Blizzard legally targeting freelance coders

[Sklug]

Considering Blizz keeps losing their legal battles, this new tactic of theirs is a scare tactic. What makes HB so desirable is the vibrant community of coders that build profiles for the community. If no one was building the profiles, HB would just be an empty shell. Well, Blizz has lost legally in the courts on suing HB, so now they will try to sue the individual scripters for what they call "Copyright violations," which as anyone knows, is this enigma of legal terminology in the US court system. This has actually already been tried in court as car manufacturers and tractor manufacturers have tried to sue people that modified the code of their purchased cars and tractors and the court system basically said, "Sorry, they bought it, they own it." And, they lost in court.

Blizz's legal case is a stretch, but a little different because the people are using a game they technically do not own, but merely subscribe to. Which again, is kind of a stretch because they only thing they do technically subscribe to is getting on to a Blizzard subscription, but the actual game software is fully owned by the individual (hence why it's not illegal by law to build your own private server, just against Blizz's TOS).

Remember, Blizz's TOS are not reflected by actual laws, so no one can go to jail over this, but Blizz is trying to claim financial losses due to botters. Thus, this is a "civil" lawsuit for supposed copyright violation.

Now, chances are Blizz won't win this, assuming they actually have a competent lawyer, but even if Blizz loses legally, they scared a lot of coders from contributing more. That, imo, is their ultimate goal, to kill off these free-lance coders and scare them all from even trying. This is really kind of a last-ditch effort by the Blizzard legal team.

Again, the ONLY way, imo, this would ever be successful in court is if they got a tech illiterate judge. I mean, hooking into memory is something you learn maybe in a 2nd year computer science class. It is not illegal and it is in no way infringing on copyright. Hell, if they somehow won this, the whole computer programming world would be turned on its head because of the implications of such behavior as being a copyright violation would be insane. Think about it. Imagine how many programs out there hook into User32.dll to get Native API controls in windows? Right now I can instantly think of about a dozen JAVA libraries that do this for important tasks. Such a ruling would mean someone like Microsoft could come in and sue everyone. It just makes zero sense, in my mind. Again, all they need is some tech illiterate moron of a judge to take their side though.

Does anyone know if where Apoc lives, if they have legal protections that if the prosecutor loses, they have to pay the defendant's legal fees?

[DarkLinux]

My question is why was he not working for them under an LLC. Apoc could be really ****ed b/c of that. I must be missing something b/c Bossland looked to have everything planned out from the start, unless he did not think they would sue his coders. I really hope Apoc was prepared for something like this. This also puts a lot of pressure on Bossland, production wise and financially, if he decides to help. But even if everyone on the forums chipped in I dont think we could cover a basic lawyer.

[natt_]

Does anyone know where one might follow this? Twitters etc

[andy012345]

My question is why was he not working for them under an LLC. Apoc could be really ****ed b/c of that. I must be missing something b/c Bossland looked to have everything planned out from the start, unless he did not think they would sue his coders. I really hope Apoc was prepared for something like this. This also puts a lot of pressure on Bossland, production wise and financially, if he decides to help. But even if everyone on the forums chipped in I dont think we could cover a basic lawyer.

I'm guessing if they expected lawsuits to be criminal then the laws would leave the people involved liable regardless of structures.

Other then that some countries have capital requirements for limited companies.

[Phattwoohie]

Wow, haven't been to this site in a long time, just dropped by to see what's up. Read the article today about Blizz going after individuals so I'll chime in my 2 cents. Blizzard is very smart by going after coders as individuals because they win whether they win or lose. Does that make sense? lol, let me explain in a bit more detail. If Blizzard wins, it's easy to figure out that they will bankrupt the individual coder and saddle him/her with so much debt that they would basically be working the rest of their entire lives to pay it off. The judgement could be in the tens of millions. On the other hand, if they don't win, they could and will drag it out in court for an eternity, essentially accomplishing the same thing. Unless the coder or coders are wealthy, the legal team they would need to assemble to fight the charges will cost massive amounts of money.

Blizzard actually has a good point to their case in that they are accusing a coder of hindering their ability to make profits. This is a far different case than saying you are ripping off their code or infringing on their copy protections. Whatever happens I feel for both sides because Blizzard has lost player base and is doing everything it can to deter future losses. That and the coders life is about to get a lot more complicated and stressful.

