http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/th...geNo=1&sid=1#0

From Eyonix's post, it looks like Blizzard's lawsuit deals just with in-game spam and nothing to do with the legalities of gold-selling.

The legalities of gold-selling itself (and the whole virtual property issue surrounding it) is still one I don't think Blizzard will want to touch. Many of the big dogs have gone sniffing around and frankly, the potential disaster represented by getting a bad verdict is just too dangerous.

It is quite interesting that they are going to try and stop them from spamming in-game though and frankly I'd love to read the brief. I suspect it is mostly just a harassing tactic but hey, fair is fair.

Well done, Blizzard. They actually get the goldsellers for spamming, pretty smart. Since it is virtually impossible to actually sue them for the whole property thing.

What exactly does the lawsuit entail? Is it based on EULA enforcement?

This is going to set one hell of a precedent if they fail in court. Time to sell my golden efreeti boots for $500 again.

At some point someone in the Benefactor Bar said they had an "inside source" that works for one of the gold spam companies and said that they were exploiting a hole in Blizzard's servers that allowed them to spam whispers without being detected. Might have something to do with that.

Not really, any addon author that even knows a little but about the API could have made something to spam everyone, it wasn't throttled either in the limit of what you could send, one of the changes in 2.1 was throttling the amount of whispers that could be sent within a short period of time.

Yes but that gets recorded by the server. What we were told was happening was an undetectable way of doing it.

wowrex seems to have taken their place. I'm getting frequent spam from them now. I report it every time. If that bypass others were doing is true that is just terrible programming.

Congress just passed anti-spam legislation a few days ago. I don't know if the executive signed it into law but the timing may be deliberate. Of course I don't know if the bill only involves email spam or what amounts to glorified AIM spam as well.

That's the thing though Quigon, they are very carefully avoiding the virtual property aspects. In the present legal environment I still think it would be suicide to try and get at them on that basis.

I was quite serious actually, I'd love to see the legal basis for what they are proceeding with, although I imagine it isn't very interesting actually. Unless the Spam legislation is far more broad than past consumer protection legislation it shouldn't even be applicable and isn't what they are pressing anyhow it would seem. 5GP says they are just going to try and bully them with lawyer hours for a while and see what happens. Blizzard has the muscle now to do so and probably with some success.

Nonetheless, even if it isn't perfect, good on Blizzard for at least stepping up to the plate and trying to do something about the problem.

To put it briefly, it seems like they could get the spamming companies for some form of advertising without their (Blizzard's) permission, especially within their own service.

I'm curious to see where the lawsuit goes. New Zealand recently passed anti-spam legislation, and I actually read the text of the Act. In the NZ legislation, electronic communication seemed to be defined broadly enough that in-game spam messages could potentially be covered.

Chris

Take "video game" and "virtual gold" out of it.

Let's say I modify a company's proprietary software and use it to connect to their service, and then bombard their users with spam promoting an unauthorized service against the company's wishes. Let's say I modify AOL's client and connect to their servers and bypass AOL's built-in filters to spam their chatrooms advertising penny stocks and Viagra, and do so repeatedly despite being banned and restricted where possible.

Does that sound like something a company might sue for? Probably not even very controversial.

Bingo. And since this is a civil lawsuit, all Blizzard has to do is demonstrate resulting damages; it'd be hard to peg a figure on how many subscriptions they lose due to spam (though I'm sure they'll try) but it'll be very easy to demonstrate increased server load costing them $$$, and resources/labor spent on curbing spam.

Anti-spam legislation doesn't even need to factor into it; this is a far more invasive method of spamming.

Hmm, it really isn't so cut and dried though. Say you have a company that offers a service with embedded communications of some sort. Let's look non-gaming and say something like instant messaging through AIM. A user can send messages that are "spammy" and the license holder is quite welcome to terminate their service based on that. Going from the ability to do that to the unwelcome party owing legal compensation for those actions though is a pretty big leap, even if there is a pattern of behavior and even if you can show that it is behavior detrimental to the service itself. Of course you can sue but that's miles away from getting a jury to deliver anything or even having enough to bring it to that point.

Also, some of that hinges on the idea that promoting gold selling/buying is in and of itself illegal or even detrimental to the service and that still has no legal basis other than violating the EULA, which itself is a nightmare to enforce beyond right to terminate. Since Blizzard is effectively bound to not even touch the legality of virtual property sales, their hands are a little tied on that front too.

I really don't know and I certainly wish Blizzard the best on this. Still, these sorts of things are awfully tricky from a legal standpoint and when you are dealing with essentially untraceable accounts, even more difficult indeed. We might all "know" that P4H is doing a lot of this activity but proving that is another thing entirely of course. Further demonstrating economic damage is even more a problem I imagine, nevermind getting a judge and jury that understand the issues at stake.

I am speculating rampantly of course and will await the outcome with great interest.

With this though, Blizzard is attempting this on the right way, look at it this way (kick out any portion of being a video game) Lets say you're walking around and someone is stalking you / bothering you repetedly, what can you (blizzard) do?

1. ask them to refrain from doing this? *check*

2. Provide self resolution tasks (limiting ability to send multiple spams) *check*

3. Formal / Legal request to stop this from happening *check*

Yep, everything looks correct, next form of action would be a legal sense if you classify this under harrassment, which it blantantly is, receiving 30 odd spams a day even though you as a player do not want this on your gameplay time. Also, I beleive in the EULA it notes something on excessive harrassment, which they should be able to draw on as the characters logging into the servers to spam in the first place need to accept this before the game even lets them log in, and logging in is an agreement that you accept these terms.

Is it just me, or does it also feel partly that this is because Peons4Hire crossed the line during the originally planned Stratics Developer chat? That also seems particularly close to being damage done that can be proven, one of the reasons it was cancelled because of technical problems as I recall... And a certain gold-seller company was spamming the place through joining with varying nicknames, which certainly causes some extra overhead on the server, possibly resulting in technical issues.

Actually gold-farming is a quit reason. They just need to add all of them up, multiply with average account age and present that as damage.

The players will know. And with SpamSentry (off wowace), it takes two clicks of a button to report it.. Hell, it's doable in the heat of combat without too much hassle. Through gm tickets, Blizzard will know.

Imagine how much cash goes into paying gms for handling these tickets if every single player were to report every single goldspam.. Even if "handling" only involves reading it, passing it on, and sending an automated reply. Talk about damages.

One interesting aspect of this is that Blizzard may come into possession of a list of people who have bought gold from this company. I wonder if they will get banned if that is the case.

While Blizzard may not have complete lists of people that have bought gold off gold sellers, they should have a pretty big list already. That is of course assuming they have some basic tools for handling data from the servers.