If Blizzard prevails in the case of World of Warcraft cheating software, licensing could become more complex.
Computer games are harmless fun, right? You get home after a hard day running your gazillion-seat network and, after stealing a few cars and blowing stuff up in GTA4, you have depressurized and you’re ready for your next bout in the salt mines. All good, harmless fun.
Now, as an IT guy you know you don’t own that software you paid for; you license it. That license is a contract that permits or disallows whatever it is that the publisher of the software pleases. And here’s the deal: If you don’t agree to the terms of the license then you can’t legally use the software. If you do agree, well, you have to abide by those terms.
The actual terms of software licenses are a big deal in the enterprise IT world as the constraints they impose could limit the return on investment from an application, make its management difficult or impossible, or, because of any of a score of other gotchas, make your life more difficult than it already is.
So it is from the quagmire that is software licensing that I have a great example of how the sturm und drang of the world outside of IT has the potential to make your professional life more difficult. And it all starts with a game: World of Warcraft (WoW, published by Blizzard Entertainment. Should you have been lured into this time sink you will have agreed to a license that says, amongst many other legalistic perambulations, that you can’t use any kind of automation to play the game.
Those of you who haven’t paid attention to Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs) will probably be wondering why someone would want the game played for them and why the publisher would want to restrict that. The answer, my friend, is money.
With around 10 million subscribers who have put in a lot of effort to advance in WoW, anything that upsets the intended order of things is obviously not going to be welcome by Blizzard Entertainment. The reasoning is simple: if people find ways to advance more quickly or gain more advantage than others without putting in the work, it makes the game less appealing so new users might not sign up and longtime players might leave, making the service less profitable.
So it was that Blizzard decided to take to court Michael Donnelly, the creator of an application called MMO Glider that enables unattended game play. This software quite obviously aids users in violating the Blizzard End User License Agreement. And the fact that Donnelly is promoting his service to customers, encouraging them to cheat, is quite clearly unethical but not, as I understand it, actually illegal.
Not to be deterred, Blizzard argues that what Donnelly is doing is illegal because the use of Glider constitutes copyright infringement and that Donnelly is contributing to that infringement.
To define this as a copyright issue is a stretch but one that a court might allow given that Indiana University associate professor Edward Castronova estimated the economic damages to Blizzard caused by Glider exceed $20 million per year! The consequence Donnelly faces should the court find for Blizzard is staggering: A fine of $750 per copy sold, so about $75 million.
But here’s the bigger problem: If the court aggrees that copyright is the issue then the ruling could, in principle, allow any software vendor to prosecute any other software vendor whose product interoperates with theirs. Indeed, any in-house software you use or create to automate or modify a commercial application could be nixed by an application vendor. Should Blizzard prevail, the fallout could be profound.
So, do you still think computer games are harmless fun?
