World Of Warcraft Bots Defeated In Court

via Gizmodo


'Grinding'. The word strikes despair into the hearts of millions of online MMO games players.

There are many Gizmodo readers out there who have played World Of Warcraft and, as the levels progressed, have experienced the inevitable boredom of 'grinding' - the process of killing hundreds of beasties just to level up.

For about 100,000 [paying] gamers, that boredom was replaced by a clever - if cheating - piece of software called MMOGlider/WoWGlider that had your characters automatically kill and loot enemies while you did other things like watch TV, go to work etc. Not anymore - well, probably.

Blizzard just won a ruling against MDY Industries - maker of MMOGlider/WoWGlider that says the users of the program infringe Blizzard's copyright. US District Judge David Campbell said that because the bot tool is prohibited by the WoW license, it's a copyright violation. Blizzard already uses something called Warden to hunt down gamers using bots to farm gold or advance characters through the levels more quickly.

Although Blizzard has won Round 1, this case will go before a jury in September but it's widely believed in legal circles that if Blizzard wins, software makers could end up making peoples' lives a lot more difficult by creating ever more stringent usage policies for the software they have bought. Not a good thing at all.