The orcs, gnomes and elves of one of Blizzard's legal teams have won a summary judgement motion against a WoW bot maker. The bot program is called Glider, and has seen extensive use in the world's number one non-drug based addiction, the MMORPG World of Warcraft. Over a 100,000 copies of Glider have been sold. Glider functions pretty much as a grind-o-matic machine which collects stuff for your character automatically when you are not using your account.
The bot's author, a code-saavy gentleman by the name of Michael Donnely, was hoping that the court would side in his favor on the grounds that no copyright has been breached by his actions. But in an interesting ruling, the court decided that if a copy of the game exists in a computer's RAM and is modified, this can be construed as a copyright violation. Guidance for this decision came from a Ninth Circuit ruling back in a 1993 case, MAI Sys Vs. Peak Computer, which concluded that games loaded into memory are legally copies of software.
Blizzard sued Michael Donnely partly because they claim the bots take up an inordinate amount of network resources (because regular WoW players only play 8 hours a day, not 24.)
The next round of court-PvP may take place in September, before a jury, unless these two parties can come to some sort of agreement to side-step another long and drawn out court case.
