Objection! #4: The Case of the World of Warcraft Wannabe

The videogame industry's a big business -- and sometimes, companies don't see eye-to-eye. And what happens when a dispute goes to court, and gamers get their grubby hands on fancy-sounding legal documents? Why, wild, inane, forum-fueled speculation, of course. That's where California-based corporate attorney and GameSpy freelancer Eric Neigher comes in. Objection! is your one-stop destination to learn what all that legalese means in plain English, straight from someone who knows the twisty-turny language of the law.



Introduction

Did you know that it's illegal to host your own private server for your favorite massively multiplayer online games OK, maybe it's not a big deal if it's just you and a few buddies flying under the radar, but in a recent ruling, the United States District Court found in favor of Blizzard when the latter sued an outfit called Scapegaming for hosting private World of Warcraft servers for profit. Scapegaming had something like 40,000 users a day, though, so I think your buddy's basement is still safe for the time being.

So why should you care? Well, if you don't really play MMOs or multiplayer games in general, you probably don't need to care all that much. But, whoever you are, it doesn't hurt to maintain some awareness of just what your 50 clams are buying you when you click that little "I Agree" button and install a game on your PC.

Facts

Here's what went down: A lady named Alyson Reeves decided that she was gonna start her own WoW servers -- her own private gold farm, if you will. Players would log onto her servers and pay her, and they could play WoW without dealing with Blizzard. Of course, access to all of Blizzard's official WoW support features would be disabled. And it meant a much more limited pool of folks to play with. But, hey, it's private! So... yeah, why the heck would people even do this in the first place?

Well, Ms. Reeves apparently thought of this angle: She set up her WoW servers to employ micropayments (as she refers to them), which gave players the option to spend real money for in-game items without having to go through the trouble of earning them. Want those sweet tier 10 shoulders without having to run the same instance over and over? Two bucks, por favor.


Kind of a smart business model, except that Blizzard had already shut this kind of thing down with Chinese gold-farmers long ago. Ms. Reeves argued that on her servers, she should be allowed to set up whatever rules she wanted, as a lot of customer demand existed for this sort of thing. Of course, Blizzard didn't see it that way: They sued Ms. Reeves, seeking to recover the 90,000,000 frickin' dollars they say she owed the company for taking profits away from them and for infringing their copyright.

Seem excessive? Well, yes and no, and we'll get to that in the next section. But the thing to remember here is that courts are really not messing around when it comes to enforcing companies' rights to protect their intellectual property from unauthorized use. If you're now thinking: "Does this have the potential to affect custom servers for other non-MMO properties?" the answer is, probably not. Since you're not actually paying Johnny Frat Boy to host your Modern Warfare 2 realism-mod match, no money changes hands. And besides, Activision (or whatever company is behind the game in the example you choose) has already made their money off of you, so no damages would be incurred. Proving damages is one of the four key elements of any lawsuit, and without that factor, no suit can viably go forward.

Anyway, ninety frickin' million bucks!?. Yeah, it seems the court took Blizzard's side in the complaint, partially because it recognized that any company would have a difficult time affirmatively proving the amount that each player spent on individual membership fees and micropayments, and partially because the law says the court must take the most favorable view to the plaintiff when the defendant doesn't even appear at the damn courthouse. Yeah, it looks like Ms. Reeves dun goofed -- she didn't even show up to mount a defense (I guess she went with the head-in-the-sand defense)... and the court, quite rightly, threw the book at her.


So, all that said -- does this case have any significance at all for us as gamers? I mean, we already know the outcome, right? Not so fast. We may know the outcome of this particular action, but the real meat of the issue comes when we analyze exactly how the court's ruling here affects our rights to create custom MMO stuff down the line. Just how much do we "own" the video games we buy?