sp00n

According to MMO, Blizzard has changed its policy regarding legal add-ons for WoW.

One of these changes (actually the first) is:

So if this point of view remains, it ends all commercial applications regarding addons for WoW (like Carbonite).
What currently makes me scratch my head is "services related to the add-on", which is a very very broad and vague term. It could basically give a charter to ban a multitude of addon, at a 'free will' of Blizzard, which in my eyes is problematic.



I can see why Blizzard is performing such a (more or less) clarification on addons, but in my eyes they have gone too far. Let's take Carbonite. It offers a long sough-after functionality for me, which simply isn't available from Blizzard.
It also contains an awful lot of information regarding quests, which in no way can be gathered in just a few hours. And it also combines this in a new and intuitive way.
This addon smells like and certainly is hard work, so I have no problem paying a small fee for an even greater functionality, and frequent updates to its database.

But with these changes, development of the addon will practically end, leaving us short of a great improvement to the long and often tedious (at least for a good part of the player base) levelling phase.

Another example would have been RDX before it went open source. It was considered a huge improvement to the actual raid experience of a whole guild, and people who had access to it almost swore to never go back (I have never tried it myself though, so this info is only from reading this forum).
Development wouldn't have had a chance to go this point if they wouldn't have received a compensation for their hard work.


Overall, I feel this change could hinder the development of some great addons. I welcome the change that all addons are open source (not necessarily in the legal way, but in terms of readability of the code), but I feel that Blizzard has gone too far. They're not even allowing pleas for donation in addons anymore. Which I think is just ridiclous.

 

Northerner

It is more a legal tactic than a real change in policy though. Without the ability to enforce, it is more a cover-your-ass thing than a change that matters.

I imagine it is more a cut off for SC2 and Diablo3 than anything, after noting the monies my favorite robot and others have garnered off of WoW itself. Of course I may well be dead wrong but the new Bnet and other indicators seem to lean this way.

 

Tuvai

This is a much needed change that should have been implemented back in the days of RDX6, let alone now. There are countless addon creators out there who are able to get by crafting fantastic addons with no need to try and solicit donations, and they will be free to continue as such without trying to mooch a profit.
Of course if you feel that they need to be "compensated" for their work you will still be free to donate money to the creators via their website.

 

Eggi

The code that the author writes is also his own intellectual property. So if the author thinks that his addon is good enouth to take money for it, it should be his/her right to do so.
Also if most authors do not take money from you, it should be their right to decide if they take money or give it out for free and not the decision from blizzard.

Also does this step not improve anything. It only leads to addon authors who will stop their work...

 

Malan

If you think these policies are in any way enforceable, you're off your rocker.

Shitting up every single thread on EJ since '06

 

Keldin

Actually the specific Add-On coding is theirs, not the code itself. The code itself is open source for everyone. I don't see why would you have to pay for something that's open source.

I would love it to be this simple, but it isn't. Its a really really gray area and to find out who is right or who is wrong based on laws would be a really difficult task. Right now the only thing solid is that these addons need WoW to work and Blizzard's ToS and EULA guarantee that they have the final say on things.

 

Eggi

Only because you can read the code it does not make it Open Source!
Open Source Definition - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

Tosari

I really do not think this impacts any of the addons that people are currently purchasing/subscribing to. If they like them they will still use them, and the programmer just has a "donations appreciated" button on thier web site.

Several excellent addons are already supported in this fashion and get user donations that motivate them to keep updating and making thier work available.

 

Keldin

Ah, my bad. Didn't quite get it I see.

 

Liebestod

Oftentimes donations are solicited through the addon itself, however, which is now banned. There's a discussion thread on Slashdot of this issue, where one developer chimes in:

Personally, I can't see any rationale for supporting this at all other than moral outrage over people making money over what "should" be free, or possibly a deficiency of economic understanding. Presumably these errors don't extend to Blizzard's legal team, however, which leaves me baffled as to why this policy was implemented. Were they afraid that addon developers would start giving them legal trouble when they changed the UI or something? I don't know.

It depends on the licensing scheme under which the program was made. According to Wikipedia, Lua is under the MIT license, which as I understand allows for the code to be incorporated in proprietary materials. You still have the right to distribute the code, but whether it's ethically acceptable to do so is another issue.

It's my understanding, though, that addons that were working through subscription services were doing so not by trying to limit access to the basic code, but by tying its functionality to things which the designer does control - ie. access to certain databases. So you weren't paying for the quest addon code itself, you were paying for being able to use it to download data from some private server.

