If you’re going to suggest “Not stealing things”, could you try making something like UOWoW, which is heads and tails above actual WoW in terms of awesomeness?
 
kthx.

Or you could probably buy a well-geared WoW account for $300.

Lum, your comment box is giving an error on first attempt to post (works pressing it a second time), plus mungs / removes some of the content.

@Mark: Competing with one’s business, even with one’s own product, is protected by a wide variety of laws. Re-using a product you’ve purchased is a protected right in most countries, including the U.S..
 
Even the DMCA, is not designed for the purpose of protecting against competition. There’s an exception for reverse-engineering for instance to allow for “interoperability”. You could argue it breaks Blizzard’s EULA, but their recourse there is mostly to ban you from their own servers. Not everything in a EULA is automatically a legal imperative, laws still trump license agreements in most cases.
 
So the argument that competing with Blizzard is the sticky point? Um, no. It’s the outright theft and the promotion of piracy (more theft).
 

@Mark: That’s an odd / disturbing point for me, because I’d agree that most people might now think that was common sense. It certainly wouldn’t have been common sense just a few years ago.
 
The assumption that competition should be protected by not allowing anyone else to leverage your product– that’s just bizarre and contrary to most of the laws and expectations prior to the way companies have misused / abused the DMCA.
 
Now, nobody bats an eye when cell phones get locked down, or some kid gets arrested for modding an XBox. Only in the U.S. mind you.
 
It’s stifling innovation. The proficiency of coders in eastern Europe makes that clear. Protected business is not good business, it creates monolithic corporate culture.
 
If that’s the common sense now, oh geez, attitudes need to change.
 

If I purchase a car and then figure out how to repair it myself, it goes far beyond re-use.
 
Make no mistake, car companies tried *very* hard to make it illegal for third parties to compete with their business.  The courts are still playing catchup with software, but in the long run they’ll align with Rog.
 
So what if the EULA says you can’t use your copy of WoW with unapproved servers?  If car manufacturers could, I assure you they’d have a EULA that stated that you can’t use unapproved repair facilities.  And then sue unapproved repair facilities for facilitating breach of contract.  The fact car manufacturers can’t is a sign that the current state of affairs is a result of a technically unsophisticated court.
 
All this is beside the point, however. I suspect, as the other commentators point out, this pirate server was not a clean-room paragon of virtue.  If they had built a grey server cleanly, without using WoWs server side assets, it would make for a more interesting legal case.  (They’d still be sued out of existence in the current legal environment, mind you, but I’d be able to actually defend them.)
 
MMORPG operators should not be overly scared of grey shards.  You are a service provider.  If you can’t provide the best service when you control both the client and have a practically infinite tech advantage, well, you really don’t deserve to be in service.

I’m sure the legal (and sensical) thought is that for a game that is *exclusively* online your subscription (and box costs) are for the right to play the game – not rights to any specific content. You’re not buying a game with an online component or a single-player game or an iPhone.
 
The car analogy is flawed – You’re not buying an item that just so happens to have services attached or wildly available optional-extras. You’re buying access to a service. That’s also the reason I included the iPhone into the list. The phone, the device itself, is yours. Period. AT&T has no right whatsoever to support you should you jailbreak/unlock your phone, but they also have no right to stop you from doing so. If AT&T bans your handset from their network you either buy a new one or hope your T-Mobile SIM works.
 
The battle.net cases legitimately should go against Blizzard. This is not the same can of tuna by any reasonable standard. While I agree that the courts will take some time to catch up to the realities of SaaS operations I don’t agree that they’re going to start ruling that outright left is a fair-use. I CAN see them allowing purely private endeavors that are both unavailable to the public and make no attempt to charge fees.

@Merusk: You missed the point and / or didn’t read. Allow me to simplify it:
1. Stealing and reselling Copyrighted material is (and should be) illegal.
2. Stealing customers, even by leveraging their own product is not illegal and perfectly ethical IMHO.
The reason I bring this up is that some people seem to think Blizzard won this case on #2.
 

Isn’t the art, music, voice-acting and text in WoW all copyrighted? Aren’t the lines of code themselves copyrighted? How can you take them and reuse them? I buy a book, and I own it, but that doesn’t give me the right to make copies of it and distribute it. That’s been established.
 
I’ll be very surprised if the courts ever come down on the side of these private servers if for nothing else than it will essentially destroy the business model. No one will make MMO games for profit if anyone who buys the game can reverse engineer it and run their own servers.

They didn’t just set up a private server, they made $3M from it. Did anyone read that much? This wasn’t some homegrown fun server for a few friends. Someone made serious cash based on Blizzards work, without Blizzard’s authorization, and didn’t share any of the profit with Blizzard.
 
