Botters Sued.

Perhaps SE might not do such, but given that Blizzard actually won the lawsuit against the bot program creator, it might be a step in the right direction and may even give them some incentive and/or ideas on doing so and preparing their own argument.
Honestly, I'd love to see SE follow in Blizzard's footsteps in this regard, but they'd obviously have to actually take the initiative to do such and make sure they would be able to, based on their EULA and copyright laws (most likely Japan's).
We'll just have to see what happens - obviously, nothing will be instantaneous, but possibly eventually.
 
I bet it has the dude that makes ffxiapp squirming a bit
 
Cool, however I can't see SE doing anything like this. :/
 
Not that fighting bots and stuff is bad, but the methods blizzard used to win said lawsuit are less than "cool", in the future for example, loading a full program from hard drive to ram would be copyright infringement under that ruling.

This means once we're all buying 8gb-32gb of ram we technically wouldn't be able to do cool things like load up entire programs into ram to avoid hard-disk usage, which would increase performance significantly.

Also I'm pretty sure that the ffxi-bots don't load extra parts of ffxi into ram in order to run its bots, meaning the rulings have no effect for ffxi-bots. (aka: SE can't sue the makers of the bots)

The end result: The WoW botters will figure out a new method not involving loading more of WoW into ram, and a new thing now suddenly becomes "wrong".

In any case of "hackers" Vs. "Company X", it's always a game of catchup for the company, when the company just fights fire with fire (banning people, making programs ineffective, etc..), it's all fine and dandy, but when they try to affect laws, they end up hurting lots of legitimate uses for certain techniques.
 
I hope they win, it won't effect much but atleast it would be something.
 
The issue isn't having a "copy" of Blizzards game in your RAM. Everyone knows that in order to run a game, or any other program for that matter, you load it up in your RAM, thats just how PCs work.
The issue is that this person or company created a 'copy' of a particular string of code and enprisoned it within the users RAM, disallowing it from functioning properly. This string of code is Blizzards, and they know damn well its running in your RAM and they dont care. The problem was, this program created a "copy" of said code within the RAM, circumventing its intended purpose.
There is nothing wrong with having a copy of any program in your RAM as long as "such copy or adaptation is created as an essential step in the utilization of the computer program."
This 'hack' was obviously not an essential step, and Blizzard was therefore able to sue.

EDIT:
SE won't bother doing anything like this. Their user base is far too small for these kinds of theatrics. Besides, I can't really think of any hacks in FFXI that are on scale with WOWs Glider hack. Not that i'd really know, i don't hack FFXI, let alone even play it atm. :)
 
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Thread was misleading. Was hoping SE would finally be taking a major step towards ridding of that crap. =\
 
Half of that lawsuit did seem to be questionable and bad precedent, but it seemed as if the source of the copy was important as well.

Copyright is a bit of a stretch, and definitely not the route to go. I'd like to see the copyright charges get successfully appealed and the Tortious Interference ruling will hopefully stand.
 
This case does remind me of the youtube one a lot because in both they have a judge making a ruling on a case where i don't believe that they fully understand the implications of their precedents. I have to say i pretty much 100% agree with garvin.

I'd rate u up Garvin but it wont let me...
 
Blizzard makes way more money than SE off its respective MMOs. I doubt SE would take the same approach, although it would be nice to see. But surely people will find some other way
 
Twille said:
The issue is that this person or company created a 'copy' of a particular string of code and enprisoned it within the users RAM, disallowing it from functioning properly. ... The problem was, this program created a "copy" of said code within the RAM, circumventing its intended purpose.
There is nothing wrong with having a copy of any program in your RAM as long as "such copy or adaptation is created as an essential step in the utilization of the computer program."
This 'hack' was obviously not an essential step, and Blizzard was therefore able to sue.
Click to expand...

Under that ruling, it means programs can only be loaded in ram as designed by the writers of it. This makes it illegal to do things like have a user load up entire programs into ram to increase performance (example: When you have load times for a game, it's because you're transferring stuff from HD to ram usually, imagine if there was a 3rd party program that could pre-fetch and entire game into ram, you'd need like over 8gb of ram for this to work with a modern game, but it would still be an awesome thing to do).

Blizzard wasn't able to sue because the hack wasn't an essential step, otherwise anyone could sue any 3rd party program for any program. Blizzard was able to sue for an additional copy into ram that the software wasn't designed to do. Loading up software to ram outside of the normal is very useful. Look up vista's feature that pre-loads stuff to ram based on what it thinks you'll be using for an example, this ruling might make -that- illegal depending on exactly what vista does, but I doubt you could ever win a lawsuit against microsoft on this issue, it's likely just overturn the original ruling.

Also it's important to realize, WoW is -not- a game in terms of law, it is a piece of software, a ruling on how WoW's software works, is a ruling on how windows, microsoft office, your tax software, everything can be used. Now no 3rd pt programs can load parts of another program to ram to do something without being ready to fight this decision in court should they be sued. Imagine a 3rd pt program that duplicated your web browser's session (I know firefox already has similar built-in features, but easiest example I could think of), so if it detected a crash, it'd open a new copy load up the session and kill the old copy in under a second, causing minimal interference from a crash. That'd be pretty useful no? Hardly a hack that deserves being sued for copyright infringement.


Bottom line: Copyright law is to prevent against bootlegging, brand dilution, and stealing profits, if you use copyright law to fight against anything but this, you're abusing the law. Indirect lawsuits are pure bullshit and make things worse for everyone by making legit things in certain conditions illegal under all conditions.

P.S. There's nothing inherently wrong about making bots, cracking programs, and etc... There's a reason why you can't sue bot makers for making bots, it's the same reason you can sue gun makers for making guns. It's the use of a tool that's wrong, not the creation or possession of one. You could argue there's no "good" use of a WoW/ffxi specific bot, but the law doesn't work in specifics, a ruling against a game-bot is a ruling against a bot that automatically spiders the internet (i.e. googlebot).
 
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