I was under the impression that the addon developers don’t own their addons. Blizzard does.
Hard to trust Overwolf after knowing what they did in past. I don’t like giving anyone who had hand dirtied with malware a chance.
With that said, WoWUp is very simple and lightweight. Love it.
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Addons are derivative work. Circular 14: Copyright in Derivative Works and Compilations
Blizzard content belongs to Blizzard, but new code, ideas, graphics, etc. belong to the addon creators. It’s pretty much the same in every modding community across gaming.
That’s why Skyrim and Minecraft are so rich in delicious drama: addon authors telling each other “no you can’t use my stuff” is only possible because they really do own their derivative work. If the company did, tweaking anyone’s addons would be fair game for anyone, as fair game as modding the base game itself. But we clearly see it’s not. Try forking WoW’s TSM or Skyrim’s Unofficial Patch, see the TSM team or Arthmoor come down on you with the wrath of angry gods.
The EULA can say whatever it wants, but corporations being cute with a “we own whatever you make and if you don’t agree don’t bother making anything” scary-lawyer-speak approach would defeat the entire principle of protecting derivative works in the first place. Like going after Fair Use. No gaming company to date dared to test it in court.
Then again, a simple user getting in a legal dispute with a publisher is a surefire way to get your entire account with that publisher nuked (yay for digital libraries you don’t own, amirite?), so I’d say the scare tactics tend to work in the publisher’s favor most of the time.
2 things, So theoretically nothing is stopping someone from downloading every addon through overwold / keeping them updating and sharing their interface file? Interesting concept right? A little bit of automation here and there and boom you’ve got a client that’s so grey area I don’t think anyone would know what to do. (not that it would matter anyway, as anyone who wants to go against overwolf just need to host in a friendly country)
Second thing, It’s hilariously easy to block overwolfs ad’s just FYI for anyone looking into it.
We do to be polite and efficient with their bandwidth.
Sure you could write a bot that essentially just loads up the addon page and guesses what the download URL is. But that would use up a lot more bandwidth then just using the API to initiate the download.
I think you meant to say here that Addons are NOT derivative works.
Derivative works need to contain significant parts of the original to be considered derivative works. In a emulation lawsuit a judge ruled that the function calls and variables used in an API wasn’t significant enough to be copyrighted (while the code was).
In fact it’s fully possible to write a wow addon that runs purely on Lua with absolutely no Blizzard related function calls or variables used it in. In fact you probably use one already - LibStub is an example of an addon with nothing Blizzard related inside it.
You wouldn’t be able to rehost someone else’s addons as , by the Berne convention an Author owns the copyright to it the instance it’s in tangible form. The moment they start typing in the code for their addon they own copyright to that addon and only they can change their license for it.
While there are more permissive licenses not every single addon author out there is going to up and change the license on their addons to those more permissive licenses.
And sure you could make a scraping bot that reads the addon page then guesses the URL from that requires using a lot more bandwidth then simply making an API function call. If you did this you would run the risk of addon sites taking action to stop people using such a method to download. In fact inefficient bandwidth use is probably the main reason why they blocked wowmatrix from downloading from Curse/Wowinterface. That thing was loading up the entire addon page , ads and all 3-4 times … per addon download.