Gamers Rights Law » Blizzard

Communications, People! (Developers’s Corner)

jaymoffitt — Tue, 23 Nov 2010 16:15:23 +0000

10 things every online game should have. (From blog Imtalkingames)

Photo Credit: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/; http://www.flickr.com/photos/fotologic/216182916/

Great series of articles, at “clicknothing” by a known game designer, Part 1 and Part 2 (And yes, I don’t understand it all… but thankfully it’s a series… I’m hoping there’s a happy ending at the curtain).

Gamer Entitlement, (from a game designer’s personal blog) More great articles after the jump

Executive… listens??From the always readable “gamepolitics”( Most gamers think this…. right?)

From Keen and Graev’s gaming blog; (Words to live… and design games by)

The boss battle; why? From Online magazine Resolution-Magazine (Very quirky article about game design of boss battles)

Just an opinion piece, about game developer culture in general not really a legal point, just about communication. (From Multiplaying)

Including milestones in your game developer agreement ; older article by Atty. Tom Buscaglia… (his series of articles is still the most comprehensive I’ve read about communications between developers and attorney as allies and not adversaries)

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Well, that about covers what’s out there about communication with attorneys and with your audience. Apparently it’s much more exciting to talk about design and art (I think so too). But like my “about” page says, “a necessary evil” is what an attorney is. If you need a start or a jump-start with your company; email me through the link, and I’ll provide my information (or someone in your jurisdiction) to get you some help with your game project.

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Jay Moffitt is a Tennessee attorney. This blog is for entertainment and educational purposes only and does not consitute legal advice or create an attorney/client relationship. Jay Moffitt is not certified as a specialist in this area by Tennessee and Tennessee does not certify specialists in this practice area. All comments will be answered promptly and courteously as long as they are germane to the discussion and do not contain specific game names or incidents

First, a Blizzard Warning

jaymoffitt — Mon, 18 Oct 2010 14:34:47 +0000

From the Movie ”Death Becomes Her”, “Now, a warning“, link to trailer. Well, they couldn’t say Blizzard didn’t warn them. More after the jump

Photo by Megaman, http://www.flickr.com/photos/meta-man/4198170449/

Used via Creative Commons License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

After the warning, Blizzard is on record filing suit against 6 alleged hackers in the game Starcraft 2 ®, story here (according to Gamasutra). According to the story, that lawsuit was dropped.

This week, there was a lawsuit filed in California against three hackers (according to Geekosytem). More links here, (Ripten), and here (Big Download).

All versions of the story claim the three defendants are out of the U.S., but are subject to U.S. jurisdiction per the End User License Agreement (EULA) of Starcraft II.

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Purely commentary: As you know, this legal blog frequently links to independent gaming blogs whose view of the actions of the large gaming companies range from respectful to downright sarcastic. In this case, my own personal commentary will be much more kind (as it usually is).

It’s not only listed in the EULA, it’s posted as a warning on the Website (which, frankly, a lot more people will read than the entirety of the EULA), and then enforcement followed. Apparently in the first incident reported (and I must report I have found no lawsuit link, either my usual sources or in the news stories) the purported lawsuit was dropped. In the second claimed lawsuit it is reported as still live.

These games, whether paid or free-to-play (still a term of art) have a very real positive obligation to monitor cheaters. As an attorney, I believe that litigation (either against gamers, or gamers feeling they are unfairly targeted) is a small but important part of that equation. To me, this is almost a case study of the right way to approach the problem of “unfair advantage” in a large online game. Of course, this is purely predicated on current reports.

As you know, I’m no apologist for the large gaming companies (who many people find to be tone-deaf to individual gamers). However, specifically in this case, I couldn’t point out a different way they could have went with this.

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Real ID and the worldwide impact of gaming

jaymoffitt — Sat, 31 Jul 2010 16:29:33 +0000

(Photo courtesy of FoxSpain; Flickr CC attribution license)

Starcraft II will be a worldwide phenomenon. The RealID requirement, since retracted, is causing some ripples across US gaming blogs, and some other places. I’m going to explain why the U.S. is, perhaps, not as important as we like to think…. right after the jump….

