The article's pretty short, and quite interesting. It's packed with neat info about the state of software sales, EULAs, etc..

If you were interested enough to click on the comments link for this story, you're interested enough to click over to the main article. :)

The link I'm referring to is:
http://www.publicknowledge.org/node/1546

It makes Blizzard's claim of copyright infringement out to be quite plainly ludicrous. So why would they bother? Well, there's also this part:

"There’s a big legal difference between what happens when you breach a contract and when you infringe copyright. Generally speaking, the idea with contract remedies is that if you break a contract, you have to pay the other person what they’ve lost due to the breach. In copyright infringement, though, you pay a minimum of $750 per infringed work, and up to $150,000 for willful damages, no matter how little the copyright holder has lost."

@ Wolfkin

Mensrea's point is that the copying does constitute copyright infringement, since it's being done without express consent of the author. The equivalent would be if a journalist gained permission to quote a large part of a book in their column (not infringing copyright) as opposed to doing so without any (now infringing copyright).

from my understanding of how glider works, it doesn't even breach the EULA of WoW, let alone copyright law. At best it may breach things like the DMCA, but even then it's not clear cut. As much as it pains me to say it, it looks more like blizzard are trying to force glide in to submission, rather than legally aiming for what's right.

I don't agree with what glide does, but if what it does is within the realms of law, and EULAs i would advise blizzard to ignore it, and stop drawing media attention to this product, and maybe look at making its use obsolete? How?

I think glide's main use to a certain type of person, is to allow them to level alts, where they don't want to run through the same content again, and again. other MMOs have the ability where, once you have a character of a certain level, you can create another one of the same level, thus nullifying the whole level grind, add to this a character creation cap to limit how many alts created this way, and you have a flexible way of allowing players to try out new classes, and non-low level game content.

Look at what blizz has tried to do to halt the need for farmed gold? honor, reputation, decent gear in the expansion, gear bought through BoP badges. there's less emphasis on gold, and in the same way there needs to be less emphasis on the low level grind for alts. 2.3 was a nice start, but it needs more.

jrb, I personally know of no game that allows you to do this. Examples are needed, methinks.

@JRB
Are you serious? Have you looked at the EULA. Using a program to automate actions is most definitely breaking the EULA.

@ onetrueping

Amazing engine - an old TSR ruleset allowed the player to keep a certain % of exp overall - which got used on new characters. But that was a tabletop game.

That'd never fly. For starters, they'd have to sue the users of glider for harassment -- MDY is just writing software, which has been ruled first amendment expression. You don't sue Apple because some one is prank calling you from their iPhone all night. Second, a WoW player could really never harass blizzard with blizzard's own service... the mere fact that Blizzard can ban their account precludes it.

Copyright infringement would never fly, either. However, they did continue to distribute the product. Also, harassment is more defaming to glider.

Copyright infringement may still fly. "Harassment" would get laughed out of court. Distributing a product that someone doesn't like isn't harassment. Distributing a product that others use to harass someone isn't harassment.

As for what's more "defaming" to Glider (wtf?), who cares? It'd be "more defaming" if they accused them of murder... so maybe they should do that? Besides, a successful harassment claim wouldn't bring in anywhere NEAR the damages that copyright infringement would... and that's in the nearly impossible scenario that they could get harassment to stick.

There's just not a single instance of harassment going on here whatsoever.

There isn't a single case of copyright infringement here, either. The point of me suggesting harassment was ridiculing the fact that the word is thrown out over nothing, in the most ridiculous situations, as is the case here. Come on, a lawsuit over cheating in a game?

When the cheating eliminates hours played, and hours played can be directly translated to dollars, then yes, a lawsuit is understandable.

L2fullyquote:

"For Blizzard's part, they claim that making a copy in RAM of the game's information constitutes copyright infringement, [but again, that's only because Glider is misusing those RAM files] -- every user everywhere needs to copy parts of the game into RAM in order to run it."

bracketed for emphasis. I think Mike covered your little comment there, mensrea.

For my part, I would defend Blizzard's right to control the content of their games, and even (within reason) the manner in which they're played. It does seem that the copyright thing is part of the "everything but the kitchen sink" approach to this lawsuit, and IANAL, but I wouldn't be surprised to see that dropped in the final calculus. Besides, do we really need ANOTHER legal copyright controversy up in this hizzy? I'd hate to see blizzard mentioned in the same breath as the RIAAs of the world.

What "every user everywhere has to do" is completely irrelevant to the copyright claim because the claim itself presupposes that some users (those following the ToS) are licensed and some (those using Glider) are not.

The paragraph (which you, ironically, didn't fully quote) goes something like this: "Blizzard's CI claim is bogus. They're just trying to scare people. Blizzard says X. That's not right, though, because of Y -- Z."

Where 'Y' is a misrepresentation of Blizzard's argument and 'Z' is something that's not related in any way, shape, or form to the validity of either 'X' or 'Y'.

so if i write a program that disables Windows Genuine Advantage and sell it, i'm violating copyright?

bullshit, i say! a breach of the terms of service, certainly, but i'm not stealing someone else's code for profit - merely creating something that interacts with it. the car, not the road, in other words.

this is, indeed, an extremely dangerous precedent to set. imagine a world where Windows programs which microsoft does not specifically approve constitute copyright infringement.

i love blizzard... but they had better lose this lawsuit.

The primary effect of the DMCA is to make code into law. If you're doing something that the code doesn't allow you to do, you're circumventing the code, and therefore automatically breaking the law.

This will most likely be their core argument, but it's weak. It's weak because there's nothing to circumvent; the game is plainly in memory, and Glider manipulates it in the same way a player would. Now, just to clarify, Glider isn't a player, but to a computer there's no difference, and therefore there's no circumvention and no real DMCA claim.

But, IANAL, so take that with a grain of salt.