Blizzard vs. Glider Battle Resumes Next Week 384
trawg writes "You paid for it, you have the DVD in your drive and the box on the floor next to your desk, but do you own the game? That's the question the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals will rule on next week in the case between Blizzard, publisher of World of Warcraft, and MDY, publisher of the Glider bot. The Glider bot plays World of Warcraft for you, but Blizzard frowns on this, saying it voids the license agreement — you don't own the game, you only have a license to use it, and bots like Glider invalidate the license. The EFF has a good summary of the case as well. The case is due to be resumed on Monday."
The brief is interesting reading... (Score:3, Interesting)
The case opening brief makes for interesting reading.
There's one curious omission though (as near as I can tell, I only skimmed it). Ongoing payments.
Although the brief does mention that the game is available for retail purchase, or download, it makes no mention that an online account that requires an ongoing service charge is required in order to play. I suspect that Blizzard could argue that while the Glider author may not be circumventing the game client itself, it's making an illegal copy of the data stream for which the gamers pays an ongoing fee.
That said, I believe Blizzard is in the wrong on this one by going the legal route. I believe they have every right to modify their Warden software to scan for and ban accounts which use glider and other bot programs. They're just worried about losing revenue by banning customers, rather than by going directly to the source.
N.
Re:Still waiting for... (Score:4, Interesting)
TAEB is getting there. It already plays better than I do about 10% of the time.
Re:Wider implications? (Score:5, Interesting)
Does this case have much wider implications (as summary hints at) for the software licensing at large?
I haven't read the article yet, but it seems so.
It depends on the arguments being made. If the only argument is that because World of Warcraft is heavily dependent upon server-side interactions, that there is a leasing of the software to interact with that code.
To have the WoW binaries alone is fairly useless. Most games are not the same way.
Re:High Price of Success (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Blizzard is not completely guilty (Score:3, Interesting)
Well that's the key point. Does Blizzard own/rule the communal experience of the players? Is this position implicit or explicit, and precisely what are the boundaries of their authority and responsibility?
Good question. If I stop paying for my account, what do I get to keep?
Re:Blizzard is not completely guilty (Score:2, Interesting)
^^^^THIS IS 100% UNTRUE^^^^
Glider was made for people to play with their own emulated servers at home not on the blizzard servers!!!!!
If someone chooses to use glider on the blizzard servers blizzard has every right to remove their account. Glider is not arguing with that.
Glider is saying people who own the software can run glider with it!!!!
This is the exact same as making a bot that plays starcraft single player.
Re:Blizzard is not completely guilty (Score:5, Interesting)
^^^^THIS IS 100% UNTRUE^^^^
Glider was made for people to play with their own emulated servers at home not on the blizzard servers!!!!!
If someone chooses to use glider on the blizzard servers blizzard has every right to remove their account. Glider is not arguing with that.
Glider is saying people who own the software can run glider with it!!!!
This is the exact same as making a bot that plays starcraft single player.
This is why we have real lawyers fight this stuff in court. Your argument admits all the key parts necessary to prove liability on the part of MDY in inducing people to violate their contract with Blizzard.
The primary purpose of Glider is a violation of Blizzard's license agreement to use WoW.
Iffy on this one (Score:3, Interesting)
Hoping for a so-so verdict here. The court should allow anyone to modify software they've purchased in any way they wish.
However, the court should allow Blizzard to block connections from any modified software they detect (just like Apache disconnects clients which violate the HTTP protocol).
However, their should be recourse for false-positives to get their money back.
The consequence of this: (Score:5, Interesting)
I'll choose Microsoft for an example, although this sort of boilerplate is fairly standard. I quote from the license terms for Microsoft Office:
And many other restrictions.
So Microsoft can (successfully, in the Central District of California) sue you for copyright infringement the moment you load Office into RAM after: fixing their product for them; using it for any purpose that is "against the law" (which law?); borrowing it from anyone; buying a 2nd hand copy.
You think that's ridiculous? The U.S. District Court for the Central District of California doesn't think so. They think that the EULA gives Microsoft exactly that right.
