Mods on eBay - General Discussion

***Cairenn*** · 06-22-05, 10:44 AM

Please note: this thread is for anyone and everyone to be able to discuss the situation. If you are a Mod Author or representative of one of the companies who is effected by it, please contact one of the site admins for admittance to the private forum.

dagoburg · 06-23-05, 09:58 AM

i wonder why the people buying it have no awareness of mod sites?

maybe there's a need for setting up a decent configuration for people who are incapable of doing it themselves? should this be charged for? if it's done by someone who then pushes that money to the original authors (as well as paying for their own services) would this be a more acceptable method?

funnily the people paying for these services is just going to come unstuck when blizzard release the next UI, as the mods will probably fail anyway

i'd say there could be a general need for a controlled service such as this, but while there isn't, people will take advantage of services like ebay to make a quick buck on a few unsuspecting victims.

either that or the ebay seller knew it would insense at least a dozen mod sites who are the only ones buying the service to shout it down.

Beladona · 06-23-05, 10:02 AM

either way, it only takes a single mod author some time to pursue this, and he can be shut down for violating intellectual property rights. The fact that he has litterally hundreds of addons / programs on that cdrom, including stuff that are OBVIOUS violations in the form of teamspeak and other products, and you have someone who has either gone out of their way to screw up, or really doesn't know any better...

Devla · 06-23-05, 10:16 AM

I understand that alot of work goes into the entire process of making mods. For those of you who don't know all the steps:

Thought, preperation, programming, testing, documentation, packaging, uploading, supporting and updating (some steps are multiples lol).

Now, I do this because I ENJOY IT. I'm not tied down by a life consuming job, and am single without the burden (or joy to some) of a spouse and kids. I have the time right now, and have fun making, fixing, chatting, supporting anyone in the community, whether its something regarding my work or others.

The second it stops being fun...I'll quit.

From reading the comments at another site, a popular addon's author seemed to have a downward spiral of issues IRL and wanted to start charging people to use his addon. What ensued was 3.99/4 ratio of flame posts. I understand that addons do take time, but if you need money, find something else to do.

Blizzard gave us all the option to code mods/addons/etc for THEIR game. We may own the box, but Blizzard still owns their world. Every time we login, we are all bound to the TOS agreement. If you don't know what that is, I suggest you read it:

11. Ownership.

All title, ownership rights and intellectual property rights in and to World of Warcraft (including without limitation any user accounts, titles, computer code, themes, objects, characters, character names, stories, dialogue, catch phrases, locations, concepts, artwork, animations, sounds, musical compositions, audio-visual effects, methods of operation, moral rights, any related documentation, "applets" incorporated into World of Warcraft, transcripts of the chat rooms, character profile information, recordings of games played on World of Warcraft, and the World of Warcraft client and server software) are owned by Blizzard Entertainment or its licensors. World of Warcraft is protected by the copyright laws of the United States, international copyright treaties and conventions, and other laws. All rights are reserved. World of Warcraft may contain certain licensed materials, and Blizzard Entertainment's licensors may protect their rights in the event of any violation of this Agreement.

i take the same stance on paying real cash for ingame items or gold. I understand many people do this, and there are some popular sites affiliated with this, but it doesn't mean I agree with it. You do it, and take the risk of having your account banned...is it worth it?

Thats all for now

Beladona · 06-23-05, 10:25 AM

It may be wise to suggest that authors consider including simple tos agreements in their toc files explicitly denying permission to sell or otherwise profit from the sale of addons you create.

We shouldn't have to do it, but this will NOT be the last time someone tries to get away with something like this. Blizzard is in a weird position in that they can either help pursue this, or drop it. My guess is that they are going to allow us to pursue it, and only step in to assist when asked...

***Cairenn*** · 06-23-05, 10:28 AM

At this point, so far as WoWInterface.com is concerned, the ball is now in the court of those who are most directly effected by this. We are providing a private forum that they can use if they wish, or not use, totally up to them. We just got the CD so we could provide a listing of the actual contents. If no one wants to persue it, that is fine. If they do, we will do what we can to help, although like I said, I think our role in this is pretty much at an end.

mozz · 07-03-05, 12:44 AM

Originally Posted by Beladona

It may be wise to suggest that authors consider including simple tos agreements in their toc files explicitly denying permission to sell or otherwise profit from the sale of addons you create.

We shouldn't have to do it, but this will NOT be the last time someone tries to get away with something like this. Blizzard is in a weird position in that they can either help pursue this, or drop it. My guess is that they are going to allow us to pursue it, and only step in to assist when asked...

