'Warcraft' maker Blizzard Wins Copyright Cheating Lawsuit

by Rob Walker | July 15, 2008 at 11:42 am

1216 views | 0 Recommendations | 13 comments

Cheating is now a violation of copyright, according to a U.S. district judge who ruled for World of Warcraft maker Blizzard on Tuesday.

Blizzard was suing MDY Industries for their software program WoWGlider, which allows players to advance faster in level faster than they would normally be able to. This essentially lets players cheat and get gold and items long before they should.

If they were to then sell the items or gold online for real money (which happens quite a bit), they would be able to cheat the system and make good money doing it.

The US Judge ruled that because the 'bot' program is prohibited by Blizzard's license, the use of it infringes on Blizzard's copyright. However, he didn't go so far as to allow Blizzard to invoke the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

This means that liability for contributory and vicarious copyright infringement and tortious interference is completely off the table and will not go to the jury at trial in September, assuming that the parties do not settle before then. The only issue before the jury on these two claims will be damages. This is a major setback for MDY, which originally brought this action seeking a declaratory judgment that its WowGlider (now MMOGlider) bot software did not infringe Blizzard’s copyright.

A federal judge has sided with the maker of World of Warcraft in its attempt to shut down a third-party application that allows players to advance more quickly in the game than they normally could.
Blizzard Entertainment won a partial victory on Monday when a court granted its request for summary judgment on copyright infringement grounds. Blizzard is suing Michael Donnelly of MDY Industries, which sells the WoWGlider (or MMO Glider) utility for $25 and has sold some 100,000 copies.

U.S. District Judge David Campbell ruled that because using the Glider 'bot is prohibited by Blizzard's World of Warcraft license, "Glider users therefore infringe Blizzard's copyright."

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onlinedesign

at 17:40 on July 15th, 2008

Awesome report! About time the bot-makers got the Enchanted Glowing AXE!

koroth-98

at 17:59 on July 15th, 2008

What Glider does is allow a person to play the game without being present. It's a bot that will run your character around according to a set of scripts and the bot will kill monsters, loot them, and repeat, with no user intervention. It's entirely possible to gain many levels in the game while doing your gardening.

Bliz has implemented code in their game that tries to detect Glider usage and Bliz bans the accounts of users found running that program.

It's totally against the Blizzard TOS, however the idea that it violates any copyright law is not apparent in the above article. In fact, based on the above article it should be trivial for MDY to get the ruling overturned since the ruling seems to have nothing to do with copyright violation.

A violation of the Blizzard TOS is not a violation of US law, regardless of how much Bliz can afford to pay its attorneys. Assuming that MDY didn't jack any Bliz code or content then the idea that this is copyright infringement is very strange.

nisidio

at 19:37 on July 15th, 2008

I'm a hard core WoW fan I have played since game launch and I hate people that use cheats like wow glider or wow sharp. Good Job Blizz now just work on 5 Boxing and this game will be like the old days!

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JuneBs

at 22:12 on July 15th, 2008

Finding signs from Second Life during my trip through WOW!

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gensao

at 23:02 on July 15th, 2008

I used to play WoW, but still applaud Blizzard's efforts to prevent cheating on WoW.

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Maiyya

at 00:05 on July 16th, 2008

Great report! Its about time something was done about the Bot-makers! Well done Blizzard ;)

omgjasz

at 14:38 on July 16th, 2008

Thanks for publishing this!

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Legiones del Caos

at 22:23 on July 17th, 2008

Nice job! I'm playing WOW atm (well, me and my guild) and i can tell that bots were making the economy fall on warcraft realms; also, it is as annoying as receiving ads directly on your brain every day

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ravevamp

at 03:56 on July 18th, 2008

well this was arena gear i fell in love with dark evil looking its great. Now i do have thanks to the new patches and its great.

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fr4gus

at 18:26 on July 18th, 2008

This is great news. Cheating at any game is reproachable, the idea of any game is to play it as it is without any "help". Allow a program to level up you character makes no sense, since should be funny make your character grow with your own effort. If you don't like who WoW is (like thinks is too much grinding quests, etc) you should choos another game.

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scottyb (not verified)

at 11:20 on September 25th, 2008

I like cheating - I am being victimised

http://www.bdd.net.au

Darkedged

at 12:36 on November 23rd, 2008

According to this ruling, the makers of GameShark and the like had better watch out!

Non Believer (not verified)

at 02:13 on July 22nd, 2009

There is a lot of back patting going on here, but wrongly given. I would even go as far as to say some of the people that have posted here just don't play the game at all. I have been playing WoW from day one. In the time that I have been playing, I have reported thousands of Botters, gold farmers and scammers. I have never seen blizzard do anything to the offending player. I have even added people to my friends list to see if they are still botting in the same place, or if they have moved.

I can give an example, then I will explain why nothing is being done. Recently (within the last month) I came across a level 80 DK in a room inside a cave, where there was a named NPC that has a quick respawn do to the fact that it is part of a quest. The DK was standing directly in front of the mob simply spinning in a circle. As soon as the NPC spawned, the "player" would instantly hiut it and shortly after kill it. It did this repeatedly as I sat and watched. So I decided to get involved because I needed the mob to complete the quest. I feared the mob away so that the DK would have to chace it. Well, he never moved. He just stayed in one spot until I couldn't fear the mob abymore and it went back to him. So, I added this person to my friends list and reported him for botting. This "person" that I reported is still on the server, still in that cave and still doing the same exact thing.

Why isn't Blizzard doing anything about it? That's easy to answer. Because the people that are botting, selling gold and selling off the premade accounts are paying royalties blizzard.

The only reason these glider people got in trouble (no I don't support cheating in any way) is because it was cutting into blizzards purse. Nobody is going to be paying the gold farmers or the power leveling gooks if they can do it on there own with the help of a glider.