Originally Posted by Tristanian
That is likely the case, though I won't pretend to be a lawyer and make assumptions on whether they would have a valid legal case or not. Judging from the Glider precedent, I wouldn't hold my breath. The point is, the WoW lua platform is their own playground, they control the waters and they can set whatever rule they feel its necessary to protect their investment and business model. The part that is currently controversial is whether addons should be actually considered as a "derivative work" or not or in simple words whether they should be considered as the IP of their respective authors. If you ask me (did I mention that I'm not a lawyer btw ? ), I'd say no, based on how addons work in the first place. In such a case, Blizzard is basically reserving their right to sue for tortious interference with contract, since they cannot actually remove author's rights granted by copyright law to be able to sell or distribute their addons in any way they see fit. As a result, though seemingly no author right is (legally) removed, in essence it is (indirectly) removed.
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I think it is safe to say nothing being said here is give as legal advice or in a client relationship for any of the parties here. It is all discussion and opinion, even if said by a lawyer, till a ruling gets made anyway. The Glider case may not be considered as an exact model as to what contract takes precedence though. The reason being, is that you need to figure out which contract prevails in a sense. In the case of glider, it interferes with terms that have always been in the game, and thus the game terms existed before glider did, and thus gliders contract. In this case, the change in terms to interfere with those addons providers obligations from the payments they received from their customers came later, so if the prevailing contract is decided on by which came first, now the situation is reversed. Now I don't have a clue how it would be ruled on, but it does seem the same grounds are at least there and a case on them may be able to be made
against blizzard using the same grounds.
BTW, the this is my playground I can set the rules is the very same argument Atari tried to make to stop Activision from starting up.