Blizzard Says World of Warcraft Bot Creator Earned $2.8 Million
Donnelly, the author of popular World of Warcraft bot Glider--a downloadable tool that automatically plays the massively multiplayer game for users--was sued by Blizzard in February of 2007.
Both sides have since been locked in a legal battle, with Blizzard claiming that Donnelly knowingly infringed on its copyright, in addition to breaking World of Warcraft's End User License Agreement.
"Blizzard's designs expectations are frustrated, and resources are allocated unevenly, when bots are introduced into the WoW universe, because bots spend far more time in-game than an ordinary player would and consume resources the entire time," said Blizzard in a legal statement filed last week.
Donnelly claims that his program does not violate Blizzard's copyright because it never makes a true copy of the game client.
"Blizzard permits its licensees to load the WoW game client software into RAM to play WoW. As such, Blizzard's licensees cannot violate Blizzard's exclusive rights under the Copyright Act to make copies simply by loading a copy of the program into RAM to play WoW," reads one section of Donnelly's retort.
The MMO Glider program sells for $25, with an optional $5 subscription available that provides additional functionality.
"We are fans of the game that want to try out a lot of different things," reads a section of the MMO Glider website.
"Getting a bunch of characters to 70 is a pain. Getting money to equip them is a pain. Doing big instances, Battlegrounds, raids, and generally socializing in the game is fun. We use the Glider to skip the painful parts and have more fun. Someone suggested we sell it, so.."
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liqker
replyWhen I first heard about this I was thinking "damn, dude is going up against the full wrath of Blizzard Legal" but if he's made 2 million off of his bot, then he's got enough money to see this to the end.
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This works off the same principle as all you can eat buffets or soda refills. The restaurant knows you aren't going to stay for 8 hours eating the whole time.
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That was my point. I was agreeing with Arcanum by presenting the real world equivalent.
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Breaking the Terms of Service is grounds for account removal. Breaking the End Use Liscense Agreement is indeed grounds for lawsuit. When you purchase any softare, you're not buying THE PROGRAM, but the LISCENSE to use it, and the EULA tells you exactly what you are permitted to do with their softare.
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The problem is they probably want to do everything in their power to crush this guy so other people don't follow - lest they have to spend increasing amounts of time chasing THEM down and potentially tweaking game balance around them - which hurts the player base.
(Example: Fishing - just after launch, fishing got heavily nerfed because it was basically 'too good' and farmers could use it to just get a lot of items, sell them, and make money that way)-
Fishing was actually worthwhile, without bots, in the beta. These days its pretty much worthless. =/
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It's not just EULA violations. The copyright claim comes from the particular way MMO Glider works. It runs WoW is a sort of virtual machine; the copy of the game that's running in the VM is unauthorized, according to Blizzard. That doesn't seem like a particularly strong copyright claim, true, but it's not completely meritless either.
There are also claims of deliberate interference with the contracts between Blizzard and other players, and some other stuff I don't remember.-
"the copy of the game that's running in the VM is unauthorized" This is exactly what he takes an issue with:
"Blizzard permits its licensees to load the WoW game client software into RAM to play WoW. As such, Blizzard‘s licensees cannot violate Blizzard‘s exclusive rights under the Copyright Act to make copies simply by loading a copy of the program into RAM to play WoW"
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What about chinese farmers using bots! That's like 10x10x10!
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