Let me give some background. It’s gathered from a couple of very good, well-researched articles by people who are much, much more tuned into the worldwide gaming scene than myself. (Announcement of Starcraft II at an Olympic Stadium in Seoul.) (From MyMim an estimate of first-day sales of 1 million in U.S…. huge… and 3-4 million in Korea.. astounding.) The long story short is that Starcraft II is going to have much more of an impact in Korea and other parts of Southeast Asia than in the U.S. That’s the pure numbers speaking, not my own insignificant opinion.

And if you’re talking “worst-case scenario”, remember, if gamers in the U.S. don’t like the way a game’s forums work, they can refuse to purchase a game. If a government such as China, or some other government with that power, wishes to strictly regulate or prohibit a game, they can (and will). Just look at China and the difficulties of Blizzard’s World of Warcraft in keeping servers open and available there. (See my related post).

Nicholas DeLeon on Crunchgear talks about Blizzard and hypocrisy. (It details the move as more of a “trial balloon”, like a politician would use to gauge public-opinion impact of a policy move.

One last link, from an English-language Korean site, that explains the anti-anonymity movement in Korea.

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[Note: This inspiration brought on from Entertainment on Saturday's post about point of view.] Second, largely ignored issue about RealID and bloggers. You cannot, as a public blogger, make a realistic argument that total privacy is your utmost goal. You’ve already made yourself known, publicized, and you have no synchronicity of thought with the TRUE anonymous individual. The individual that shuns RealID, doesn’t link their Google page to their Youtube, doesn’t automate their comment-posting ID, and is otherwise paranoid to have any trace of their actual identity linked to their UserID. In this regard a blogger, though myself and others may “argue” a viewpoint about anonymity, do not share a common ground. We are speculating about reasons, as myself (and other attorneys and/or gamers who blog) have decided that being heard is more important than keeping a total anonymous persona. Of course many great gaming bloggers use personas, but as an attorney-blogger (who also collaterally solicits business in the areas of my expertise) we must fully disclose all email and point-of-contact information if requested by any potential client or contact.

Privacy; Blizzard; and being the only one in costume…

jaymoffitt — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 14:36:56 +0000

Lucious the Luscious; Sabrina the Sorceress; Paul Philbaum, Crombie, PA, acct.; Rena Tsolitias, adm. asst to Mr. Philbaum; Larry Goldberg, CPA; Crombie, PA. (All names totally fictional, for the purposes of illustration)

Maybe your teammates figure out that you’re an accountant, too. After all, if your friends all go by their real name and you’re simply “Grandmaster G”; you go from part of a club to “that guy”. No one wants to be “that guy”. We want to be “that group”.

If you opt out when all else are “opting in”, you go from being cool to being an insider trying to be an outsider. More after the jump…

Photo courtesy of Flickr; http://www.flickr.com/photos/katclay/4449231084/, Creative Commons, attribution required.

An outstandingly thought-out article about Blizzard’s plan to use RealID for Starcraft MMO. (From Networkworld)

Another incisive guess (or discovery) from a Harvard law student’s blog about WHY this Blizzard game makes RealID necessary. (Korea?)

A gamer’s blog with a decidedly even-handed description of why RealID is a bad idea. (Epic Slant) My absolute favorite quote, “The internet is full of cowards. These cowards delight in forums and message boards because they can say terrible things with little to no consequence”

A gaming blog’s listing of reasons why it is a good idea, from MMOsite.com, Celkie’s blog. (Total disagreement; but the logic is impeccable, that’s why it’s included)

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Other blogs giving their opinion on the debate, (including an incident with the de-privatization of an executive’s identity, and an about-face by Blizzard[perhaps] on this being a firm rule). These presented without comment.

http://www.gamingunion.net/news/blizzards-community-manager-the-first-victim-of-real-id–2141.html

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2010/07/esrbs-privacy-badge-all-about-best-practices-not-anonymity.ars

http://kotaku.com/5585451/people-complaining-about-blizzards-real-id-have-their-email-addresses-exposed

http://www.digitalsociety.org/2010/07/is-world-of-warcraft-headed-into-privacy-troubles/

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8806623.stm

http://content.usatoday.com/communities/gamehunters/post/2010/07/blizzard-backs-down-from-real-name-requirement-on-its-forums/1

http://www.strategyinformer.com/news/8551/battlenet-removes-veil-of-anonymity-on-forums-real-names-used

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New wave of copyright lawsuits

jaymoffitt — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 21:30:45 +0000

Zynga vs PlayerAuctions (From Web site IP trademark lawyer)
Zynga Game Network, Inc. v. Playerauctions.com, CV10-2576 CBM (C.D. Cal. 2010). (Zynga says that Player Auctions is making money from their work. We’ll keep up with this one.) Others to keep up with after the jump.