If I had the ability to make mods and write code I'd probably design bots for games I love to play as well. However, if I suddenly got sued for 10's of millions I think it would be time to give it up and go on with life. It's not really worth the stress of fighting a huge company and being stressed out over court dates, paperwork filing dates, lawyer fees, the threat of bankruptcy, etc. If I'm that gifted of a person, I'd rather just work for some company like Microsoft, make an above average wage and spend my days fishing off my boat or something.

[homer91]

Hang in there Apoc!

[Cecu]

I have read only shady accuses in the Blizzard letter, not a single proof, that Apoc personally have contributed to what Bossland GmbH was accused for.

I am too far away of the US legal system, but I doubt, they could engage him without solid evidence.

From the shared on the forums stuff from these Blizzard trials vs Bossland in Germany, Blizzard Europe's legal team is failing hard at confirming their accuses.

[namreeb]

There is no reason for them to reveal what evidence they have until the last possible moment.

[~Unknown~]

Considering Blizz keeps losing their legal battles, this new tactic of theirs is a scare tactic. What makes HB so desirable is the vibrant community of coders that build profiles for the community. If no one was building the profiles, HB would just be an empty shell. Well, Blizz has lost legally in the courts on suing HB, so now they will try to sue the individual scripters for what they call "Copyright violations," which as anyone knows, is this enigma of legal terminology in the US court system. This has actually already been tried in court as car manufacturers and tractor manufacturers have tried to sue people that modified the code of their purchased cars and tractors and the court system basically said, "Sorry, they bought it, they own it." And, they lost in court.

Blizz's legal case is a stretch, but a little different because the people are using a game they technically do not own, but merely subscribe to. Which again, is kind of a stretch because they only thing they do technically subscribe to is getting on to a Blizzard subscription, but the actual game software is fully owned by the individual (hence why it's not illegal by law to build your own private server, just against Blizz's TOS).

Remember, Blizz's TOS are not reflected by actual laws, so no one can go to jail over this, but Blizz is trying to claim financial losses due to botters. Thus, this is a "civil" lawsuit for supposed copyright violation.

Now, chances are Blizz won't win this, assuming they actually have a competent lawyer, but even if Blizz loses legally, they scared a lot of coders from contributing more. That, imo, is their ultimate goal, to kill off these free-lance coders and scare them all from even trying. This is really kind of a last-ditch effort by the Blizzard legal team.

Again, the ONLY way, imo, this would ever be successful in court is if they got a tech illiterate judge. I mean, hooking into memory is something you learn maybe in a 2nd year computer science class. It is not illegal and it is in no way infringing on copyright. Hell, if they somehow won this, the whole computer programming world would be turned on its head because of the implications of such behavior as being a copyright violation would be insane. Think about it. Imagine how many programs out there hook into User32.dll to get Native API controls in windows? Right now I can instantly think of about a dozen JAVA libraries that do this for important tasks. Such a ruling would mean someone like Microsoft could come in and sue everyone. It just makes zero sense, in my mind. Again, all they need is some tech illiterate moron of a judge to take their side though.

Does anyone know if where Apoc lives, if they have legal protections that if the prosecutor loses, they have to pay the defendant's legal fees?

Have you seen the previous case of Blizzard vs Glider back in the day? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MDY_In...rtainment,_Inc. and https://www.eff.org/files/mdy_opinion.pdf

They fairly successfully sued glider and won some of their copyright points in the appeals court (Better yet Glider sought a judgement saying Glider was ok and Blizzard counter sued). While another appeal could have changed that, Glider just decided to settle instead of gamble on that chance. To me, that is Blizzard winning by getting them to shut down. This case seems very similar to that one with the caveat that HB is a non US based company and they are actually suing Apoc directly instead. Either way, Apoc still has a lot of work ahead of him due to this nonsense.

[Sklug]

Have you seen the previous case of Blizzard vs Glider back in the day? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MDY_In...rtainment,_Inc. and https://www.eff.org/files/mdy_opinion.pdf

They fairly successfully sued glider and won some of their copyright points in the appeals court (Better yet Glider sought a judgement saying Glider was ok and Blizzard counter sued). While another appeal could have changed that, Glider just decided to settle instead of gamble on that chance. To me, that is Blizzard winning by getting them to shut down. This case seems very similar to that one with the caveat that HB is a non US based company and they are actually suing Apoc directly instead. Either way, Apoc still has a lot of work ahead of him due to this nonsense.