Mod authors: If you are going to do this, please consider using an existing Free Software or Open Source license, such as the GPL. There are several good reasons for doing so:
* the main OSS licenses were all written by (or with some help from) IP lawyers, and they are much less likely to have legal loopholes in them than something you write yourself.
* if an existing license can be found with appropriate terms, it is better to use it than to create a new one, for at least two reasons: (1) other developers may already be familiar with it, and (2) your code is more likely to be (legally) compatible with similarly-licensed code. If you roll your own license and accidentally make it incompatible with the popular OSS licenses, people are less likely to be able to build on your work (in a legal fashion).

Here are some resources for finding appropriate licenses:
http://www.asiaosc.org/enwiki/page/C..._licenses.html
http://www.opensource.org/licenses/

Copyright law reserves exclusively to the copyright holder, the right to distribute the copyrighted work (and pretty much all creative works, including AddOns, are automatically copyrighted the instant you publish them in the U.S. and Canada and other Berne-convention countries. The "Copyright (C)" notice is a legal reminder only, it is not required). So basically, if someone copies your code without your permission (which you can give in the form of a license), then they are infringing your copyright (just like the people using P2P apps to distribute copies of music are infringing the copyrights on that music owned by the RIAA and their members).

A license is a unilateral grant of permissions. It can't restrict what people do with your code (that is what copyright law is for!). However, your license can choose to grant the permissions only if certain conditions are met (this is how the GPL works, and is its great strength).

My favorite OSS license is the GPL because it is a "share and share-alike" license. If you want to re-distribute some GPL code which you have modified in any way, you are required to share the source code for your changes, and thereby give back to the community. Since AddOns are all distributed in source code form anyways, the GPL is pretty easy for authors to comply with.

I have not chosen a license for my own addons (MozzPack). Instead I've just been relying on implied license (by distributing them, I basically give people implied permission to use them with WoW and to use ideas and perhaps even some code from mine, in their own AddOns).

Keep in mind that if you ever change the terms of your license, people who already got it from you under the old license (even if that was "none") retain whatever permissions they were given. So if you were to distribute your code under the BSD license for a while, and then start distributing it under the GPL instead, the people who got the earlier versions from you under the BSD license can still continue to distribute those BSD-licensed copies to other people, who then get the same rights to use it however they want.

Also, keep in mind that if your AddOns include any code copied from Blizzard's standard UI, Blizzard probably owns the copyright on that code, and your AddOn might be considered a derivative work. Or, if you include copied code from someone else's AddOn in your own AddOn, the result might be a derivative work. In these cases, the copyright holder of the original work gets some copyright interest in your work too--to distribute your work, you must have the necessary permission from the copyright holder of the original work. Obviously this can affect whether you are allowed to use a particular license! For example, Blizzard doesn't give us permission to make derivative works from their standard UI code, so if you use Blizzard code, you either have to only use tiny bits of it and depend on fair-use rights, or else it has to be some code that is not actually copyrightable (e.g. because there is only one possible way for that code to work, and therefore nothing creative about it). My MozzTinyBar addon is derived from Telo's BottomBar, which is derived from the standard UI action bar code. Whether Telo's code is actually derivative of Blizzard's, or whether mine is actually derivative of Telo's and/or Blizzard's, I have no idea (I suspect my code would pass the Abstraction-Filtration-Comparison test, but I'm definitely no expert on stuff like that!)

If you based your code on someone else's, then there might be license(s) under which you are legally allowed to distribute the derived work--if the original code came to you under the same license, or a more-permissive license which is compatible with yours. For example, you could take some GPL'd code and include it in your AddOn and then release it under the GPL (the GPL is specifically designed to allow that). For more recent versions of the BSD license, you could also take someone's BSD-licensed code and use parts of it in your AddOn, and then release the result under the GPL (since the BSD grants you the permission s you need to include that code in code which is then relicensed GPL'd code). I think old versions of the BSD license were incompatible with the GPL though, so be careful!

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer and the above nonsense is not legal advice. I hope it does illustrate though, that choosing a license for your code can potentially be very complicated, and that is probably why most AddOn developers don't bother.

***Cairenn*** · 07-05-05, 02:28 PM

He's been shut down:

http://feedback.ebay.ca/ws/eBayISAPI...362897&frm=284

Note the red text on the right hand side near the top.

Hopefully this will warn others to not try the same stunt.

Littlejohn · 07-05-05, 04:47 PM

I've had my software distributed before, but that was back in the days where a 2400 baud modem was really fast -- distros were generally a good thing back then. I'm glad this guy was shutdown. There's just no reason for a middleman if you've got a good enough connection to play WoW...

Anybody know if any authors took legal action against him?

***Cairenn*** · 07-05-05, 04:48 PM

Well, he lost his eBay account, his PayPal account (I believe) and he has been (or is in the process of being) served with a Cease & Desist.