Blog from SF Weekly SF lawsuit filed; Crowdstar vs. Wonder Hill; great article about an Aquarium game. (Crowdstar recently rumored to be looked at by Microsoft).

Hitler parody sites taken down. http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/popular-hitler-downfall-parodies-removed-from-youtube-company-cites-copyright-infringement/ Technically this was not a “game-related” lawsuit, but the most famous of these parodies was for X-box.

Gamasutra; Blizzard sues. Gamasutra; Blizzard sues and drops suits

All these are new, therefore no comments on ongoing litigation, but you should read up on these… and perhaps we are in a “new wave” of copyright litigation after a bit of a lull.

Crossing the Line

jaymoffitt — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 16:26:57 +0000

Tracking your virtual character to track YOU!

Pixels and Policy has a great article about using a guy’s WOW profile to arrest him in real life. Extraordinary piece of reporting about interaction between police and WOW support system.

This is a link to a somewhat related story where Blizzard (WOW-maker) was sued for the way the program worked with personal information.

Some other interesting ideas that use the Metaverse to reveal something about the person behind the character.
There’s an article on Hypergrid Business about “Virtual Drag a Thorny Issue for Employers”.
I especially liked the quote, “A company can require that employees present themselves in a consistent and professional manner while at work and make clear who they are, she said, but can also decide to be flexible on this issue.”

Here’s a link to an earlier story at Poe News that describes an earlier arrest using simpler technology.

There is an interesting story in Networking World magazine describing how DNS tools helped track down the “Craiglist killer”.

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As always, the authoritative peer-reviewed type of article here below the fold.

Levin, Avner and Sánchez Abril, Patricia, Two Notions of Privacy Online (2009). Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law, Vol. 11, pp. 1001-1051, 2009. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1428422
My favorite quote: “According to network privacy, information is considered by online socializers to be private as long as it is not disclosed outside of the network to which they initially disclosed it”.

Banned in Videogames – a Brief History

jaymoffitt — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 17:33:05 +0000

Today’s article is MAINLY about lifetime, universal, or at last long-term banning.

Let’s break down the component parts first of all. No discussion of legal terms is complete without a glossary, so I’m going to give you the abridged version. There will also be a referral for outside reading to understand the history of community in video games.

Universal banning – A pipe dream. Not yet technologically possible from an economic standpoint. For example, that would be Sony (or Activision) or Microsoft feels you have created a grievance so heinous, or repeated on so many occasions, that your personal ID (not just your gamertag, or your machine-tag, or your IP address, but you PERSONALLY, are banned from their games online at any computer, any console, or any IP address.) Developers can only dream of this type of power.

Banned by gamertag – this is the way of most online games. Depending upon whether player is paying for the gaming, or whether it is free-to-subscribe (and paid via optional add-ons) the banning varies in effectiveness. Tracks you by username and billing/registration information. Obviously if free-to-subscribe it is simple (if you are dishonest) to give an email address and a fake name.

Banned by game console or IP address – This is the most used these days. Especially with Xbox360 and PS3 accounts now updating regularly so as to tie these to the internet, the difficulty of “just playing” and not connecting is very complicated. And so the banning effectively “bricks” the Xbox360 or the PS3 to any additional updates through the company servers.

Starting from most recent to a little earlier: here goes…

Bragg vs. Linden
A great article on Law.com about the banning of Bragg. It is insidiously complicated or notoriously simple, depending upon how you look at it. Here is your legal citation and synopsis, “After a dispute over a land auction, Linden seized Bragg’s virtual land as well as an account with $2,000. Bragg v. Linden Research Inc., No. 06-08711 (Chester Co., Pa., Ct. C.P.). ”

Dailytech tells the story of the estimated one million X-box live customers banned from using the service for having modded consoles. The quote from Microsoft is “When a Gamertag comes up as violating our policies for online behavior, the person who owns that Gamertag is punished by being banned from the service. Keep in mind, this isn’t just a ban on a particular game. This is a ban on the Xbox Live service as a whole, so you won’t be able to go online at all during your ban”

Activision’s proactive legal strategy to give cease-and-desist orders to Websites running programs/addons that Activision feels violates the terms of use. (The Cease and Desist letter posted at Play No Evil video-game security blog).