This is not hyperbole or speculation; this is now established case law in that District (pending appeal).
You don't think Microsoft would ever exercise this power? OK, pick a different name then. Adobe [wikipedia.org]. Apple [i4u.com]. SCO [groklaw.net]. Choose your poison.
Re:I am not going to hold my breath... (Score:4, Interesting)
Fair enough on the tortuous interference, but that's small beer compared to the ownership and copyright issues.
MDY shouldn't have to make any argument regarding whether the RAM copy is "authorized" or not, since Title 117 disallows copyright claims against the owner [copyright.gov].
Note carefully that Blizzard's argument isn't against Title 117, it's that their EULA means that the purchaser doesn't "own" the copy that they bought, and so the enjoys no Title 117 protection. That's the significant precedent here.
MDY didn't make the argument at all, Blizzard made the argument that it was unauthorized... specifically for the points that you raised.
MDY is then required to answer as to how Blizzard is wrong, otherwise they stipulate to the claim.
This raises the question: can a person in possession of a piece of software, make a copy necessary for its use, when such use is in violation of the EULA?
Re:I like living in the future. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Still waiting for... (Score:3, Interesting)
>I am not trying to claim that these games will ever be as "successful" (read: profitable) as World of Warcraft, but I would say they far more closely approach video-games-as-art.
I'm not so sure, there's a depth of emotion in WoW that they lack... they are purely intellectual leisure... WoW gets you emotionally involved.
Example - when I did the Pamela Redpath questline... that's when I started to genuinely HATE Arthas... quite an extreme emotion to be feeling for a fictional character. I wanted to cry over that little girl. Now THAT is art.
Glider is fun (Score:3, Interesting)
Running Glider was one of the most entertaining things I did while playing. Glider comes with default behavior for every class, but you can develop your own in C#. I ended up writing some code for my druid to be a "Healbot", basically causing my character to run around and heal nearby allies.
It was quite simple - it would search for nearby players and try to stay in the middle of everyone. It would throw heals over time on anyone within range that was slightly injured, and cast big heals on people taking a lot of damage. I used it to farm honor in the PVP battlegrounds. After letting it run for hours, I'd take a look at the chat log and see lots of tells from people thanking me (it) for heals. Never once saw a comment calling it out as a bot. The mod I used to queue battlegrounds took screenshots of the match results, and many times my bot was #1 on healing (often by a large margin).
It was fun tweaking all the settings, by the time I maxed out on honor the code was pretty robust. I ended up modifying it a bit to follow around specific people (awesome for power leveling).
Re:I am not going to hold my breath... (Score:2, Interesting)
Blizzard has stated that any piece of input hardware that emulates another piece of hardware is fine provided that every hardware command sent to the game is backed by a direct (not delayed) human interaction. Such mapping from human interaction to input also needs to be consistent. You may map more than one button to a single action, you may multi-box as much as you like. You may not using "auto fire" sytle buttons, as that causes an input without direct human interaction, or even one that presses a button 5 seconds after you press one on the keyboard. You may not use programmable "combo"s that press a series of keys in sequence by you hitting a single key several times.
Re:Glider is fun (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Still waiting for... (Score:3, Interesting)
TAEB developer here. Unfortunately, none of us have been working on TAEB in the last year or so; Real Life keeps getting in the way.
The real problems with building a NetHack bot are dealing with all the special cases; even parsing the screen is nontrivial. You can come up with a few simple rules that handle a lot of situations in the game, but there are always going to be hundreds of exceptions that need handling of their own. In my TAEB AI, TAEB::AI::Planar, I try to handle this to some extent by noticing that actions are failing and not repeating them, but there's only so much you can do before you have to specialcase everything by hand.
You can read more about TAEB development, and some other things related to NetHack automation on the TAEB blog: http://taeb-blog.sartak.org/ [sartak.org]. Unfortunately, it could probably do with a few more posts. Hopefully I'll get back to TAEBing some time later, or maybe someone else will take up the slack.