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Blizzard Sues Bot Developer!
Although not Tibia related, Blizzard Entertainment (World of Warcraft) is suing the maker of a bot called MMO Glider. The bot enables players to play WoW without the need for anyone to be behind the keyboard.
According to the reports, a Vivendi games lawyer visited his house over the tool he developed. The developer, Michael Donnelly, said that this was how he found out about the legal complaint in the first place. Blizzard argues that the tool breaches copyright, the End User License Agreement and disrupts the balance of the game.
A trial version of the tool is free, but full versions are sold for 25$. According to the reports, over 100,000 copies of the tool were sold. The tool seems to be powerful too. According to the FAQ, "Glider works a lot like a regular player. It looks at your health, mana, energy, etc. It moves the mouse around and pushes keys on the keyboard. You tell it about your character, where you want to kill things, and what to kill. Then it kills for you, automatically. You can do something else, like eat dinner or go to a movie, and when you return, you'll have a lot more experience and loot."
Donnelly reportedly said that the development of the tool technically doesn't violate the EULA as it does not make a copy of the game data.
The official MMO Glider forums seem to be buzzing with discussion on the topic. In response to the following:
"Blizzard has said the tool infringes copyright because it copies the game into RAM in order to avoid detection by anti-cheat software."
KrTech writes:
It would be fun to prove that, since WoW loads itself into RAM when you try to play. And I don't think Glider actually copies all the memory WoW uses and then reads it, that would be stupid. Instead it probably looks for very specific information that is located somewhere in that giant heap of info WoW loads and then processes it, that doesn't even mean it is directly copied. As BBC puts it, that case is going nowhere.
"if there are other [programmers] out there that copy to RAM then a judgement in favour of Bliz in this case would open up lot in lots of other areas of industry." writes ILikeToBot.
D3m0nik points out the following, "The use of Glider is against the EULA. But the creation of it, may not be, which is what they are fighting about."
A very interesting case, which also asks the question "will CipSoft and other game developers follow Blizzards example?"
