Which basically the community as a whole blames for all of this.
Perhaps I require more sleep, less time in between trying to keep up with threads >.<
And quite frankly, for a big part - yeah, I join ranks with the community. But that said, I can understand the "insert moneyz here" from there, just not the method. :(
I'm still waiting to see what the Microsoft deal actually pans out to be practically. For Starcraft II I think the message was that the ads are for battle.net and not for in-game and frankly my guess is that for WoW the same holds. No ads ingame, but yes ads in battle.net. If this is the case I'm kinda hard pressed to really link this to the ad deal. The link to Carbonite does make more sense to me. But to be seen.
So what I learned so far : It does not matter whether I am aware of breaching some contract someone else signed/agreed to, if anything from my hands causes damages, I am liable?
You will not be liable if you are unaware.
In order to establish tortious interference, 4 things need to be proven:
(1) A valid contractual relationship exists between X and Y,
(2) You know of this relationship,
(3) You intentionally and improperly interfered in the relationship and caused a breach or termination of the relationship, and
(4) X or Y has been damaged as a result.
The above is quoted directly from the court document between Glider and MDY with some slight modifications.
It's not really as serious as one might think because its important that there is both intent and damage caused. Damage caused can easily be trivial things like "manhours used to answer 1000 GM tickets" or "lost subscriptions from people unsubscribing" though, which are translatable to monetary values.
If Blizzard were to ban your addon, and then you renamed it or made changes to circumvent this ban, then intent would be clearly provable. Damage caused would also be provable because manhours are needed to update WoW to ban said addon.
I actually found this to be interesting. See the EULA of Unreal Tournement 2004 always had the "Addons must be free" requirement directly in the EULA.
Now the way Blizz/WoW did things, is they didn't have this. They let a culture of monetization of addons develop and now (tries) to shut the door on it. Of course that's attached to legal strong-arming because how else will they force things down to a more restrictive EULA/ToU? If WoW had had this clause from the beginning, things would be different.
The way it went, they allowed the genie out of the bottle and now force the lid back on to get back to a state they probably wished they had from the start.
I actually found this to be interesting. See the EULA of Unreal Tournement 2004 always had the "Addons must be free" requirement directly in the EULA.
Now the way Blizz/WoW did things, is they didn't have this. They let a culture of monetization of addons develop and now (tries) to shut the door on it. Of course that's attached to legal strong-arming because how else will they force things down to a more restrictive EULA/ToU? If WoW had had this clause from the beginning, things would be different.
The way it went, they allowed the genie out of the bottle and now force the lid back on to get back to a state they probably wished they had from the start.
Indeed, clauses of this type from the beginning don't cause issues, enacting them 4 years down the road causes hurt feelings.
I have no sympathy for the "hurt feelings" of anyone who writes an addon for an online computer game and then cries that they're not allowed to make money off the success of the game. If you want to get paid for writing code, get a job writing code. It's Blizzard's game, and it's 100% up to them what is and is not allowed in their game. If WoW weren't such a success, nobody would even think about trying to make money by writing addons for WoW, yet WoW didn't attain such success because someone wrote a great addon for it.
I sure as hell wouldn't be playing on any sort of regular basis if I couldn't modify the UI. I played FFXI for less than a year because, among other things, the interface blew and I couldn't FIX IT.
I used to think that blizz should 100% decision power, but I'm starting to change my mind on that one.
Say there is an activity that in no tangible way harms blizz or interferes with their IP hence does not mess with their leverage to monetize. Why should they have absolute control over that? Why should blizz by virtue of how they write their EULA/ToU have the power to block contracting of third parties that would not incur damages to them, in fact might do the opposite?
I do recognize that Blizz does need ways to protect their business interests and their gaming environment. But I think the control they should have should be limited to achieving exactly that and not more.
What changed my mind some on this is a lecture by a Princeton Prof on user created content and copyright:
If we granted the movie industry 100% control over how their copyright is to be protected, we wouldn't have a VCR as we know it. That is a scary thought because it is business protectionism gone wrong. The rights of consumers or third parties in this picture is completely trumped by the copyright/IP law.
I do feel that Blizz does overprotect here and that they try to prevent contracting that they probably shouldn't have the right to prevent.
