In my last post, I talked about Blizzard’s new policy regarding add ons. The new policy announcement has sparked off the community rather fiercely, with various pontificators besides me posting their thoughts on the matter. One of the interesting points which comes up in this discussion is talk of “rights”. Consider this, from Tobold:
I think the Outfitter example shows well that addon authors never had many rights. Like so many addons before it, Blizzard is simply introducing the addon functionality in the standard UI in patch 3.1, making the addon obsolete. I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if some future patch introduced functionality to WoW similar to Questhelper’s one, other MMORPGs like WAR are already marking quest locations on the map. So relying on income from an addon was never a really good idea. But Questhelper was downloaded over 20 million times from Curse in its various versions, and the author rightfully claims that his addon has more users than many MMORPGs. Shouldn’t that give him any rights? No, legally it doesn’t. Because his addon piggybacks on World of Warcraft, and would be completely worthless without WoW, Blizzard is the sole holder of any rights. Blizzard can change the LUA addon language at any time, or even disable it.
I think we’re conflating terms here. First, Questhelper’s author may not be arguing on purely legal grounds. This is particularly the case if no law directly covers the issue at hand: at that point, either new law must be outlined to describe rights or existing law must be interpreted to extend beyond it’s given language. Beyond that, Questhelper’s author may be making an appeal to moral rights as opposed to legal rights. For instance, even if no law explicitly laid out our right to life, and thus to not being murdered, we may appeal to a moral right against being murdered which applies regardless of the law. By the same token, the add-on author may be attempting to claim that, regardless of the platform on which their work resides, because it is entirely their work, it is their property to dispose of and shouldn’t they therefore be able to request payment or at least ask for donations from community members to support them? Moral arguments usually break down to questions of decency, which I believe is what add-on authors are looking to here: wouldn’t the decent thing be to allow them to ask people to help support them in their work?
By the same token, simply because an entity has a legal right to an action, does that imply they have a moral right to that action? Yes, Blizzard does have the right to change their UI API at any point, legally. Would it, however, be moral for them to do so? I know it seems silly to discuss a game in the context of morality, but that’s ultimately what you’re talking about when you talk about common courtesy, decency, respect for others, etc. Those are all extensions of a moral system, and I think that is what’s ultimately being discussed by the add-on authors revloting against Blizzard’s new policy.
I’d like to consider a different example: webmail. Much of the internet’s communications flows through webmail providers. Their servers store all of this data, holding potentially private information about you for…however long. It’s really outside of your control. Now, I rather suspect that Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and the other various webmail providers have the legal right to go digging through your email…or they could, at least. I’m honestly not entirely sure. Are you? What if they do have that right: ought they? The ‘ought’ is the appeal to an absolute moral system. Even in the case that their contract with their users specifically allows them to dig as deep as they want into your email and display it to whomever they like, should they be allowed to make such a contract? If they have made such a contract, should it actually be binding?
What about your apartment or rental home. Should your landlord be able to enter at any time they please and do whatever they like? It is, after all, their property. You’re only renting it…you’re merely paying them for a service. If you didn’t explicitly contract with them to not enter the premises uninvited, shouldn’t they be able to, freely? They may have precisely that legal right, but I suspect we’d think they were a jackass for exercising it.
One more example: if a contract allows a party to sign over to any other party any of their rights, can someone legally agree to a contract with another party allowing that party to kill them? If there exist circumstances wherein you cannot do so, then we can note that their exists legal rights which are granted to legally recognised entities, irregardless of their will, rights which they cannot give away regardless of their will. A simple example is indentured servitude. It is illegal for someone to contract away their free legal will into indentured servitude, regardless of their personal desire on this.
Even legally, then, a contract is not wholly binding. A variety of things simply cannot be upheld legally, even if all involved parties willingly agreed to them. You’ll note that this actually incentivizes contract authors to make contracts grant them as broad powers as possible, since it puts the onus of deiciding what parts are legally disallowed on the courts and the signee. Because of this, I’m not entirely certain that Blizzard actually does have the legal right to enforce its policy. It behooves them to appear as if they do, in order to dissuade users from doing what they don’t wish, though if they don’t actually have legal grounds and know this, it’s quite deceitful.
