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[llien]

An anonymous reader calls it "the never-ending stupidity of copyright wars." TorrentFreak reports: Blizzard Entertainment is taking a stand against a popular World of Warcraft legacy server. The fan-operated project allows gamers to experience how the game was played over a decade ago and to revive old battles... In recent years the project has captured the hearts of tens of thousands of die-hard WoW fans. At the time of writing, the most popular realm has more than 6,000 people playing from all over the world... Blizzard, however, sees this as copyright infringement and has asked GitHub to pull the site's code offline.

The article notes the DMCA notice came "just weeks after several organizations and gaming fans asked the US Copyright Office to make a DMCA circumvention exemption for 'abandoned' games."
slashdot

TL;DR
github repository was taken down.
Server itself is still up.


Whether vanilla WoW qualifies as "abandoned game", is debatable, especially after Blizzard's: Word of Warcraft Classic announcement (neogaf) .

 

[MrMorningMan]

Deja vu? Aren't Blizzard themselves working on a vanilla server anyway? I believe it was announced officially not too long ago.

 

[Phoenix RISING]

If they're running their own server, that's fine.

It's interesting how companies abandon games only to remember the when fan made projects begin to garner success. AM2R comes to mind. Also, Streets of Rage Remake, though Sega abandoned that too.

 

[BANGS]

It's amazing how instead of recognizing the talent and giving these guys a job, they just cancel their work...

 

[Blam]

This isn't a real DMCA. Look at the way this was built. Whomever did this is a true asshat, and was not legitimately from Blizzard.

If it was it would have actually linked the entire repo and not the specific files/names inside the files. It also would have mentioned in the full legal name of the lawyer/company on the last 2 parts since nearly no company makes that private on their legal side.

Fantasy Names – “Script” files and folders are named after and reference WoW fantasy names.

Like really? You can't be serious when using this as a reason. It's got fantasy names that are the same. This was already taken to court once before, and Blizzard lost. They can't copyright a fantasy name because anyone could have used it before them.

Matching Record IDs – There are “scripts” that reference database records directly by ID; there are cases where these IDs directly match the ID from WoW’s content.

Absolutely baseless, numbers being the same just doesn't work as a defense.

Nostalrius References – Several code files reference Nostalrius copyrights and code.

Why would you reference another shut down projects copyrights? What once again a legal entity wouldn't need to do. They could just target the entire repo, and that's final.

Ctrl+F on the page, search for spell_template +-The LightsHope spell table has identical layout and typically identical field names as the table from early WoW. We use database tables to represent game data, like spells, in WoW. In our code, we use .sql files to represent the data layout of each table (i.e. the fields of each specific table, like a spell name or the magnitude of its effect). MaNGOS, the platform off of which Light’s Hope appears to be built, uses a similar structure. The LightsHope spell_template table matches almost exactly the layout and field names of early WoW client database tables.

We? You mean Blizzard Activision Inc.? Because a programmer is not the one filing this and a lawyer/legal entity isn't this lazy to use that terminology.

This is 100% an angry dev on the project.

 

[Rellik]

This is 100% an angry dev on the project.

Or someone trying to make Blizzard look bad.

 

[Blam]

Or someone trying to make Blizzard look bad.

It's a bad attempt regardless, since Blizzard would have shut the actual server down.

 

[llien]

#soyouaresaying

Seriously, it is that simple to take things down in Blizzard's name?

 

[Grimmrobe]

Surely Blizzard makes enough money from Overwatch? Give these guys a break. They are just passionate fans.

 

[Blam]

#soyouaresaying

Seriously, it is that simple to take things down in Blizzard's name?

Yes it's ridiculously easy to do it in Anyones name.

On Github, Youtube, etc. Nearly none of these big companies ever do DMCA background checking because it's a huge hassle to verify it all, and they'd probably get hundreds if not thousands (in youtubes case) a day. So it's easier to comply and worry later. Then worry and comply.

 

[Azathoth]

Surely Blizzard makes enough money from Overwatch? Give these guys a break. They are just passionate fans.

"Blizzard is a successful company so they should just let people pirate their game"

Yeah no. Never felt sympathy for these people and never will, especially with an official vanilla server on the way. Their excuse has been the game is no longer available, but they'll continue with this shit even after Classic comes out because the real reason is it's free WoW.

 

[DrCheese]

Yeah no. Never felt sympathy for these people and never will, especially with an official vanilla server on the way. Their excuse has been the game is no longer available, but they'll continue with this shit even after Classic comes out because the real reason is it's free WoW.

Pretty much - It's one thing to re-create the servers of a long dead game that the devs have moved on from, it's entirely another to recreate servers of a game that's in active development & still making profit for the developer. Even more so if the developer in question is giving the community an option to play on classic servers. Blizzard would be irresponible to do nothing & let these people walk all over their IP.

 

[Spukc]

their stuff their decision.
hurry the f up legal blizz and give us options