World of Warcraft at Ten Ton Hammer

A YouTube video ostensibly posted by Glider developers confirmed that the biggest threat to players running Glider wasn’t detection by Blizzard, but being reported by other players. But while Glider easily evaded WoW developers, it couldn’t escape Blizzard’s legal team.

On March 10th, 2009, MDY lost a critical first round legal battle when a US district court judge ruled against Glider’s creator for wrongful interference in the contract between Blizzard and WoW players, copyright infringement, and Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) violations. Blizzard was awarded a permanent injunction (meaning MDY cannot continue to sell or support WoW Glider) plus $6.5 million in damages, pending appeal.

What made Blizzard v. MDY something of a landmark case in digital rights law wasn’t the broad interpretation of the notoriously muddled doctrine surrounding copyright infringement. Plus, it marked the first time that a US court ruled on the injurious nature of a third-party bot program.

WoW is said to be so accessible, it almost plays itself.

As for Blizzard’s copyright claims, that the court ruled that Glider knowingly aids players in breaching the WoW End User License Agreement (EULA) seemed to hang on something of a technicality: that Glider makes an illicit copy of the game in RAM to avoid detection by WoW’s native anti-cheat program, Warden [source]. Previously it was assumed that online gamers purchased the software and licensed the service (see the SWGemu discussion below, as an example). Blizzard v. MDY not only took what was, to many gamers, a fairly laughable document extraordinarily seriously, it allowed Blizzard to adjust the scope of the license to dictate how the game runs on your machine.

The court also found MDY liable for harmful ("tortious") interference in the EULA between Blizzard and the players. “The Court found MDY and Donnelly’s conduct to be improper because (1) they profit from the sale of Glider knowing that its use constitutes a direct breach of Blizzard’s legitimate and substantial contract rights, (2) their interference causes Blizzard to lose customers and revenue, and (3) the use of Glider by WoW users upsets the carefully balanced competitive environment of WoW.”

What follows this ruling is anyone’s guess, but MDY’s chances on appeal seem pretty bleak. From the judgment, “MDY and Donnelly... would likely be put out of business by the permanent injunction. Even if the permanent injunction ultimately is eliminated on appeal, MDY and Donnelly likely will have lost all of their market share to competitors during the duration of the appeal and will be unable to regain their business.” As it stands, WoW Glider (now MMO Glider) has suspended operations.

As for gamers, this is something of a pyrrhic victory. Glider is in all probability eliminated from WoW, yes, but the majority of botters - small-scale developers not out for retail success but as a link in the supply chain (such as powerlevelers and goldfarmers) and certainly those bot developers without deep pockets will likely stay under the radar.

Clearly the most interesting aspect of the ruling was its almost reverent regard of Blizzard’s EULA. While the most paranoid among us might fear a “hand over your firstborn” clause in the small print of future EULAs, the ramifications of this ruling, if upheld, is as one commentator noted, “a bit disturbing.” For example, could you write a EULA that stipulates that a game could only be played on a machine running Nvidia GPUs? Could a EULA trump the fair-use doctrine and stretch copyright infringement to prevent unflattering screenshots from being posted on third-party sites, or prevent your game from being criticized on third-party forums on the basis that ad-supported forum sites are making money off of defaming your game? Other laws and precedents would weigh in on these rather extreme examples, of course, but time will tell if this case is as precedent-shaping as it seems to be.

Hacking to Restore

A Q&A with SWGemu developer Ramsey

SWGemu developers want to set back the Star Wars Galaxies to April 2005, then see where the game takes them

We've spent a lot of time looking at ways gamers have behaved badly, but to wrap things up on a more positive note, let's look at an upstart project that seeks to hack and reverse engineer Star Wars Galaxies to undo what they view as the widespread damage of several unpopular patches.

Private servers have a long history dating back to the days of MUDs and BBSs, when rulesets for a particular game might differ from one server. Only when Ultima Online introduced the mainstream to a public Internet server did private servers start to develop a seedy reputation as wretched hives of cheaters and freebooters. One volunteer team had a different goal, however: to restore what they felt was the long lost, pre-Combat Upgrade glory of their favorite MMORPG. Ten Ton Hammer asked one of the founding members of the project, Ramsey, to share a bit of the SWGemu story and why this particular project doesn’t share the same stigma with other private server projects.

Ten Ton Hammer: How did the project begin? Who were the key developers in the early days, and how soon after the Combat Upgrade (CU) did you know that you wanted to make SWGEmu a reality?

Ramsey: I was involved with various emulation projects and was asked to take a look at Star Wars Galaxies in December of 2004. I have never played the game on an SOE server even during the PreCU, which wasn't so much of a problem for the research/code I was reponsible for. In the beginning, a lot of time an effort was spent on research by Ultyma, Xenozephyr, and myself. When we started to write the actual code for our current software, 'Oru' and 'TheAnswer' spearheaded the underlying architecture (called 'Engine3'). SWGEmu has been surrounded by a lot of passionate, talented, developers that not only care about restoring the great MMO - but for paving the way to future projects.

The initial vision was not to protest the changes SOE made to the game - it was simply a hobby. We never realized how big the project was until people like John Smedley (President of SOE) openly stated the impossibility of us ever achieving our goal (late 2006). What has kept us together for so many years is not fueled by hate for SOE. We love doing what we do and building an MMO that the community wants to play.