How seriously does Blizzard take the operation of private World of Warcraft servers? On August 10th the company was awarded a stunning $88,594,539.00 judgment against a woman who operated a business running her own WoW server and selling items via Paypal. While that may seem high, it's not. More than $3 million of that amount was made from the server's "inappropriate earnings." That's right: her private server, run under the name Scapegaming, was a multimillion dollar business. It made her an attractive target for litigation.
Running private servers violates the EULA, DMCA
Creating a private server, and then selling access and items to players on that server, breaks the World of WarCraft End User Licensing Agreement and Terms of Use in many ways. You agree to the EULA by agreeing not to host, provide, or develop matchmaking services. You also promise to not intercept, emulate or redirect communication protocols used Blizzard in any manner, including for unauthorized play over the internet or network play. This agreement clearly prohibits you from playing on any server other than Blizzard's.
According to court documents, the server was not small. It hosted 32,000 players at one time. In June 2008, there were 427.393 members of the website's online community. This is where the math comes into play if you think that Blizzard has been given too much money.
"Based upon these allegations, it seems reasonable to infer Defendant supplied each of its customers with anti-circumvention product or services on at most one occasion," the document states. "While Plaintiff is unable prove this fact, the Court must draw all reasonable conclusions in Plaintiff's favor due to Defendant not participating in the litigation process."
That's right, since the woman in question never showed up in court, she was slammed with a DMCA violation for every single one of her users. After making a few million from running a private server, you'd think it would be a good idea to save a little back just in case the company in question decides to come after you.
In fact, the statutory damages were low, according to the court. The $200 penalty per circumvention is the minimum required by law. In this case, it was multiplied 427,393 times. "To the extent the figure seems unreasonably large," the judgment explained.
Blizzard also argued every Paypal transaction was a fraud, but the court dismissed that argument. What was the amount Blizzard claimed it owed, based on the Paypal transactions? All About Private Wow Servers Additional $20886,200 in statutory compensation.