Honorbuddy district court Hamburg 28th February 2012

[HI5]

As most of you already know, Bossland / Honorbuddy was sued by Blizzard for Inducing Breach of Contract, Trademark and Copyrights. Today around 14:30 Bossland were in local court to confront Blizzard Head Office Lawyer - Rod Rigole.
How did it go? Read Bossland relation here:

I did not have any big expectations or hopes for the district court in Hamburg, as there already where few decisions made in Hamburg, that where not in favour of the bot creators or forum operator of a bots/cheats forum.



Around 14:30 we were in the local court, in front of the newly assigned courtroom A 156. Unfortunately our case was not included on the list of cases. After consultation with the officials, a government servant moved us to courtroom B 336 ( which was good as the we were asking the judge to give us a bigger room).




As we arrived, Rod Rigole, the the Blizzard Head Office Lawyer from the US, Rod Rigole was there with a translator.




The process took about 90 minutes. The court accepted in principle all of the charges, however you also could tell that the Attorney of Gleiss Lutz did not have the slightest idea of neither WOW, nor Honorbuddy. Luckily Rod Rigole was there to help him out a bit.




You could see it on the mostly not important charge of trademark law, Blizzard lawyer wanted to hammer Honorbuddy because it violates trademark law and their protected trademarks WOW and World of Warcraft. When asked if he is sure that it includes any trademark violation in the Software itself, the lawyer told the judge that he did not download HB and did not know for sure. Then he said that while the WOW Bot Honorbuddy on the webpage is linked to the file to download, that the file has to have this violation in itself. In one word, it was weird and I do not know if anyone understood him and it does not need an expert to understand the difference about a webpage, a link and a software. if the Link tells you "mothers best pie" and you download pie.exe, it doesnt mean that you downloaded the software "mothers best pie" just because the link says so. You just downloaded a Bot that can be used with the trademark protected game WOW.




After spend so much time on so non-essential argumentation, we went on.




In the opinion of the judges, Honorbuddy is a competitor to Wow, and that for its deliberately interferes with Blizzard as an competitor and its TOS and EULA which are included in the agreement between Enduser and Blizzard.




Our argument was not given reasonable time, but we received a five-week period to describe our point on UWG § 4 paragraph 10. (Act Against Unfair Competition)




We will take our chance and hopefully we will get a little more attention. The presiding judge is aware that the whole thing will go up to the Supreme Court and so it is hopefully interesting case for him, because something like this does not occur daily.




A decision will probably be there between May and June.

As you can see there's not much to say now, case still isn't close to be solved, and for now we need to wait a few weeks for Honorbuddy to describe their point of view.
Either it's for legal reasons, or change in personal attitude - Bossland doesn't seem to be as eager to fight for their laws as he was at the day Honorbuddy got sued.
Will Honorbuddy get closed and share the fate of bots like Gilder and Pirox? We don't know yet, but we know for sure that Honorbuddy is one of the best / biggest bots available, and Bossland surely won't just easily give up and disappoint Honorbuddy subscribers.

[Evilbuffy]

In my opinion, it would be sad if Blizzard gets this through. But then again, using 3rd party software is against TOS and EULA, so they will most likely win, even tho I hope not. I wish everyone behind Honorbuddy / Bossland the best of luck in the time coming!

[Confucius]

Yes, I wish Honorbuddy luck but I think there is little chance they will win.

Blizzard is a very big company with Activision backing them, they can afford very expensive lawyers and would probably not sue unless they were sure they were going to win. Honorbuddy does break their ToS and EULA, while that is not law if there is a program that does nothing but break their ToS and EULA I think they should be able to get it shut down.

Will be sad though if honorbuddy does end, it's a great tool.

[Phygar]

Old people really shouldn't be in charge of laws regarding computers...
It's the same thing that happened with Glider, SOPA, ACTA, PIPA, etc. People without the qualification to make proper decisions being put in charge of it. I think Blizzard is likely to win, because no matter how valid the defense is, Blizzard's lawyers can probably convince the court otherwise since they have no idea what Honorbuddy actually does.

I don't see how they can view Honorbuddy as a competitor for WoW. Obviously, Honorbuddy doesn't server a purpose without it, so Honorbuddy sales will not negatively affect WoW's sales as a competitor. What they should do is explain to them the pieces of the software which violate trademarks or copyright law only work within the official game by Blizzard. Users have to pay for a WoW subscription in order to use Honorbuddy.

Simply put, Honorbuddy is an "accessory" to WoW, just like real life products such as iPhone accessories. You could say that something like an iPhone charger violates trademarks, as it uses the trademarked charger port, but the product does not function if the user does not purchase an iPhone, so it doesn't affect sales. The charger cables needs to use the products trademarks to function, because they extend the functionality of the specific product. They are not standalone products that use another companies' trademarks to create alternative services. Just because one product is designed specifically for another does not mean that it uses trademarks of the original product to create a competing product. If Honorbuddy or iPhone accessories did not use trademarks of WoW or the iPhone, they would simply be generic products that did not ensure that users continued to use the original product.

Bossland needs to stop arguing that trademarks are not being violated, and needs to stop saying, "Well, how do you KNOW that we violated trademarks? Maybe we did, maybe we didn't." This will get you nowhere, and th court will become fed up with the nitpicking of details. In my opinion, your best strategy is to prove that your use of the blizzard trademarks is valid and not malicious. Honorbuddy will function if and ONLY if the user has a valid subscription to WoW, and it uses WoW in the same manner that a real player would use it. It does not give players an advantage that would be otherwise unobtainable by a real player, and a real player is theoretically better than Honorbuddy.