Did you know that practicing law without a license is illegal in all 50 states? 
2 Likes
Well there is Illegal and then there is unlawful and then there are actions that open you up to liability.
Illegal is forbidden by law, Unlawful is not authorized (sanctioned) by law and the third means you are infringing on someone’s intellectual property and may be liable for damages.
Illegal? Not really. Unlawful, possible and it definitely opens you up to liability.
There’s criminal law and there’s civil law. Breaching either is unlawful. IP law is most often a civil matter (liability), however there can also be criminal implications.
Does it really matter? Soon enough classic will be released killing 99% of vanilla private servers and hopefully in time due to its success Blizzard will release TBC and WotLK servers then killing off all private servers that matter
4 Likes
The use of public is what makes it liable for blizzard to come for it. You can make your own personal private server for personal use without issue. It when you release it for public consumption. Regardless of what emulator you use you still using their IP, weather you are making monetary gain or not specially since blizzard charges a monthly fee to use their servers and you are offering a version for free regardless of what version 1.12 or 8.1 you are still distributing their IP without their permission.
Just like music once you buy the album or song you can make billions of copies of it for your personal use you cant however hand out free copies for public consumption.
1 Like
While this is an argument that people could have in the past. The fact that Blizzard is making a Classic server is making this argument null. Anytime anyone tries to open a private server Blizzard will just be able to shut them down and anyone who tries to say “Well WoW isn’t what it used to bed.”, Blizzard will just point at the Classic servers.
2 Likes
I think the concept of “fair use” is applicable to both the trademarks as well as copyright, when it comes to a software emulation (as opposed to, for example, using the actual source code you came by through untoward means) of something like WoW:
Blizzard certainly has a lot of rights in this respect, and in addition to those rights a “use it or lose it” enforcement of their trademarks (i.e. if they don’t aggressively police the misuse of their trademarks it becomes known as “abandoned” and more or less free for anyone to use in the future) that must be understood in context. However, their legal rights are not absolute, and there is room for certain iterations of something like private servers to thread a legal needle and be able to operate without getting successfully sued by Blizzard when doing so.
I imagine, though I don’t know for sure because I haven’t dove into this, it is a tricky needle to thread.
1 Like
Private servers aren’t really emulation though.
And Emulator is a program that acts like the operating system of something else.
Edit: Also, in the world of emulation, it is illegal to download and play roms you don’t actually own.
A private server is just a rip off of a WoW server. And even if you want to argue it’s just emulation. Fair use has to meet 1 very critical standard. Is it transformative? And the answer to that for private servers is most assuredly no, because they are trying their best to recreate Vanilla WoW down to the letter.
They aren’t private servers. They are pirate servers. WoW already is a private server game. The owners are Acti-Blizz. It isn’t open to the public. You have to become a member of a private group to access it.
1 Like
Yes, it may be the case that pirate servers by and large do not meet the full “fair use” descriptors such as “transformative” or other critical things that makes them fair use and not piracy. This is not to say, however, that it is impossible to make a private server into something legitimately transformative through a proper fair use of the copyrighted material.
Inasmuch as Blizzard wishes to waste money on it, they do need to do at least a bare minimum of protecting their trademarks, but in some cases even a legitimate “fair use” scenario can be successfully litigated against simply because the fair user lacks the resources to defend the fairness of the use.
I could imagine, for example, a private server that is not merely a ripoff of Blizzard’s WoW, even if there are no relevant examples of this actually happening in the last 14 years.
While I agree that they could make it something different, the goal of private servers is not to transform wow but to recreate it.
I can see your point, but in the end they didn’t really recreate WoW – at least the Vanilla servers didn’t. The key was that there was no progression into the BC expansion, which transforms the nature of an expansive game into a game that simply fizzles out and dies, or one that renews/recycles itself.
Probably not enough to meet a “transformative” definition, to be sure, especially after Blizzard releases Classic and has copyrighted that version of a non-expansive game.
Asking this question here is just going to net you a whole lot of bad information.
“Fair Use”, Tell that to the guy I won a summary judgement for using some Artwork I created with out my permission. He argued it in arbitration that I wasn’t using it. I showed the judge the copyright paperwork and certificate and was awarded 3 times the worth of the artwork. Made $6000 plus he had to pay for the court fees.
I’m no lawyer but my understanding is that Fair Use primarily exists to allow things like reviewing a movie and showing clips from said movie without being sued for copyright infringement.
It is not a “Well you weren’t using it so…” clause that some people around here seem to think it is.
Plus, Blizzard rather clearly has not abandoned World of Warcraft and “Vanilla” is not a product. Nothing in the original agreement we clicked accept to with Blizzard said that they were obligated to always offer us an original version of the game to play without updates.
3 Likes
It seems like the majority of people have absolutely no idea about emulation. Private servers do not use ANYTHING created and copyrighted by Blizzard, the emulators are built from scratch.
The only potentially “unlawful” use comes from the player’s side, because they might be launching the game’s client without having bought it at some point.
Legal advice you can TRUST folks. Right here on an internet message forum!
1 Like
Couldn’t be further from the truth.
1 Like
It will be interesting if Classic and private servers both spike in popularity in a synergistic, win-win sort of way.
I can actually foresee this reinforcing them because the people who work on emulators can now datamine directly from the game instead of guessing and browsing 15 years old archives.