Blizzard suing StarCraft II hackers
After the bans, the courts.
Blizzard isn't stopping at wholesale bans of players using hacks to cheat at StarCraft II. It's going after the authors of the hacks themselves – in the courts.
GameSpot reports that the developer has filed suit against three offenders in the Los Angeles District Court. Two of them are Canadian, while the third lives in Peru. Blizzard claims that their cheat programs are in violation of the user licence agreement and Battle.net terms of use, as well as infringing copyright.
The cheats, it said in the suit, were available "just days after release" and were "designed to modify (and in fact destroy) the StarCraft II online game experience". Blizzard feels that the StarCraft II hacks damage the experience to such an extent that legitimate users grow dissatisfied with the game and communicate their displeasure – therefore resulting in lost sales.
Blizzard is therefore demanding damages and wants the hackers to surrender any profits from the sale of the hacks, which, it claims, also induce others to infringe copyright.
"When users of the Hacks download, install, and use the Hacks, they copy StarCraft II copyrighted content into their computer's RAM in excess of the scope of their limited license, as set forth in the EULA and ToU, and create derivative works of StarCraft II," reads the suit.
This is a similar, if less obscure, intellectual property argument to the one Blizzard used to shut down the World of Warcraft Glider bot, a program that automated levelling and farming in the MMO. That case won the developer $6 million in damages.