Ruminations on the legal standing of the add-on policy:
Can Blizzard truly ban requests for donations? I’m honestly curious. It smacks a bit of an web host being able to ask you to take down data on the basis of its content…it feels like it’s treading on iffy ground. Actually, I think a better example would be a browser provider, such as Microsoft or Mozilla disallowing the viewing of certain content on their browser because it violates their ToS. Users explicitly download and view the add-on of their own accord. It’s not even being delivered over Blizzard-controlled services…it is merely being displayed by a Blizzard game. Theoretically a WoW add-on reader could emulate the functionality of the WoW UI and display the add-on without requiring the actualy game be run. It’s local data…does Blizzard actually have the right to demand certain data types not exist on their users’ computers?
This is different from the argument against the botting program Glider. There, Blizzard used a copyright argument, as Glider was making an illicit copy of the application into memory, violating both the copyright and the ToS/EULA of World of Warcraft. Add-on authors write data, which is copywritten to them, that they then distribute. They can do this freely, since they are obviously the copyright holders. The distribution process lands this data in a specific place on the user’s computer, which World of Warcraft then accesses and reads (which involves making a copy. presumably this copy is at least implicitly allowed, since the distributor granted copying privileges to the user for usage purposes, and this is proper usage). I do not see, at any point, Blizzard having any rights yet over the data of the add-on. Add-on authors need not be players of WoW. If that’s the case, I do not see how they are bound by the EULA/ToS when authoring an add-on. Distribution of data is also not problematic: simply giving an add-on with donation requests included to others cannot be considered problematic. Therefore the only problematic point is when the user’s WoW application actually loads the add-on. We have already shown that no copyright laws have been broken, as opposed to the Glider case, so the add-on’s only offense can be against the ToS/EULA.
Since the add-on is being run locally, we must discuss the WoW application in this case as a displayer of the data, much like a computer screen can be used to display words like a book. The data in the first case is the add-on and in the second, words. Can the author of a viewer place restrictions on the content viewed one the user has the viewer in hand? Can a monitor seller legally forbid a purchaser from viewing objectionable material on the monitor, after the purchase time? I’m not sure they can. But at the very best Blizzard could take action against their users for loading an add-on in violation of the ToS. The explicit case Blizzard would need to show is that they have the right to dictate what users place into a certain directory on their computer, or that users must explicitly tell WoW to ignore certain things in that directory.
A donation request is not sent over the network, so it is not handled by Blizzard servers. If it were, I think this would be a different issue. The question here is whether Blizzard can legally enforce a contractual obligation on users to not have certain addons stored in a certain place and turned on when their application runs. If they can enforce that contract, it remains a contract against with the users and not with the add-on author. Since they do not have a “helping subvert copyright” claim against the add-on author in this case, the best action that could be taken against an add-on author I can come up with is the add-on author is defrauding users by getting them to download an add-on which violates their contract. In that case, I suspect the add-on author could place a warning on their add-on download, offer it up as an example of Lua code for educational purposes, and include the donation request anyway.
As I said above, I’m not sure the authoring an add-on, which is done entirely outside of WoW beyond testing, and could be emulated quite legally without any recourse to running WoW, is constrained by the ToS or EULA. If language in either speaks to such authoring, I’m not sure it actually has legal authority.
If this reasoning is correct, then I don’t think much of Blizzard’s policy has ANY legal validity, beyond “Add-ons must not negatively impact World of Warcraft realms or other players.“, “Add-ons must abide by World of Warcraft ToU and EULA.“, and “Blizzard Entertainment has the right to disable add-on functionality as it sees fit.“. In fact, all of these derive from the add-on as an extension of the user. The Lua API is simply a communication layer for libraries that WoW explicitly looks for and loads. The communication layer exists just like the layer with DirectInput: it’s a way for inputs to be submitted to the application. Blizzard could not stop legally stop a player from playing the game with a keyboard that solicited donations for its maker. I believe the same logic holds for an add-on. The workings of the add-on are hidden from Blizzard. The only parts which actually impact them as service providers are actions taken by the add-on which are passed to the WoW servers. But those are no different from actions taken by a user: an add-on can do nothing that a user could not also do, as far as the servers are concerned. Thus, “Add-ons must not negatively impact WoW realms or other players” is the same as “Players must not negatively impact WoW realms or other players”. Obviously, then, Add-ons must, in their capacity as player actions, abide by the ToS and EULA. And finally, Blizzard can obviously alter the code of their application, as they hold the continuing copyright to it. Since it is that code which handles add-on functionality, the right to change add-on handling obviously follows.
But none of that convinces me that Blizzard actually has the legal grounds to demand add-ons not display donation requests to their users, not display offensive material, or even that add-on authors not require payment. Certainly I am not convinced add-on authors can be legally required not to obfuscate their code.
So I am genuinely curious: what on legal grounds can Blizzard enforce these requirements?
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