Take the following scenario: Someone writes an addon and sells it. Someone buys that addons. The buyer keeps playing WoW and happily pays subscription. What is the damage to blizz in that scenario? Well at least overtly I see none. Now blizz rewrites the contract and bans the user and goes after the addon author under a tort and possibly copyright claim. The damage claim is cost to prevent the breach of contract, loss of subscription of the banned user and his upset friends. But these are self-inflicted by the very choice of that contract and acts to enforce it. If blizz chose to not try to enforce there would be no damages at all.
It's overprotection and prevention of things that really don't hurt anybody including blizz. In fact by the very prevention people are hurt, namely those that quite legitimately did things that now blizz tries to shut down.
I do think there is something wrong with that picture and what is wrong with that does fall down on Blizz's side. They try to put people out of business who haven't hurt them, in fact an argument can be made that value was added to blizz's business. That doesn't seem right.
That is very different from glider where I certainly agree with the argument that bots, generically, do incur damages to an MMO and MMOs should have means to protect the integrity of their code. Addons, generically, do not do either of these things because the MMO defines the interface.
But what a good resolution of this would be probably needs a smarter person than me.
I have no sympathy for the "hurt feelings" of anyone who writes an addon for an online computer game and then cries that they're not allowed to make money off the success of the game. If you want to get paid for writing code, get a job writing code. It's Blizzard's game, and it's 100% up to them what is and is not allowed in their game. If WoW weren't such a success, nobody would even think about trying to make money by writing addons for WoW, yet WoW didn't attain such success because someone wrote a great addon for it.
I would like to argue 2 points here, and probably frature the issue one more degree or expose it a bit.
Personal Responsibility for Actions. Users have downloaded, used, and accepted the fact under witch they have done so. For Carbonite users, they pay for it. For QuestHelper, they have to look or deal with the donation reminder. For the good vast majority of addons there is nothing that has to do with IRL money of donations or pay for in the addon at all.
When the User first downloads/installs these mods the see what they do, or eventually find out that they as for donations or have to pay for it. It is right then and there they need to decide to keep said mod or get rid of it.
It is our position as resepectable authors and community to tell people that paying for addons is universally stupid, as well as putting up with the Annoying side of donation reminders (Never use QH, it prolly got a very nice reminder that is unobtrusive.). But Blizzard enforcing this upon the community takes that choice of the Users away from them. If you don't allow for the opertunity for someone to do something stupid, they won't learn as effectively. "Telling a child that the stove is hot teaches them theory, letting themself burn their hand (abeit not exessively) gives them experiance not to touch it again and the lesson sticks 100x better than the theory."
However Blizzard has the position to police their own systems and enforce a set of standards for those systems. But i do have a problem with the situation around this policy being viably enforced and the ramifications out side of wow that would effect the entire software industry in general. That situation far outweighs that of WoW and makes the problem of wow addons largely irrelavant.
The Catch22: Everyone on has a problem with Ads in game. However if we get rid of ads in game, we have to throw out donations too. To viably enforce this blizzard has to threaten legal action, in doing so they are in a position to open a can of worms that would be very undesirable in the rest of the software industry, open or closed source.
I'm still not unbanning him. If somebody with more authority wants to they can do it themselves.
And I've said on IRC and on the official UI forums but not here yet, I'm on the fence right now about 'strike'. Not just because of the policy but because of the response from non-developers. Only one projects copyright is completely under my control so anything else I've worked on can be taken over by others, but the question is if anybody (qualified) actually would.
I'm still not unbanning him. If somebody with more authority wants to they can do it themselves.
And I've said on IRC and on the official UI forums but not here yet, I'm on the fence right now about 'strike'. Not just because of the policy but because of the response from non-developers. Only one projects copyright is completely under my control so anything else I've worked on can be taken over by others, but the question is if anybody (qualified) actually would.
I'm out of the loop on this one. What happened with BangCraft and what ban?
I don't know the details either, but have you looked inside !Bang!Core? It's some funny shit. That addon is packaged with every other addon they's written.
Banned. User has become a risk to the community due to but not limited to the following reasons:
* "encrypted" (obfuscated) addons
* "encrypted" (obfuscated) time limited trial addons
* "encrypted" (obfuscated) addons with high risk hidden features such as whispering the author with its version number upon targeting or mousing over the author
* distributing modified libraries with hidden code for use in "decrypting" the authors obfuscated addons
* distributing modified libraries that do not have a license that permits modification or redistribution
I was told to make it look good and 'official' back when I banned him so that's what I put as the message, all of it true. He made a new account and said "it says I'm banned but it doesn't say why" (if he really couldn't find out its a curse issue) and Ackis banned that account for ban evasion.
