

Zynga goes after hobbyist bot programmers - bcaulf
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20091223/2255557495.shtml

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smokinn
I wasn't sure this was at all newsworthy. Turns out the "newsworthy" part is
that they're claiming copyright infringement by a greasemonkey script that
plays the game for you automatically.

They got what they wanted because the script creators don't have the resources
to fight in court so basically this is a clear-cut case of legal bullying. The
claims would not have stood up in court but it would've been expensive to go
through the process so the bigger bankroll wins.

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imgabe
It seems wrong that there's no legal recourse against this sort of thing. If
you're brought to court on something that has absolutely no legal standing,
you should be able to sue for your legal fees.

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pavel_lishin
I'm pretty sure you can.

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jacquesm
As a veteran of 5 court cases I can assure you can in theory but in practice
you can't.

If you win then that's good for you, but fat chance you're going to get your
lawyers fees back except in very rare situations.

And even then you'll probably get some baseline payment of a fraction of the
real costs.

Lawsuits are expensive, American lawsuits doubly so.

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mattmaroon
We had to do some stuff to stop people from scripting our game recently. We
didn't go the legal route, we just wrote some stuff to figure out who was
doing it and suspended them.

It's a big deal because it messes up your in-game economy by devaluing the
currency. Someone using a script will have a massive advantage over someone
not using it. They'll have no reason to ever spend money, and they'll make it
so that players not using a script feel they can't compete and thus make them
not spend money too.

In our game, it's more of the competitive aspect. We have a system wherein
people can get a whole fleet that they spent months (or years, once our game
is that old) building. It could be wiped out by another guy in an hour if they
make a mistake. If the other guy is playing by the same set of rules than
them, it sucks but at least it's fair. If he used a bot to build a much larger
fleet to enable him to do so, the customer won't be as understanding.

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vaksel
FYI: when you click the logo from <http://www.bluefroggaming.com/games.php>
you get a 404 page.

You are linking index.html there instead of index.php

~~~
mattmaroon
Ha thanks, it's been like that for quite some time. Some day I'll get around
to fixing that. We get like 7 hits a month there so it's at the bottom of the
list.

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pvg
Looking at the script source, screenshots of the script in use and screenshots
of MW itself, it looks like the script embeds a number of MW icons as data
urls. These icons are the IP of Zynga and likely the basis of their copyright
claim. I bet the C&D they sent didn't actually say that - they just used it to
scare off the script writers and it worked.

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thorax
I saw the title and actually thought it meant Zynga was going to be making
games for hobbyist bot programmers. Talk about a let down upon reading.

From the "cheating mafia games" department: I wrote a proxy server that would
allow you to cheat at an iPhone variant of mafia wars. I watched its packets
and saw some holes in the normally pretty solid OAuth communication it used
with their servers. I never published the trick because it really made the
game even more unfun than it was. Cheating is pretty rampant in games like
this, but I don't know how anyone can enjoy doing it because there's really no
fun in any game where the rules are meaningless.

If you're designing games, be sure you try really hard not to rely on the
client for important game information, or put in other checks and balances to
help catch lies and exaggerations coming over the wire.

From the "when I was a kid" department: The first "software" I ever sold were
scripts to automatically play BBS games like TradeWars. I'm glad that
companies weren't flexing their legal muscles quite so much back then about
auto-game-playing or it might have turned me off to doing software in the
first place.

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pavel_lishin
> I don't quite understand why this is a big deal (admittedly, I don't play
> the game, but I don't see how this is different than if a player sat there
> and played repetitively themselves)

Maybe it's the fact that a person playing the game can't compete with an
automated script whose sole purpose is to win the game and be better than a
human player? I'd have very little interest in competing against other robots.

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qeorge
For one thing, the script's name is "Mafia Wars Auto Play". I presume Zynga
has a trademark on the term Mafia Wars, and would argue that the script's name
implies a non-existent relationship between the two companies.

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patio11
They'd have a pretty good nominative use defense, if it came to that.

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henning
When Blizzard went after Glider, they claimed copyright, too. It was because
Glider loaded the game itself to keep the WoW game client from detecting that
Glider was reading and writing to its memory. Loading a copy of an application
into memory on your own computer without the vendor's approval is now a
copyright violation in court.

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keefe
I'm not sure they so much loaded the game as deliberately circumvented the
Warden <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warden_(software)> to copy portions of
the WoW memory space (locations of toons, etc) into their own address space...
but I think they were busted more on violation of the DMCA for writing code to
circumvent warden

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mikeryan
I'm not siding with Zynga but there seems to be some precedent here

[http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2008/07/popular-wow-
autom...](http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2008/07/popular-wow-automation-
tool-infringes-blizzards-copyright.ars)

~~~
jacquesm
That got appealed, any idea on how it ended ?

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mikeryan
It actually got worse and ended with a DCMA violoation

[http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2009/02/03/bizzard-wins-anti-
bo...](http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2009/02/03/bizzard-wins-anti-bot-
copyright-case/1)

