Blizzard Versus Glider: A Pyrrhic Victory? [Court Cases]

[Reposted from Kotaku]

Lest anyone missed this little gem among the E3 hubbub, Blizzard has scored a victory against WoW bot maker Glider. Don't remember that whole kerfluffle? Blizzard sued Glider over EULA infringement for copying code, as well as the ancillary issue of pissing WoW users up and gobbling up resources. Glider shot back with 'But grinding your way to level 70 is boooooring.' Probably unsurprisingly, this argument did not go over very well in court and Blizzard won its summary judgment motion. All's well that end's well ... or is it? Over at PlayNoEvil, there's some interesting analysis on what this judgment could mean and why it may not be all that it's cracked up to be:

1. This ruling is very dangerous to any third party utility provider. Especially security companies like Symantec, who load programs and "check them out" to see if they are malicious. Ironically, it would seem that Blizzard's own security program, Warden, would be imperiled by this notion of copyright ....

3. What if Blizzard wins? After a long fight, Blizzard defeated the unauthorized Battle.Net server developers, BnetD, which simply drove the system outside the US where it is still available. It is actually surprising that MDY didn't move its business offshore to a country where this suit could not have been effectively tried or did not have a copyright treat with the US.

4. Legal solutions to business and technical problems are terribly inefficient an expensive. While they may be able to shut MDY down and even bankrupt the company (and perhaps its owners), how much will this have cost Blizzard and how long until another equivalent product is made available. Might MDY simply publish the source code to Glider as a "finger in the eye" gesture at Blizzard? (or "leak" it onto the Internet?)

No doubt this case hasn't been put to bed quite yet -- any future developments should be pretty interesting.

http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/kotaku/full/~3/340091851/blizzard-versus-glider-a-pyrrhic-victory

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