And when I just went to lookup the ban reason again to copy and paste it I noticed hes created 6 new accounts using the same IP address and email addresses from his website. So I have a little work to do.
Directly affected addons:
- Carbonite (no official word)
- Zygor's In-Game Leveling Guide (will discontinue when "forced" to)
- BangCraft (switched to donations)
Addons on strike
- Outfitter
- Mappy
- GroupCalendar
- Are You Lookin' At Me?
- PingSnitch
Addons that might die:
-QuestHelper
-nUI Standalone UI
At least check (via WoWInterface), nUI will continue. The "Pro" version will be a donation item as before, however the link will be a standard link on his site somewhere, just not somewhere obvious. Thus will will be possible to simply stumble upon the link and get nUI Pro for free. The author will not block that download which should (in theory) not violate the new Blizz policy since the Pro version will be "publicly available".
Which basically the community as a whole blames for all of this.
Perhaps I require more sleep, less time in between trying to keep up with threads >.<
And quite frankly, for a big part - yeah, I join ranks with the community. But that said, I can understand the "insert moneyz here" from there, just not the method. :(
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Curse PremiumYou will not be liable if you are unaware.
In order to establish tortious interference, 4 things need to be proven:
(1) A valid contractual relationship exists between X and Y,
(2) You know of this relationship,
(3) You intentionally and improperly interfered in the relationship and caused a breach or termination of the relationship, and
(4) X or Y has been damaged as a result.
The above is quoted directly from the court document between Glider and MDY with some slight modifications.
It's not really as serious as one might think because its important that there is both intent and damage caused. Damage caused can easily be trivial things like "manhours used to answer 1000 GM tickets" or "lost subscriptions from people unsubscribing" though, which are translatable to monetary values.
If Blizzard were to ban your addon, and then you renamed it or made changes to circumvent this ban, then intent would be clearly provable. Damage caused would also be provable because manhours are needed to update WoW to ban said addon.
http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companion/view?docId=blackwell/9781405148641/9781405148641.xml&chunk.id=ss1-5-13&toc.depth=1&toc.id=ss1-5-13&brand=9781405148641_brand
I actually found this to be interesting. See the EULA of Unreal Tournement 2004 always had the "Addons must be free" requirement directly in the EULA.
Now the way Blizz/WoW did things, is they didn't have this. They let a culture of monetization of addons develop and now (tries) to shut the door on it. Of course that's attached to legal strong-arming because how else will they force things down to a more restrictive EULA/ToU? If WoW had had this clause from the beginning, things would be different.
The way it went, they allowed the genie out of the bottle and now force the lid back on to get back to a state they probably wished they had from the start.
Indeed, clauses of this type from the beginning don't cause issues, enacting them 4 years down the road causes hurt feelings.
Although people have tried making similar claims. :p
There's the REALLY great line of "so and so's addon is one of the few reasons i still PLAY this game"
...ooooooookay :p
Say there is an activity that in no tangible way harms blizz or interferes with their IP hence does not mess with their leverage to monetize. Why should they have absolute control over that? Why should blizz by virtue of how they write their EULA/ToU have the power to block contracting of third parties that would not incur damages to them, in fact might do the opposite?
I do recognize that Blizz does need ways to protect their business interests and their gaming environment. But I think the control they should have should be limited to achieving exactly that and not more.
What changed my mind some on this is a lecture by a Princeton Prof on user created content and copyright:
http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~felten/rip/
If we granted the movie industry 100% control over how their copyright is to be protected, we wouldn't have a VCR as we know it. That is a scary thought because it is business protectionism gone wrong. The rights of consumers or third parties in this picture is completely trumped by the copyright/IP law.
I do feel that Blizz does overprotect here and that they try to prevent contracting that they probably shouldn't have the right to prevent.
Take the following scenario: Someone writes an addon and sells it. Someone buys that addons. The buyer keeps playing WoW and happily pays subscription. What is the damage to blizz in that scenario? Well at least overtly I see none. Now blizz rewrites the contract and bans the user and goes after the addon author under a tort and possibly copyright claim. The damage claim is cost to prevent the breach of contract, loss of subscription of the banned user and his upset friends. But these are self-inflicted by the very choice of that contract and acts to enforce it. If blizz chose to not try to enforce there would be no damages at all.
