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The Lawbringer: A primer on private servers
Pop law abounds in The Lawbringer, your weekly dose of WoW, the law, video games and the MMO genre. Running parallel to the games we love and enjoy is a world full of rules, regulations, pitfalls and traps. How about you hang out with us as we discuss some of the more esoteric aspects of the games we love to play? The history of private MMO servers goes back to the heyday of the massively multiplayer, when the concepts of these virtual worlds were still in their formative stages. World of Warcraft private servers, also called emulated servers, boast numbers in the thousands, usually running off donations and providing a limited amount of the full WoW experience due to the nature of the reverse server engineering and implementation needed to run the game. One thing is for certain, though: Using the game client to connect to an emulated server is against the World of Warcraft EULA and cuts into Blizzard's profits.
Blizzard awarded $88M from WoW private server lawsuit
Tweet var digg_url = 'http://digg.com/gaming_news/Blizzard_awarded_88M_from_WoW_private_server_lawsuit'; Private game servers are a controversial, often hushed topic in gaming circles. Some gamers enjoy the fee-free nature of private servers, while others use these forbidden realms to experience the MMO in a different state than the live game (for example, playing on a "classic" private server that doesn't allow for expansion packs). No matter what the reason, game companies tend to frown on such activities. Last week, Blizzard frowned at a particular private server and was awarded $88,000,000 for the effort. In October 2009, Blizzard filed a suit against Alyson Reeves, owner of Scapegaming and a private World of Warcraft server. Reeves was making a profit from the enterprise, using microtransactions on the server. The judge ruled that this was indeed copyright infringement against Blizzard, and ordered Scapegaming to pay $85.5M in statutory damages, $3M in inappropriate profits, and $63,600 in attorney fees. Reeves may appeal the suit at this point. As with the bnetd case, Blizzard is sending a clear message to people trying to mess with their code: don't. Scapegaming's Facebook page isn't exactly overflowing with support for the company, and we can imagine that many private server operators are thinking long and hard about whether the risk is worth it this week.
Blizzard files lawsuit against private server
We've talked about private servers on the site here before, but in case you haven't heard the term: they're unofficial servers, very much against WoW's Terms of Use, that are run by companies other than Blizzard. They're shady as get out -- some make you pay (and these are not people you'd ever want to give any credit card information to), some will delete or change characters on a regular basis, and many times they're created just so whoever's running them can mess around with GM powers, and cheat with any items they want. So you can see why Blizzard would want them shut down, and that's exactly what they're trying to do with this lawsuit filed in the California Central District Court against a company called "Scapegaming" that runs at least one private WoW server (and they've apparently been running microtransactions in-game -- selling in-game items for "donations" of money). The law firm working for Blizzard, Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal, also worked on the "Bnetd" case, which was another piece of unofficial server software that allowed players to play off of Blizzard's Battle.net setup. The complaint lists copyright infringement as the cause, which means they're probably using the same argument targeted at other private servers in the past. We'll keep an eye on this, but it's very likely Blizzard will win this one unopposed, and Scapegaming (or at least just their WoW server) will get shut down for good. Thanks, Phenom!