Since people who played on this service paid $3M to do so, it’s very easy to extrapolate that Blizzard might have been paid some of those monies had this server not existed.
 
As to this: “how is it somehow immoral to write a program that implements a particular protocol so that people can play a game *they already paid you for* without having to pay you a subscription fee?”
 
The game was never offered as a standalone game. You don’t buy WoW with the idea that you pay for the boxed game and never have to pay another cent. It’s clearly marked on the box that it’s a subscription game, and in the EULA, etc. They have a support staff. Make updates to the game. Maintain community reps. Message boards. Etc. Blizzard spends tens of millions each year supporting WoW and never once was it designed to be a game you buy and play without a subscription.
 
Finally, if these people don’t want to be called “thieves” as you say, why don’t they create their own art, text quest, voice-overs, etc.? Instead you think it’s just fine that they spend $50 to buy a game that cost tens of millions to develop and then set up their own server to run it? Does that really seem just to you? Does it seem ethical?
 
 

I like to think it’s simple ignorance rather than wanton malice. The concept of respecting the rights of intellectual property is not implicit to human nature. It needs to be learned. Who teaches people this? The schools? Maybe at a college/university level. It’s little wonder that software piracy is as prevalent as it is.

Well, the $85 million award is so large because the defendant did not bother to show and actually contest the amount, that is argue that the damage to Blizzard do not amount to $85 million.

When you win by no-show, you can just about write your own amount to a blank check. Whether you can collect on it is another matter altogether. BTW, Allison Rees is most probably just a front (probably the name of a girlfriend) for the real perps. No way they are going to collect a cent from anyone.

“The history of copyright law starts with early privileges and monopolies granted to printers of books. The British Statute of Anne 1709, full title “An Act for the Encouragement of Learning, by vesting the Copies of Printed Books in the Authors or purchasers of such Copies, during the Times therein mentioned”, was the first copyright statute.”

So before 1709 there was only ‘amateur’ shit being written eh Stabs?

Delrum:

I don’t understand why everyone things this verdict was a good thing.88 million?  That’s enough to ruin someone – for life.I find it very bi-polar of our country that when McDonalds is told to pay a few million to a woman who got burned (3rd degree) due to them serving coffee so hot it melted through a cup – (and mind you – the penalty was less than one day of *profit* from said coffee) everyone seems to blame ‘the corrupt judicial system’ and lawyers and on and on.But a company can sue someone for downloading some songs or running a fake wow server and millions of dollars of damages are somehow ‘ok’.How backasswards is that?  I get this person was wrong – I get they should have to give up any profit – that’s fair.  Some kind of fine is fair also – but 88 million?  Unless they do something else illegal – anything more than 30-50 thousand (the price of a *very* nice car for most people) seems very excessive.  

You think the coffee MELTED through the cup?

It may also point out that Blizzard could make even more money by lowering the subscription price and having more RMT items available.

Which is why $200 per person is flawed. It assumes every single person using the pirated item would have payed for the original, but that is false on it’s face: if they wanted the original they would have paid for it. For some reason, whether the price was too high, or whether they wanted differnet services (rmt) theywent with the pirate. Not all of them would have had accounts at Blizzard if the pirate didn’t exist.

Oh also and in a way $88 million (infinity squared?) isn’t so much a “crippling blow” rather the most rare and coveted WoW achievment that nobody else has. Scapegaming is among the best players in the world.

In certain circles it could guarantee employment. Granted like many game achievments what’s that actually worth? but still

Viz:

JuJutsu:
“The history of copyright law starts with early privileges and monopolies granted to printers of books. The British Statute of Anne 1709, full title “An Act for the Encouragement of Learning, by vesting the Copies of Printed Books in the Authors or purchasers of such Copies, during the Times therein mentioned”, was the first copyright statute.”So before 1709 there was only ‘amateur’ shit being written eh Stabs?

There was non-amateur shit being written, but the STEALING of said non-amateur shit was a rampant problem (and continued to be afterwards; the mere fact of a statute doesn’t make the problem go away).

I won’t deny the problem. I just find the notion that if you don’t do it for the money it’s worthless irritating and the notion that if it’s not paid for it won’t get done irritating and…I guess ill-informed is the polite way to put it.

The judge should fine according to the copyright law, a max of “$250,000 or twice the monetary gain or loss”, and it should be only once (for the server). The judge should not fine per people, because those fine should be on the subscribers.

And this is another example of how judges can be unfair. In the ink maker case (where printer manufacturers made printers for cheap and depend on ink for revenue, and some other guy come in and figure out how to make the inks and sell them for cheap, basically the same as making a private server), the judge ruled against the printer manufactures.

