Saturday, June 21, 2008

Blizzard not doing so well against MDY

If you think that the subject area of my blog is narrow, you should see Virtually Blind, a blog that only discussed the legal aspects of virtual worlds. Sid67 alerted me to their latest news about the Blizzard vs. MDY (WoW Glider) lawsuit. Apparently Public Knowledge, a digital rights advocacy group, intervened as "friend of the court", blasting Blizzard's claim that modifying a copy of WoW in the RAM is a copyright infringement. And the judge ordered Blizzard to respond, which means he doesn't simply accept Blizzard's claim as is.

This is interesting, because it not only is important for Blizzard's lawsuit, but for the rights of modders and writers of addons everywhere. If modifying the copy in the RAM is a copyright infringement, game copies can go after creators of mods they don't like for some reason. Hey, they could even sue you if you use some cheat program to modify a running program. So while I'm not a fan of bot software, I think it would be good if a court set rules on how far game companies can restrict what players can do with their games.

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