It's overprotection and prevention of things that really don't hurt anybody including blizz. In fact by the very prevention people are hurt, namely those that quite legitimately did things that now blizz tries to shut down.
I do think there is something wrong with that picture and what is wrong with that does fall down on Blizz's side. They try to put people out of business who haven't hurt them, in fact an argument can be made that value was added to blizz's business. That doesn't seem right.
That is very different from glider where I certainly agree with the argument that bots, generically, do incur damages to an MMO and MMOs should have means to protect the integrity of their code. Addons, generically, do not do either of these things because the MMO defines the interface.
But what a good resolution of this would be probably needs a smarter person than me.
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Curse PremiumI would like to argue 2 points here, and probably frature the issue one more degree or expose it a bit.
Personal Responsibility for Actions. Users have downloaded, used, and accepted the fact under witch they have done so. For Carbonite users, they pay for it. For QuestHelper, they have to look or deal with the donation reminder. For the good vast majority of addons there is nothing that has to do with IRL money of donations or pay for in the addon at all.
When the User first downloads/installs these mods the see what they do, or eventually find out that they as for donations or have to pay for it. It is right then and there they need to decide to keep said mod or get rid of it.
It is our position as resepectable authors and community to tell people that paying for addons is universally stupid, as well as putting up with the Annoying side of donation reminders (Never use QH, it prolly got a very nice reminder that is unobtrusive.). But Blizzard enforcing this upon the community takes that choice of the Users away from them. If you don't allow for the opertunity for someone to do something stupid, they won't learn as effectively. "Telling a child that the stove is hot teaches them theory, letting themself burn their hand (abeit not exessively) gives them experiance not to touch it again and the lesson sticks 100x better than the theory."
However Blizzard has the position to police their own systems and enforce a set of standards for those systems. But i do have a problem with the situation around this policy being viably enforced and the ramifications out side of wow that would effect the entire software industry in general. That situation far outweighs that of WoW and makes the problem of wow addons largely irrelavant.
The Catch22: Everyone on has a problem with Ads in game. However if we get rid of ads in game, we have to throw out donations too. To viably enforce this blizzard has to threaten legal action, in doing so they are in a position to open a can of worms that would be very undesirable in the rest of the software industry, open or closed source.
- Carbonite
- Zygor's In-Game Leveling Guide
- Outfitter
- Mappy
- GroupCalendar
- Are You Lookin' At Me?
- PingSnitch
Possibly Affected:
-QuestHelper
-nUI Standalone UI
Directly affected addons:
- Carbonite (no official word)
- Zygor's In-Game Leveling Guide (will discontinue when "forced" to)
- BangCraft (switched to donations)
Addons on strike
- Outfitter
- Mappy
- GroupCalendar
- Are You Lookin' At Me?
- PingSnitch
Addons that might die:
-QuestHelper
-nUI Standalone UI
I'm still not unbanning him. If somebody with more authority wants to they can do it themselves.
And I've said on IRC and on the official UI forums but not here yet, I'm on the fence right now about 'strike'. Not just because of the policy but because of the response from non-developers. Only one projects copyright is completely under my control so anything else I've worked on can be taken over by others, but the question is if anybody (qualified) actually would.
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Curse PremiumI'm out of the loop on this one. What happened with BangCraft and what ban?
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Curse PremiumI was told to make it look good and 'official' back when I banned him so that's what I put as the message, all of it true. He made a new account and said "it says I'm banned but it doesn't say why" (if he really couldn't find out its a curse issue) and Ackis banned that account for ban evasion.
And when I just went to lookup the ban reason again to copy and paste it I noticed hes created 6 new accounts using the same IP address and email addresses from his website. So I have a little work to do.
At least check (via WoWInterface), nUI will continue. The "Pro" version will be a donation item as before, however the link will be a standard link on his site somewhere, just not somewhere obvious. Thus will will be possible to simply stumble upon the link and get nUI Pro for free. The author will not block that download which should (in theory) not violate the new Blizz policy since the Pro version will be "publicly available".
http://www.wowinterface.com/forums/showthread.php?t=21327