Can Blizzard Be Beaten? Maybe...

For those of you following Blizzard's many attempts to shut down botters, gold farmers, and the like through legal actions, you may be feeling a little despondent after the recent failure of the court when a judge agreed with Blizzard that modifying an program's memory is the same as copyright violation. There may be some good news. An unnamed party sued Blizzard for banning his account. Blizzard had banned the account for botting (a violation of the World of Warcraft ToS). The unnamed party admits he botted on the account. However, the party sued citing a decision in SoftMan Products Co. v. Adobe Systems Inc, which basically says SoftMan had purchased software and not just a license. This will be interesting to watch in the future, as Blizzard contends we WoW players are buying a license, and not software. The difference is that if we buy software, we are free to modify the memory of the program on our own machine. Buying software means we bought a product, and have the rights and warranties of having bought a product. If we buy a license, we are bound by the items in the EULA and are prevented from accessing or modifying the memory of the program running on our machine. Buying a license means we bought permission to use a product, and have restricted rights and warranties. Since we have precedence of a judge ruling we actually bought software, I think this tactic could be used over and over with Blizzard. Blizzard does not want to have a recent court ruling agree with this previous ruling, as it would damage their case against MDY and other companies. If you've been banned recently by Blizzard, you might consider sueing Blizzard and cite SoftMan Products Co. v. Adobe Systems Inc. The unnamed party from above got his account back plus a free year of WoW. It cost him court costs and filing fees (which amount to about one year of WoW service).