88 million for default judgement in Blizzard case
 

Linkage

Go ahead and discuss.

I'll be damned if statutory damages isn't messed up. Basically Congress has said the bare minimum for copyright infringement is $200 per case. How they calculated the damage was that the server had 490K+ people. So they charged $200...

For each person on the server.

I may not like the woman (she used the donations irresponsibly) but damned if this isn't just a smidge harsh.

As the article mentions, this is just Blizzard making an example. They almost certainly have no intent on trying to enforce the full payment, instead "settling" for "x amount of dollars paid per month for pretty much the rest of your life." If they decide it's financially sound to bother enforcing it at all.

But yeah, Blizzard is... pretty unambiguous about that sort of thing.

I hate to say it, but if you have an illegal server with nearly 500,000 people on it, well, you're servicing a LOT of people and the fine is going to be big no matter what you do.

I don't really sympathize in this case. I don't care what she did with the money she got from donations or items or whatever. That's none of my business. I'm also sure there are probably a lot of these and no good way of finding or counting them, so she probably felt safe. But she was basically illegally reselling a commercial product to more people than can be explained by simple word of mouth through friends or something and I simply can't condone setting up a business like that. I guess I'd be more generous if there was under a thousand because that's like, what, "Hey, you guys, I'm setting up a private server just for us!" and then someone saying "Hey, mind if I invite Barry from work?" and just kind of snowballing from there. Anything more than 10k is delving into handing out fliers at the mall and 100k is where I'm guessing there's going to be some actual advertising involved.

I mean, yeah, it's a LOT of money, but then she was collecting money from a LOT of people. I don't much like the media giants making examples of people just because of how ridiculous the terms are in doing that, but really, there's no kind way of handling that kind of scale. Even if they were REALLLLY nice and only charged a dollar per account, that's still enough to buy a really nice house. If it were music instead of WoW accounts, averaging 3 minutes a song, that would be enough music to listen to for nearly 3 years straight without stopping.

I do have to wonder, though, if Blizzard would have been so harsh if she hadn't been attempting to make a profit off of it?

I'm pretty sure I've read that Blizzard really doesn't like private servers, however I know of some private servers which received nothing beyond cease and desists and/or threats with no actual legal firepower behind it.

The fact that this woman had nearly 500k subscribers AND was making money off of Blizzard's work is probably what elicited the harsh treatment/selecting her as the one to be made an example of.

Question: Where does it say the number of subscribers? I'm not seeing this anywhere... Or did I miss it?

And in a semi-related story, Blizzard's suing a WoW bot maker.

Man, they're really going Gestapo on people, huh?

Not in that story. This one lists it at 427,000.

Really really hope they win that one.

I don't play WoW, but I play other MMOs, have played other MMOs, have played WoW, MUDs, etc. and one thing they all have in common is that botters fuck up the game for everyone else by doing exactly what Blizzard is complaining about in the lawsuit.

Them winning would set a legal precedent and make people who make those programs a target in the future.

It's not really "Gestapo" if it's against someone who made two and a half million bucks hacking your software without your permission.

Blizzard did win in the botting case. http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news...Maker-In-Court

Some games you need it though.

EVE Online comes to mind.

They won though

Yes but everything I've heard about EVE online is the whole point of the game is to fuck over other players.

A game like WoW is when botters fuck up the whole thing and it ruins the experience.