by Its_Immanis - 8 years ago     show comments

In a move that should surprise no one, Blizzard Entertainment continues to protect their brand legally.

Nostalrius, a private World of Warcraft server running patch v1.12, was given formal notice today by both US and French legal teams representing Blizzard that they must shut down all operations prior to April 10th due to Copyright infringement.

While some feel that the group with over 800,000 registered users and 150,000 active players should be allowed to continue operations and have started an online petition requesting that Blizzard change their policies regarding private servers, Blizzard has always aggressively defended their copyrights.

From reading tweets directed at both Blizzard (mostly negative) and Nostalrius (mostly positive), along with threads on Reddit, it is clear that there is a significantly sized portion of players who are nostalgic for the time represented by this server. While I admire their passion for the game, they’re forgetting some important facts.

World of Warcraft is the intellectual property of Blizzard Entertainment. Blizzard created the game, Blizzard maintained the game, and Blizzard brought us this world to enjoy. As such, nobody but Blizzard has the right to accept money to support World of Warcraft. The company may not have required a standard subscription but they still accepted money via donations to support the servers running some version of the game.

In an open letter to the community Nostalrius has indicated that they have released the source code along with anonymized player data so that others may take up the mantle and continue operating the server.

While some may argue that the popularity of private servers such as this one indicate that Blizzard should consider opening legacy servers, Blizzard maintains that they have no interest in doing so. On the official forums, the repeated requests for such legacy servers have given rise to what is termed “The Wall of No“, which is a collection of responses from numerous Blizzard developers, community managers, and others, and as a refutation of the very concept of legacy servers it’s usually found within the first few replies of a new thread requesting them.

Since the BlizzPro team does not condone private servers and will not support those who choose to infringe on Blizzard’s copyright of World of Warcraft I won’t link to their letter, website, or petition. They are fairly simple to find if you choose to do so.