 

Malan

That's how RDX6 functioned, despite people complaining about how you had to "pay" to use the mod. The code was easy to get, nothing was stopping anyone from distributing it and the author made no moves to break compatibility. But if you wanted service and support and updates you paid a subscription fee. Of course RDX had some major issues, namely that the author vanished for long stretches of time and that his service model wasn't exactly top notch. But that didn't make the pay-for-service model wrong. Good idea, poor implementation and now people like Tuvai hold it up as a picture of everything wrong with trying to earn a living from developing addons.

Shitting up every single thread on EJ since '06

 

Liebestod

I guess I could see Blizzard being wary of being held liable for poor mod support of possibly commercial scams done with WoW addons. It's probably easier to nip the issue in the bud than to possibly have the headache of dealing with these things, but I'd still say that it's a loss for both players and developers.

I'm not really familiar with RDX6, so I can't comment on it very much. It sounds like an interesting case, though.

 

ShadowEric

I don't really see how Blizzard can legally enforce this at all. Add-ons' copyrights belong to their authors, not Blizzard. So they're free to distribute them as they see fit. I mean I wouldn't pay for an add-on, but there are free alternatives out there, and if we had to pay for all of them, then many of us probably would. It's a bit like Microsoft stating that every program that runs on Windows belongs to them because they wrote Windows and give an API for software to hook into and run on Windows. That would never fly and I don't see how this can fly either.

 

Liebestod

I'd imagine that Blizzard wouldn't actually enforce the rule, they'd just count on having major websites and players blacklist the offending addons.

Or maybe they don't count on that at all, and they're just issuing the statement in order to deny liability if an issue of the form I mentioned above arises. "We tried to ban this addon, we won't be held liable for your bad experience with it."

 

Malan

Blizzard isn't making any copyright claims with these rules. They are adjusting the ToS and saying that they will not allow code to be run inside their intellectual property that meets the criteria. So yes, addon authors are free to distribute their addons in any form they wish, but Blizzard says "You can't run that code in our platform." Still not enforceable (Unless they decide to get mondo crazy with Warden) but it probably covers their ass legally in some form.

Shitting up every single thread on EJ since '06

 

Leviathon

With WotLK Blizzard added a baddons file in both the WDB folder and in the enUS MPQ's. Currently the game does not interact with this file but if deleted or editted it is re-made when you log in. That file is likely how they would ban addons who decide to ignore the warning.

 

Liebestod

How would that work, exactly? Would Blizzard check your addons every time you log in, and then disable the blacklisted ones?

 

kharen

The problem is, the preamble to the policy points explicitly threatens that "failure to abide by [the policy] may result in measures up to and including taking formal legal action. ", and the policy itself is explicitly written targetting authors, rather than users.

Now, try as i might, while i fully accept Blizzard's right to block addons from being run, and ban anyone they feel like for any reason they want, i can't see any possible justification for taking legal action against someone for charging for a piece of code that has the possibility of being run as an addon inside WoW (which doesn't even necessarily have to have a hard dependency on the WoW API; there's a fair amount you can do just with the base lua library included in WoW).

 

Leviathon

It most likely would work like how the game does right now if it noticed you edited the MPQ and just not let you login if a addon you have matches a addon in the baddons file.

Course this is still just speculation on the file based on its name and the fact that the game currently does not interact with it. It may actually just be something that deals with BNET2. If it is for BNET2 then these guidelines make perfect sense if BNET2 ends up not being pay to play like the original BNET was. Since if they allow addons for D3 and SC2 then obviously they are not going to want addons charging you to be used on a free service.

 

Liebestod

I just figure that if the baddons were stored client-side, it'd be easy to circumvent.. you'd just have to update the addon to circumvent the blacklist every time Blizzard the MPQ, which they don't do very often, I believe.

It's be more interesting if your addons were scanned using a server-side blacklist.

 

chaud

There is a new DBC file stored in patch-enUS.MPQ that will likely store a list of addons banned, updated with every patch. The baddons.wcf will likely be updated from the server.

 

Randyll

There's a few problems in doing that. It's easy to change the name of an addon by tweaking its name by changing a few lines of LUA code. Granted, this is beyond the average Joe but nonetheless should it become widespread people will eventually learn how to do it. As such I find it pretty interesting as to how they will actually enforce this.

[e] They could implement some detailed heuristic algorithms for comparing addons to blacklisted ones, but it'll be tricky. As long as addons are open source they're pretty easy to modify for your own needs.

