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Former GM sues over baby murloc voice and song
A bit of an odd story has been floating around the WoW community today, revolving around former GM Amanda Lewis and her claims against Blizzard for alleged copyright infringement and voice misappropriation. Lewis claims that Blizzard, without permission, used her voice and songs in creating the baby murlocs, the adorable squeaky versions of the terrifying fish-man abominations. The complaint seeks damages for the misuse of her works. While we don't have much more information other than the bit that's been reported, one of the key factors could be the clauses in her contract governing what happens to things employees create while on the job. Many companies have such invention policies in place to capitalize on employees' ideas and give them a place to go with said ideas to potentially make them real. The interesting part of the complaint -- and for me, the most heartwarming, because you could tell a lawyer wrote it -- is that Lewis is claiming the baby murloc has become the de facto mascot of World of Warcraft. What do you guys think? When I think Warcraft, I think orcs, humans, war, yadda yadda -- not baby murlocs. If you're interested in a bit more of an in-depth analysis, look forward to my Lawbringer column next week. Here's hoping for a quick settlement or summary judgmgrlrglrglrlglgglrrrllll.
Blizzard's 2008 Holiday card
The eagle-eyed among you will have caught a glimpse of this yesterday, on the LLS charity post (and how awesome is it that all that money is raised by WoW players?), but here's the whole thing in all of its glory, thanks to the OC Register's Blizzard Blog: Blizzard's holiday art for the year, drawn by Samwise as usual. Looks like the villians of Starcraft, Warcraft and Diablo are celebrating in their own way as well.Unfortunately this is as big a version as we've found so far -- usually, Blizzard releases the art as a wallpaper in their gallery (here's the art from last year), but there's no sign of this one yet. It's too bad -- I especially like Arthas and Illy D trying to get the time of day from Kerrigan and having no luck at all. Hopefully we'll see it in a much larger version on Blizzard's site soon, but in the meantime, happy holidays from Blizzard!Update: Hehut found a slightly better (as in, "not a photograph") version over on Samwise's site.
Send us your Halloween costumes!
Dressing up like something WoW-related for Halloween this year? Take a picture and send it to our tips line, because we'd love to see it! Whether you nabbed one of Blizzard's official costumes, worked a long time on a Tauren costume, or are just gluing some ears on and calling yourself a Night Elf, we'd love to take a look at what you're dressing up as, and we're sure our readers do, too. We'll collect all the pictures together and post them tomorrow, so we can check out what WoW fans are pretending to be this Halloween.And if you need some inspiration, here's all of our costume galleries from the past two BlizzCons and the results of last year's ingame contest. Sure, you probably can't beat that girl on the turtle (or can you?), but as the couple and their adorable baby Murloc above show (they're from Blizzard's official gallery from last year), even a little bit of costume goes a long way.%Gallery-9805%%Gallery-34205%%Gallery-5529%
