“Failure to police unauthorized use of one’s Intellectual Property can result in your losing the legal right to enforce the mark against unauthorized third-party users.”
In 2011, Blizzard legally established that the third party sale of in-game gold was “an Intellectual Properties violation (of) Blizzard Entertainment Inc. for the (unauthorized, third-party) sale of World of Warcraft Merchandise.”
It is objective to observe and acknowledge that Blizzard’s policing of third party exchanges of their intellectual property has gone largely unenforced, especially compared to smaller companies with smaller budgets which have hired employees for actively monitoring illicit activity and, more importantly, are banning such violations of their intellectual property before substantial profits are made (as opposed to waiting on increasingly rare “banwaves”.)
Much like Blizzard shuts down private servers within their legal reach like Nostalrius, or hand-delivered a cease and desist to the GM of the explosively popular Gummy TBC within minutes of it going live, they must also actively protect their IP from Gold Buyers and Gold Sellers.
Yet, by typing “/who rogue blackrock d” or glancing at other popular botting spots, it seems apparent that Blizzard isn’t even doing the bare-minimum in regards to the Trojan Horse of intellectual property & legally established “Merchandise” theft that is WoW Gold.
Which means Blizzard’s legal enforcement rights over their own IP are in grave jeopardy.
So are they failing to enforce or they are but their effort is just bare minimum to meet legal requirements? Pick one because right now you contradict yourself.
Not taking their side but simply pointing out the obvious.
A common mistake that non-attorneys make is vastly oversimplifying issues to reach a desired conclusion, and not objectively analyzing a situation to determine the correct outcome. This is one of those times.
