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People making money by creating third party addons to a software package is a very old and established precedent in the industry. There is no legal CYA needed by Blizzard here, because the case law is clear in a number of cases that have come up in the past decade or so. I am pretty sure that this is purely a PR move on Blizzard's part, and the entitlement reaction from a fairly significant segment of the player base has reinforced that pretty solidly to me.
As for gold v. addons... The World of Warcraft in-game currency, which is called "gold", is an artifact of the game that is solely constrained by the game and wholly exists in the game. "Gold" is not a copyrightable concept, nor can it be patented or otherwise protected legally. The limitations on "gold" and how it may be used can be and are restricted by the end user licence agreement that all players agree to at every patch. "Gold" farmers are directly contravening the EULA they agreed to in order to get in and farm said "gold". Interestingly enough, the sellers themselves may not even play the game so there's an interesting legal take on whether there'd be an actual case for Blizzard v. "gold" seller since the seller probably has never agreed to the EULA. Anyway.
Addons are copyrighted works of their authors that exist in fixed form outside of the game ("addons are useless without WoW" is a common argument but is a red herring in the context of legal precedent.) Unless Blizzard can show that they're derivative works, they have no claim at all. It's possible that a judge may lean towards derivative work based on the precedents set on mods for games such as Unreal, but such mods directly modify game play and "game experience", which addons in WoW do not have the power to do. Further, the judge also has to take into account the body of case law and precedent around arbitrary code using an API, which is directly applicable and has been long and well established to explicitly not be derivative work. (Some readers are now going it's not public!, but Sega v. Accolade holds that even if you reverse engineer an API you have the right to use it.) I obviously can't speak for the theoretical judge, but I'd bet that addons would not be found to be derivative.
I've never argued that Blizzard does not have the right to say "no for-pay addons in our sandbox". I personally disagree with their stance since there's no legal basis and it reduces competition, but I do respect their right to set the rules of the playground. As I've said before, there are much better ways they could go about enforcing this than the path they have chosen that already exist within the existing EULA.
There's much more I've said on this over the past weeks that I won't re-type here because Tekkub is already yelling TL;DR! at his monitor, but it's easy enough to find links in this thread to the major points.
No, I am not a lawyer (but I do have an acquaintance that is indeed a copyright lawyer and a gamer who understands what's going on here clearly), and as a long-time consultant I do have my fair share of practical experience with copyright law over the past decade or so. And, as always, I don't even accept donations from users no matter how often they have asked over the years.
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