Stealing intellectual property

Be it piracy of games, music, or movies over the internet, be it the discussion of virtual property rights, there is a heated debate on intellectual property going on. In most cases the users don't consider stealing intellectual property as a crime, while the industry is working very hard to criminalize it. But what if it is the industry that is stealing from the users?

I just uninstalled two addons for World of Warcraft, Selfcast and Scrolling Combat Text. I used both of them for a long time, but now patch 1.12 added their functionality to the standard user interface. And these are just the last two of a loooooong list. From additional hotkey buttons to raid ready checks, the current World of Warcraft interface contains a lot of ideas that were originally the intellectual property of the addon creators. And Blizzard just stole them, there is no record of Blizzard ever paying anything, or even just giving somebody credit for an user interface improvement idea.

Of course there are advantages of having certain improvements in the standard interface, easily available for everybody, especially improvements that make characters somewhat more efficient. You can easily argue that a character using Selfcast has a tiny advantage over somebody not using it in PvP, as you don't lose valuable split seconds for changing targets. I certainly wouldn't mind WoW introducing the Decursive functionality into the standard interface, as the difference in time it takes to dispell a debuff on a whole raid with and without Decursive isn't even funny any more.

Nevertheless I find it problematic when well known addon developers suddenly realize that the addon they worked on for many hours is suddenly obsolete, its functionality having been stolen by Blizzard, without any recognition for the authors. One sure has the impression that Blizzard monitors what addons are being used, and always steals the most popular ideas. Of course Blizzard probably is using their own code, and isn't stealing the code from the independant developers. But with something like scrolling combat text it becomes hard to argue that Blizzard came up with that idea by themselves, it is so obviously copying the functionality of the addon. Not even giving the addon writers a pat on the back is not a way to treat people who put so much work into improving your product.