 

Lazare

To provide some context, the old policy came from the Malicious UI Modification section of the World of Warcraft Bug Exploitation and Client/Server Manipulation Policy. Here's the text, in full:

That policy was deployed against cross-faction communications mods in the past. To the best of my knowledge no suspensions or account closures were ever made. Blizzard said "hey, this violates our policies, please stop" and authors, distribution sites, and users rapidly complied. Had they not done so Blizzard could have banned the authors and/or users, but that never came into play.

I also think any discussion of "how could Blizzard enforce this" is fairly pointless. The vast majority of authors and addon websites will comply with a Blizzard request, and even if Carbonite or Wowmatrix wanted to "go rogue" a vague blue threat to ban people for using them would cut the potential customer base to zero. The technical side of things is easy; it's the legal and moral side which is an issue, and the new policy - as written - is quite troubling.

• It doesn't just threaten suspension or in extreme cases account closure. Rather, it threatens "measures up to and including taking formal legal action", which is vague but ominous.
• It doesn't just say that you can't use a for-pay addon (or other violating addon) with WoW - it says that you can't even write one. That may seem like a minor difference, but philosophically its huge. If addons I write are mine, then only I can made decisions about how to distribute them. Blizzard is free to decide that only addons distributed via certain methods can be used with WoW, but they can't dictate distribution to me any more than I can dictate to them what addons should be allowed. The new policy does just that, and in some ways this is an implicit assertion of ownership of addon code by Blizzard.

There are some other concerns with the policy, including but not limited to:

• The service clause of the first guideline would seem to apply to some DKP tracking services, guild website hosting services, and even WWS (which, at least the last time I used it, offered a small addon to automatically enable combat logging inside a raid). If you offer any sort of service for a fee, and also have a freely available addon to gather or display data, then you're in violation. Harsh.
• The "programming code of an addon [...] must be freely accessible [...] by the general public" language in the second guideline would appear to require public release of all addons, including addons meant solely for personal use by the author or his guild. This can't be what they intended, but the phrasing is fairly clear.
• More generally the second guideline is violated by Bejewelled and possibly some data libraries which are compressed for performance reasons. Again, probably not what they intended.
• The restriction on asking for donations in the fifth guideline seems draconian. As written it would appear to include something as simple as a short "sure, I accept donations" in an in game help screen. What in the world is wrong with that? An addon that pops up a nag screen every 5 minutes is obviously pretty bad but I'm not convinced Blizzard needs a policy against it - and even if they did, they could just ban that rather than hit such a huge number of perfectly unobjectionable addons.

It seems like most of the policy could be better solved by something simple like: "If you publicly distribute an addon, you must make the un-obfuscated lua source code freely available. If the source code is not made freely available, if the addon harms the gameplay experience of users or other players, if it is negatively impacting the servers, or if it is generating a significant volume of support requests we may ban the addon. Attempts to circumvent an addon ban will result in suspensions or account closure for authors and/or users." That seems like it does what I assume they want (bans Carbonite and gives them discretion to ban anyone else who abuses the system), without doing anything crazy. ...naturally, it'll never happen.

 

Redroach

I very much doubt that add-on developers for WoW can claim "intellectual property" at all. Even if they somehow manage to obscure their code - it is still Blizzard who provides for the add-on interface, gives access to game variables, widgets etc..
Hell, if you further abstract it, Blizzard provides the Game itself, along with the millions of customers it has attracted, readily available to make your innovative lines of code popular in a very easy way. Seeking profit in this is a bit like "hopping on the money train".

Just an extreme example: Blizzard could easily disable the add-on interface completely - it's their intellectual property, after all.
This would throw out commercial add-on developers as well, albeit at an extreme cost of user comfort. So, I'm perfectly okay with their decision to just prohibit commercial addons. It could be damaging for them if users suddenly have to pay for several "killer addons" which are must-haves, just to end up paying double the amount per month they used to pay. So they pull the plug and they have every power to do so.

 

ShadowEric

Pulling the plug on add-ons is NOT the same thing as trying to restrict that which they cannot. Add-on authors own copyright on their work, therefore they can do whatever they want with it, ads or donation messages included. Not that I want paid addons or ads in my game, but it's something add-on authors can choose to do. You're fooling yourself if you think Blizzard can enforce this.

It doesn't really matter that Blizzard provides the API for authors to hook into. They wanted to do that, because they want add-ons. Same as any operating system or software or anything else that opens up their API to external add-ons/plug-ins/programs.