Well, there is a significant difference for 2 reasons: One, the climate then and now is a bit different in the court systems. Blizzard successfully won way back then when in a more modern court system they may not have, as other similar cases have been brought up that subsequently lost. Second, one thing Glider actually did was they hooked into Warden and actually circumvented and modified the way Warden worked, thus manipulating the host application to avoid detection. That itself is significantly different than the behavior of avoidance used nowadays. Now, they just look for Warden scans on the super-highway of your memory that all running programs within windows exists upon but they don't actually manipulate host behavior.

And this is the key, they manipulated warden, which is a type of DRM and there are actual laws on the books about DRM manipulation. That is the key reason they lost. Even then, it's still a bit of a stretch.

I still think the real goal of Blizzard here is just scare tactics and intimidation to deter freelance coders from contributing. The interesting thing is that if Blizz ends up losing this court case they will have exhausted any last-ditch efforts to stop this.

[lolp1]

will have exhausted any last-ditch efforts to stop this.

I am positive beyond any question Blizzard has the means to detect the popular effective bots, main of them being honorbuddy. I am even pretty confident they can, and will do exactly just that at some point. It's a tactic they have abused successfully in the past, come up with a clever detection method and ban any new releases right away with in weeks over and over and over.

EDIT:
It's worth nothing that I say the above based on information from passed blizzard history in other games tactics to battle hacks, mainly diablo 2 and information passed on to me about detection methods they could/have employed. Honestly, I don't think with out a major re-vamp has any chance or hope at being immune to detection. For people who say then why did they detect it sooner then? The short answer is there is a lot to consider.

It has been standard practice to leave a public tool for an extended period of time untouched and then when it reaches a big enough point, come down on it with everything the can conjure. This to me feels like this is the case.

In diablo 2, they successfully shut down ~8-10 cooders at once, and even seized their websites and in some cases hard drives and they were forced to agree to not hack blizzard games for x time. Some of these sites had millions and likely could have attempted to fight. I think all 8 were wise to simply cut their losses.

[Torpedoes]

This is pathetic, instead of locking down their software, they sue people.

[Jadd]

This is pathetic, instead of locking down their software, they sue people.

It seems pretty fair from an objective point of view. We are lawfully allowed to reverse and modify their game, but in return Blizzard is allowed to take us to court (even for other things like copyright infringement, contract law etc.) Whether either parties can afford the fees involved is totally regardless. With that said, I still hope Apoc wins because **** Blizzard.

[lolp1]

This is pathetic, instead of locking down their software, they sue people.

What exactly is immoral or viewed negatively about suing these individuals, do you think? I'm also confused by 'locking-down' their software. Does this mean, for example them banning every honorbuddy release asap? If so, I can assure you they are capable of doing just that. Instead, they have made a conscious decision to spend the resources allotted for this task to try and shut down the source(s) of the issue(s).

They have used this same strategy before I believe in Diablo II. They contacted several people with suites against the coders behind the hacks/bots. Seven total that I am aware of, four of them publicly. This came in the same fashion as this seems to be playing out, they banned the four major hacks a time or two, and of course they were re-released right away. It's worth noting, they hired out-side help with the warden back then to manage to ban those four hacks and several others, and I suspect (conspiracy theory..) they realize right away this was not going to be the best route.


With in a few months, all seven individuals were threatened with suits and some got it worse than others. From hush-hush contracts about discussing any detail of the case publicly on both ends, to hard-drives handed over, to not being able to hack or even install future Blizzard games(with some restrictions). To my knowledge, all seven people took the deal in exchange for a lower financial penalty.

I actually think this approach is pretty smart. If it works, they get the following benefits:
1. The hacks targeted will cease to exist.
2. They will receive financial restitution of some kind.
3. They avoid the need to hire a security expert who is capable of banning these hacks consistently, and with 0 false positives. Not an easy or cheap task.
4. They even possibly gain insight into the hacks them-selves, should any source-code be presented as evidence or forcefully by order.

[DarkLinux]

Sued Freelancer Allegedly Turns Over Contractee Source Code In Settlement - Slashdot

Sued Freelancer Allegedly Turns Over Contractee Source Code In Settlement

ummm what D: So I guess someone will be getting sued by Bossland as giving away something that is not his is also a crime.