Less QQ about Heartland, more pew pew on Blizzard

I really don’t want to talk about Heartland again. The discussion is tired in my opinion, but I want to once again go on record saying that PCI is fine, no matter says otherwise. The fact that Heartland was busted doesn’t mean that there’s something wrong with PCI – the same way that a hospital being busted doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with HIPAA. Again, if I go out and streak the superbowl, that doesn’t imply that there’s anything wrong with the indecent exposure and public nudity laws.

What I think is much more interesting (although nobody else seems to care) is the summary judgment issued today in Arizona court on the MDY vs. Blizzard case. Here’s the text if you think you might care.

What’s interesting about it, you ask? Well, here’s the 50000 foot: MDY makes a product that automatically plays Warcraft for you. Blizzard provides Warcraft to users at outrageous fees. MDY says they’re not doing anything wrong – just automating the gameplay experience so you can get phatter lutez and mad XP in-game. Blizzard says that MDY is generally evil for a number of reasons such as violating the DMCA, spitting on their EULA, ruining the in-game economy, blah blah blah. MDY says that’s bogus. Blizzard sues. MDY refuses to comply. Rinse and repeat.

Turns out the court thinks Blizzard’s right.

Now, don’t get me wrong here. I think MDY is in the wrong – after all, why do we need MDY’s mindless WoW-playing automaton when Blizzard already has the WoW-automaton market cornered?

But what I find scary about this is that it’s precedent for other things – actually a comment on the Freedom to Tinker blog beat me to this punch, but I’ll underscore it here too… If it wasn’t add-on software for WoW that we were talking about, but instead something else? Does Microsoft get to sue me if I use an undocumented API? What if I write software like Wine? Do software manufacturers now get to decide who can integrate with their products and who can’t? I’m not sure I like where that road leads…