We've
talked about private servers on the site here before, but in case you haven't heard the term: they're unofficial servers,
very much against
WoW's
Terms of Use, that are run by companies other than Blizzard. They're
shady as get out -- some make you pay (and these are not people you'd
ever want to give any credit card information to), some will delete or
change characters on a regular basis, and many times they're created
just so whoever's running them can
mess around with GM powers, and cheat with any items they want.
So you can see why Blizzard would want them shut down, and that's exactly what they're trying to do with
this lawsuit filed in the California Central District Court against a company called "Scapegaming" that runs at least one private
WoW server (and they've apparently
been running microtransactions in-game -- selling in-game items for "donations" of money). The law firm working for Blizzard, Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal, also
worked on the "Bnetd" case, which was another
piece of unofficial server software that allowed players to play off of Blizzard's Battle.net setup.
The complaint lists copyright infringement as the cause, which means they're probably using
the same argument targeted at other private servers
in the past. We'll keep an eye on this, but it's very likely Blizzard
will win this one unopposed, and Scapegaming (or at least just their
WoW server) will get shut down for good.
Thanks, Phenom!