Scapegaming, a private World of Warcraft server company that wrote its own software to host a private version of the world's biggest MMO, has been ordered to cough up $88,594,539 and hand it over to Blizzard. Whoops.
If you're not familiar with private World of Warcraft servers, they work by emulating the official Blizzard servers and working with altered clients designed to hook into them. They can be pretty shakey - they have to reverse engineer the server code for a start, and it usually takes them some time to catch up with patches, bug fixes, and new features. It's also copyright infringement, and pretty expensive at that. Scapegaming apparently put in some micro-transaction framework, but that still made up just over $3m - that leaves $85m in damages from copyright infringement.
They still have the chance to appeal, and if I were them, I'd take it. People, if you're going to infringe copyright, don't infringe Blizzard's copyright. Why would you do that?
[via WoW.com ]
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