Autodesk (which we blogged about previously), in which the court defined the circumstances under which a purchaser of software is a licensee, not an owner of a copy, for purposes of the copyright first sale doctrine. Recall that the case was argued on the same day, and before the same panel, as Vernor v. The ruling was largely, although not completely, favorable to Blizzard, but either way it is an important ruling for content and software licensors who seek to control their use of their copyrighted works. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled last month in MDY Industries, LLC v. The dispute between MDY and Blizzard raises a multiplicity of interesting issues under copyright law and the DMCA, issues on which the U.S. (Whether he called them Worgen and tried to repel them with his Corpse-Impaling Spike is not part of the record.) Donnelly subsequently filed an action seeking a declaratory judgment that his sale of the Glider program did not infringe Blizzard’s copyrights, and Blizzard responded with counterclaims under copyright law, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and state law. So Blizzard also sent its lawyers to Donnelly’s home to personally demand that he cease selling the Glider program. Warden works only so-so at blocking Glider-using players, though, and it costs a lot of money to deploy and maintain. WoW also deployed a software solution, WoW Warden, that checks gamers’ computers for prohibited software and prevents their access to the server if it is present. So Blizzard added a provision to the WoW Terms of Use prohibiting the use of bots and similar third-party software. Other gamers complain that they constitute cheating, and Blizzard potentially loses revenue when gamers finish the game sooner rather than later.
In a few years, Donnelly (incorporated as MDY Industries) had gross revenues of $3.5 million from sales of Glider licenses.įor Blizzard Entertainment, the distributor of WoW software and the operator of the servers that enable online game play, bots are, well, a drag. Michael Donnelly developed WoW bot software (Glider) for his own use and it worked so well that he decided to sell it to other gamers. So some gamers have resorted to the use of bots (automated game-playing software robots) to make their way more quickly from the more tedious early levels of the game to the more interesting upper levels. As the parents, teachers and spouses of gamers know all too well, playing through the 70 or more levels of the game in order to amass desired virtual currency, weapons and armor can be extremely time-consuming. Playing World of Warcraft, the world’s most popular massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG), can be, well, a drag.