Bizzard and Legal Disputes
From Blizzard's New MMO Wiki
On June 20, 2003, Blizzard issued a cease and desist letter to the developers of an open source clone of the Warcraft engine called FreeCraft, claiming trademark infringement. This hobby project had the same gameplay and characters as Warcraft II, but came with different graphics and music. As well as a similar name, FreeCraft enabled gamers to use Warcraft II graphics, provided they had the Warcraft II CD. The programmers of the clone shut down their site without challenge. Soon after that the developers regrouped to continue the work by the name of Stratagus.
On December 5, 2008 Blizzard issued a cease and desist letter to many administrators of high population World of Warcraft private servers (essentially slightly altered hosting servers of the actual World of Warcraft game, that players do not have to pay for). Blizzard used the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to influence many private servers to fully shut down and cease to exist.Private or free servers sometimes charge a fee for providing players with in game items such as Epic sets of armor, weapons and gold. Some skills, abilities and quests aren't fully functional, creating a sizable gap in functionality between the official and private servers. Despite this action, thousands of these servers still exist.
In 2007-08-14, Beijing University Founder Electronics Co., Ltd. sued Blizzard Entertainment Limited for copyright infringement claiming 100 million yuan in damages. The lawsuit alleged the Chinese edition of World of Warcraft reproduced a number of Chinese typefaces made by Founder Electronics without permission.
On July 14, 2008, the U.S. District of Arizona ruled on the case MDY Industries, LLC v. Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. The Court found that MDY was liable for copyright infringement since users of its Glider bot program were breaking Blizzard's End User License Agreement and Terms of Use.
