Saturday, March 29th 2008
Blizzard Sues Michael Donnelly Over his WoW Glider Bot
Blizzard is suing Michael Donnelly, the creator of the MMO Glider program, which performs key tasks in the game automatically, such as fighting and other game actions. Both sides have submitted legal summaries to the US District Court in Arizona. Blizzard says Glide is a software bot which infringes the company's copyright and potentially damages the game. In its legal submission to the court last week, the firm said: "Blizzard's designs expectations are frustrated, and resources are allocated unevenly, when bots are introduced into the WoW universe, because bots spend far more time in-game than an ordinary player would and consume resources the entire time." Blizzard argued that Michael Donnelly's tool also infringed the End User License Agreement that all parties have to adhere to when playing the game. As result Blizzard wants Michael Donnelly to stop selling Glider and return all profits that he made from its sales. More than 100,000 copies of the tool have been sold for the time being. Mr Donnelly says his tool does not infringe Blizzard's copyright because no "copy" of the Warcraft game client software is ever made. The two parties are now awaiting a summary judgement in the case.
Source:
BBC NEWS
72 Comments on Blizzard Sues Michael Donnelly Over his WoW Glider Bot
If not, he should walk. If he did, he should pay.
Your, or anyone elses gaming experience has nothing to do with it.
But the Glider Bot has been out for a long time now. Many have been banned for using it and made some lame excuse to vent in the forums. That's how I come to know about it. Back then most pointed fingers, laughed then the threads would just die.
In any case the Terms of Use appears to be violated and could lead to civil suit even if no criminal action can be proven. IMO all Blizzard has to do is show that this bot caused harm to the Wow environment or something alone those lines IMO.
Needless to say i hate bots.
This lawsuit is old. really really old. a year and a half old.
Guess what it has amounted to so far? nothing.
Guess what it'll continue to amount to? nothing.
Sad that a year and a half old not-particularly-interesting lawsuit is just getting passed off as news. Oh well, free advertising for mmoglider i guess.
Move along...
As far as the illegality of mmoglider: there is effectively none. in fact, all of the illegality is on blizzard's end, due to their use of a tool known as "warden" which actively scans your RAM and potentially elsewhere to view what else is running on your computer. mmoglider in no way reverse engineers warden to subvert it; there is a bot that does that (ISXWarden) but a recent warden update broke that, and i'm not sure if it's been resolved yet. As far as how mmoglider works, it reads some information from the RAM that WoW is using in order to know where you are (it has its own x/y/z system), your health/mana/rage/energy, your target's name and stuff, and generally nearby objects (ie NPCs). From there, it essentially emulates keypresses and mouse usage and sends them to WoW. glider's avoidance of detection consists primarily of a rootkit in which it hides, and a tripwire system that lets it know if its being spied upon (basically keeps an eye on warden and makes sure to stay in the shadows)
While it'd be nice to see Blizzard get countersued for the trojan/spyware that is Warden, MDY Industries doesn't appear to be interested in doing so.
As for bots ruining the economy: not really... without them, prices would be significantly higher across the board for pretty much everything, and fluctuations would be significantly larger due to a smaller supply to the same demand.
In any case, reverse-engineering is legal. Writing software is legal. Violation of a ToS is not illegal.
And to the person that's going to reference the portion of the ToS where it says that you give permission to blizzard to snoop your computer with warden: i don't care. Clicking the accept button does not constitute a legal agreement and warden is still illegal.
Michael Donnelly just has to appear in court to win. There is no legal ground for Blizz to stand on. All it does is violate TOS, there is no copyrighted info in it's programming, it is his own work, so he can legally sell it, and if people are stupid enough to buy it, well then it's THEIR fault not his.
Circumvention of "Warden" maybe a violation of TOS, so again, NOT illegal.
This will get laughed out of court.
People just dont understand that -.-
I hope Michael wins tbh, my friend has used this, he HAD 6 accounts (and a uber pc), he had 6 level 70's by the time he stoped using it, and has never been told to stop using it by blizzard (even though hes been reported by goodie goodies? GM's do nothing)
This lawsuit fails.
Daniel
Daniel
I have no idéa what so ever as of how the bot works. But if it works like all other "bots", then it is scanning the server to retrieve info. This sort of sick sh*t belongs to people who's clan tag is "MPC|"....