An argument for why Blizzard winning is a bad thing.

When we got the news the other day that Blizzard had defeated MDY in their quest to stop WoWGlider, I personally thought it was a good thing. I have no love for those people who use external software to blatantly cheat and make a profit from a game, to the detriment of the company providing the game and it's normal users. But here is an argument against that.

Mike Masnick from Techdirt.com is trying to make the argument that this sets a bad precedent because Blizzard sold the game, they didn't license it. Because the judge ruled in Blizzard's favor, this apparently means that anyone can just declare a sale a license and that any modifications to that license can now be charged with copyright infringement. I think his argument is a bit weak, but here it is in his own words.

Basically, the court ruled that as long as a company selling you a product says it's only licensing you the product (even if every other aspect of the sale appears to be a sale), then it can set pretty much whatever rules it wants -- and if you violate them, charge you with violating copyright. This leads to some really tortured reasoning, because, as William Patry notes, nothing the guy did actually violates copyright. Instead, the court had to spend eight pages trying to piece together two separate parts of the license agreement to make a case that copyright was somehow violated.

Let's pick this apart a little, shall we? Firstly, you have to keep in mind that with World of Warcraft and any other MMO, there are two pieces of software: The client side of things, and the server side of things. Yes, Blizzard does sell the client side of the software. But it is useless to anyone without the server side of the software (which is made very apparent every major downtime!). Blizzard licenses the server side of it's software, as does all other major game companies.

Secondly, if I understand how WoWGlider worked correctly, what it was doing was taking the server side software, downloading it to the user's RAM, modifying it, and then trying to pass it back to the server as the real thing. Now, if trying to pass of a nearly identical copy as an original isn't copyright infringement (and fraud to boot!) I don't know what is.

You can read Mr. Masnick's full argument here.