So why is it OK to rip off printer manufactures and not OK to rip off software companies? It give me a feeling that the law can be twisted by judges.

Rog, they don’t own the art assets, and they aren’t licensed to use the world of warcraft name. That alone is enough to file a judgement.

Blizzard has the right to control who makes money off their intellectual property. This is to ensure quality, as well as prevent people from flooding the market with buggy copies to make a quick buck off them. It’s because they spent the time and money to make it in the first place.

What private servers do is like some fan company releasing their own version of Microsoft Word by ripping off all the UI, reverse engineering what they can’t, and offering it under the Microsoft name.

@Rog:

Write an unauthorized sequel to the Harry Potter novels. See how far you get trying to publish it. Enjoy the lawsuits if you do.

“I don’t understand! I wrote every word of my book! It’s all my creation! Why does the copyright holder expect control over their IP? I paid for those books!”

I am always fascinated by the notion (which seems to thrive on discussion boards) that Law is open to individual interpretation – no bothersome legal training or knowledge required!

@Scott

Server emulators seem, to me, less like writing a sequel to Harry Potter and more like writing a book which says “Read the 5th, 10th and 18th words from Harry Potter Book 1 Page 10″ and then made an entire story out of it.

The question is, when I buy the box am I buying the book (client/software) or simply a limited right to use the software some times in some cases if I pay them money and they don’t go bankrupt or cancel the service?

Of course, again, in this case they blatantly ripped off the IP and Blizzard had every right to come down on them. I’m thinking in the theoretical sense where they’re using the WoW client without using Blizzards’ IP (such as Shards Of Dalaya, mentioned above).

@Scott Jennings: Well I’m about done on this because my point is getting lost in the “OMG are you supporting these guys?” kind of reaction. I’m not supporting these guys, but one drastic end of a scale doesn’t justify another.

That and well, it just goes in circles arguing the finer points.

Like: In what way is quoting the entire book mean that there shouldn’t be any fair protection for a client – server scenario?

I’ve already agreed, if they’re reproducing the full game or even just a single full quest from the server-side, that’s clearly not legal (nor cool).

As for current Copyright law, you’re not actually talking about Copyright law, you’re talking about DMCA takedown notices. Not. The. Same. Thing. At all. You can issue a takedown notice with no standing on the law whatsoever and most ISPs would obey it, whether they’re obliged to or not. Google’s YouTube practices in regards to that are pretty much automated.

Fair usage does include commercial applications, you’re wrong there as well. In different regards as to Copyright and Trademark. Good lord, have you not read the comments, examples have already been given.

Certainly parody has many commercial applications. That’s just the most obvious one.

News is another.

Parts and repairs.

Derivative works of merit.

Shall I go on? I could get specific to things like Machinama.

Aside from the fact that the DMCA is entirely U.S. centric, most of those takedown notices (and certainly the Downfall ones) would not hold up in court. It’s just a matter of an expensive chilling effect. Same diff for some things in reality, but still I don’t see how a legally dubious practice (no matter how successful) applies.

@VPellen: They did do something illegal and wrong though.

1. They copied all of the quest text and reproduced the content from WoW’s servers, basically anything in the standard game that wasn’t on the client. If (like me) you even accept that the client is in the hands of the player, you still have to accept that cut-and-pasting quest text is a lot like Lum’s example above of quoting an entire book (why he’s arguing that to me, is beyond me tho).

They broke the EULA, which isn’t such a big infringing issue in the first place, for most users it would mean a ban but in combination with charging for their server and the piracy issues, the judge took a pretty dim view of that.

They did facilitate piracy, as custom installs of WoW were readily available for their servers, complete with instructions on getting the latest patches. Any player willfully breaking the EULA wouldn’t then have a right to later patches as that’s Copyright material they’ve not paid for access to.

I haven’t read the full court documents yet but I think that about sums up this case.

2 quick points regarding the history of copyright.

1) Modern methods of disseminating entertainment really bear no relation to early eighteenth century methods. They used printing presses with hand carved letters and manual typesetting.

2) Professional entertainers existed using the available structures of the time. Guilds had a monopoly on printing so if you wrote a book and were in good standing with the guild they might refuse someone else’s request to print off 500 copies. Shakespeare had his own theatre and his plays were written specifically for the Globe. Sure another theatre could have stolen his work but audiences would have already seen the play.

Most artistic works were created for nobles and monarchs under the patronage system. Do you really want to see our culture revert to a system that would be basically stalking Bill Gates and asking “magnificent statue of you, sir?” “Look great outside the White House it would. sir!” “Heroic pose, sir?”