Blizzard Sued By Strategy Guide Author
Jengo
Pasco, WA | USA
24 Year old Brian Kopp is sueing Blizzard and Vivendi Universal for pressuring eBay to ban him from selling his Game Guide. He states that his guide does not in any way violate copyright laws and that he was unrightfully banned from ebay.
Source: GameSpotDuring several months beginning last August, Kopp sold several hundred copies of his guide, which contains tips on playing the game and accumulating experience, at roughly $15 apiece. Weeks after his first auction went live, Blizzard, Vivendi, and the ESA began sending repeated takedown notices under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), asking eBay to yank the auctions because of copyright and trademark infringement concerns. The auction giant's general policy is to halt auctions when it receives such complaints and to suspend a user's account after it racks up a certain number of warnings.
Kopp filed counternotices protesting the infringement claims. Because the companies did not respond to the documents within 14 days, eBay was free under the DMCA to reinstate his auctions, which it did. But by November, eBay had accumulated enough takedown warnings from the companies to warrant suspending Kopp's account. He restarted his sales under a new username, which quickly earned suspension, too.
The companies went on to threaten copyright and trademark infringement action against Kopp. In one message quoted in the complaint, a Blizzard executive said Kopp could not lawfully sell a guide that "attempts to trade off the substantial goodwill and recognition that Blizzard has built up in connection with its World of Warcraft product." He also dismissed Kopps' claims that his book was solely meant for "educational" value, saying it clearly had a commercial purpose.
Kopp's complaint argues that his book does not infringe on any of the companies' copyrights for several reasons: The book presents a disclaimer on its first page about its "unauthorized" nature, contains no copyrighted text or storylines from the game, and makes "fair use" of selected screenshots under copyright law, the complaint said.
In effect, if the video game industry's actions are upheld, "then selling a how-to book about Microsoft Word would infringe Microsoft's copyright, especially if the book contained one or more screenshots of Word's user interface," said Paul Levy of the public-interest advocacy group Public Citizen, which joined in filing the suit on behalf of Kopp. "We think this cannot be the law."
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Comments
:Pwned:
omg you must be really tired then jradmin, cuz there's a lot of them :shakehead
Mighty big words coming from someone that can't even be bothered to enter an alias...yet another reason why we need to stop people from posting anonymous comments.
dont be foolish. There are no laws saying you cant make guides for video games. Blizzard is the one that is acting foolish. There are hundreds of guides for Microsoft Word, Photoshop, etc. that are not authorized by the Ceators of these programs. If we are not allowed to write guides for any of these it would violate our freedom of speech.
I'll go out on a limb here and guess it's WoW...