Blizzard bans WOW glider from ingame use, and is victorious in the lawsuit. This is another version where the users are permanently banned.

Amicus brief filed by Public Knowledge in the case. Incredible background if you’re asking “what’s modding?”.
Ongoing coverage of the case given by Virtually Blind from 2008. Still the superior coverage of the older cases.

Kotaku has a story about Blizzard banning 350,000 users in Battle.net. The justification and method listed is “The Diablo II CD keys associated with the closed Diablo II accounts are now restricted from playing on Battle.net for approximately 30 days. Repeat offenders will have their accounts closed and their CD keys permanently banned from Battle.net. As a reminder, we reserve the right to close the accounts and ban the CD keys of players who are caught cheating on Battle.net. ”

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Here are a couple of places to find some background on the philosophy of games, choices, and banning.

Interview with Raph Koster :A point he brings up during the discussion is that the biggest and most successful games on the market are the ones that present very little choices for the gamer, and pegs them into roles that need to be fulfilled or they fail (World of Warcraft is the example).

So to this lawyer, it makes sense that the games with the fewer choices would be the most vigilant about enforcement to restrict those choices (i.e. mods, add-ons, etc.).

2. Commentary on a video-games Website; “is there a banning quota?”

3. Again, a good sampling of the response from developers as far as banning games.

4. Posts tagged banning at Massively.com (A great resource for MMO news)

5. Why Governments aren’t Gods and God’s aren’t Governments. Great article, especially concerning the whole philosophical reasoning of why an operation must be able to govern in games.

6. And lastly, of course, one for the eggheads. Basically, an article that gave me a headache, so it MUST BE GOOD.

If you’re looking for a broad statement of philosophy from me about this subject, you can move on. It is like all games, the choices on banning reflect the choices of the developers. Whether that is an actionable offense by the developers to kick out a player forever from their world, that legal decision is in my opinion at least 5 or 10 years away at least.

World Of Warcraft China Server Now Reinstated

jaymoffitt — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 12:58:14 +0000

The World of Warcraft MMO, an Activision/Blizzard product, is now back online in China with NetEase as the administrator.

Earlier this year World of Warcraft was suspended in China. The Chinese government administration did not license the continuation of a server for WOW.
This online game has about five million active users in China, accounting for about 30% of its total users worldwide. In April 2009, Blizzard Entertainment terminated its operating contract with the game’s former Chinese operator, The9, and selected Chinese portal and online game provider NetEase.com as its new operator in China. Since the operator replacement, the operation of the game in China has been suspended and users of the game have consistently complained to get the game restarted.

World of Warcraft in China has seen some six weeks of downtime as government regulators process their approval of the transition to operator NetEase…According to the MMOSite report, the lack of specific age ratings for games in China make issues like showing bones or the undead a gray area. You should read this story to see the difficulties of running a worldwide game across multiple government environments.(legal and cultural)

Here are other links pointing to this monumental story in the MMO world.

The Escapist Magazine

Softpedia talks about the small section of China to the entire WOW market

MMORPQ discusses WOW online again

Gamasutra discusses WOW reopens

Article for background about WOW opening in China, 2005
Another excellent article by same author; great discussion about difference in subscription plans China to US

For the full scope of the story to the World of Warcraft community, read a couple of the stories linked in this article;
WoW shutting down one server in China (GREAT LINKS)

And just these last two; to show the extent of World of Warcraft’s growth.

Blizzard reveals WOW operations

WOW Audience Grows (Gamasutra)

Technically, I know this is a Chinese government administrative decision, and not a legal decision. But it shows the tremendous worldwide reach of these games, and the jurisdictional nightmares if a user wants to file suit against an entity spanning dozens of countries, and thus dozens of different legal environments. It’s also important to have this background when reviewing individual lawsuits against multinational games. Hopefully you’ll read these and have a little empathy for those writing End User License Agreements(EULA) to span five continents’ scrutiny, or a little sympathy for the players or even the lawyers trying to make sense of them.

Jay Moffitt is a TN attorney. The words do not constitute legal advice, and do not create an attorney/client relationship. Jay Moffitt is not certified as a specialist in the subject matter by the Tennessee Bar, and the Tennessee bar does not have a certification in this specialty. Copyright October 2, 2009.