for WoW alone is not enough to catch anyone's attention?

I believe what I was saying is that that's the only part of it anyone else cares about. "Players gaining control" and "rights to one's character" don't enter into it, because as far as they're concerned, the money is the beginning and the end of the story 90% of the time (at least until someone in Asia has a heart attack in an internet cafe again).

From what I've heard, it seems that this Glider is a bit of a special case among MMO bot programs, because it's only designed to be used for non-competitive PVE aspects of the game. If it was a claiming bot instead of a farming bot, the question of "affecting others" would be very different.

[aurik]

It's ludicrous that unauthorized copying includes making cached copies that are not distributed that are necessary for proper execution of a program.

Let me expand that into language that people can understand.

If you have a legally purchased tape cassette of a band you like, you can make copies of that tape, and you can rip that tape to a digital format so that you can load it on your ipod. In fact, one could say that in order to play the media that you have licensed with the device of your choosing, you need to make a copy.

Similarly, in order to play the legally purchased copy of WoW with the application of your choosing (in this case, Glider), you need to make a copy of the media from your hard drive to your RAM. This copy, by the same logic, ought to be legal.

However, the ruling was that once a person intends to run Glider, they have violated the EULA, which declares that you can't use tools such as glider in combination with WoW. Thus, your license to the ORIGINAL software is no longer valid, which means that transferring WoW from hard disk to RAM is not allowed.

Therefore, Glider is a tool that depends on making unauthorized copies. Yadda, yadda yadda, 6 million dollars in damages even though not a single unauthorized copy of their product has been distributed due to Glider.

Blizzard's Legal department has always been destructively creative in interpreting copyright laws. I remember keenly the bnetd dispute, which was similarly slimy move after slimy move by their lawyers.

[Correction]

The advocacy gap wins more cases than reasonable interpretation of the law. From what I saw, the company that distributes Glider had some pretty shitty legal representation from the get-go. They were doomed from that decision alone.