On July 14, 2008 Judge David Campbell of the District Court of Arizona granted a summary judgment to Blizzard Entertainment in their civil case against MDY Industries, LLC. (“MDY”)

In summary MDY designed a bot called WoWGlider that allows players of World of Warcraft (“WoW”) to acquire higher skill levels through menial tasks while not being physically present playing the game. WoW is owned by Activision Blizzard which is in turn owned by the French entertainment giant Vivendi.

The bot plays the game for the player while the player sleeps, goes to work and generally lives life away from the game. The player can then regain the controls of their avatar later once it has achieved a high enough skill level to be more interesting to play. Essentially, its automated Power Leveling.

You can read all of the filings made by both parties on PACER if you have a subscription. Some of the files are also available on Justica.

Since I’m not a lawyer, I will refer any reader who wishes a deeper legal analysis of the issues to the postings made by Ross Dannenberg on The Patent Arcade and Benjamin Duranske on Virtually Blind.

The issue that seems to have struck both the legal and gaming communities as the most interesting is the fact that the Court upheld Blizzard’s assertion that the game client purchased by users was a license, rather than a product completely owned by the end-user/purchaser.

WoW for the purposes of this discussion has two components. The first is the game agent which a player purchases and loads on their computer. This is the product on the shelf at the video game store that kids bug their parents to purchase for them. It is purchased once for one price.

The second part is the game server that the player logs into in order to interact with other players, go on quests, etc…..to play the game. This is the monthly subscription portion of the game and is resident on Blizzard’s servers.

When the WoW agent is activated part of the code gets copied from wherever the game is stored on the users system, for arguments sake the hard drive, into the Random Access Memory (“RAM”). This is what happens with most applications on a computer.

The Court felt, citing other cases, that the copying of the game from hard drive to the RAM was a copyright infringement because the copying of the files resulted in a violation of an End User License Agreement (“EULA”) and the Terms of Service (“TOS”)

The offence was in fact a EULA violation, but because source code was “copied” from the hard drive to RAM the activity was found to constitute a copyright violation. It was also found to be a vicarious copyright violation because the program allowed other players of WoW to violate the EULA and TOS that they would have agreed to when they purchased the agent and accessed the WoW servers.

It is unclear at this stage whether or not the case will result in an appeal, but the general consensus is that it will. If it does not end up in appeal it is certainly not clear what Blizzard will recoup from MDY.

There are two things that are clear. First this decision will have a large impact on the decisions that game and virtual world platform owners make when dealing with violators of their terms of service and license agreements. It may make prosecution a more appetizing choice.

Second, this was a well coordinated effort between the legal team at Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal LLP, Blizzard’s technical security group and the “unidentified private investigator.” It’s an excellent example of the convergence of these areas of expertise and how these functions can work together successfully, something that is very topical in the Investigations and Security field.