Legal cases of Apple and Blizzard
In our lineup, both Apple and the plaintiffs would escape a lawsuit, and Blizzard is suing for lack of a better one.
We increasingly believe that law is the most dynamically developing sector of IT. According to the latest news, it is Apple Lossless Audio CODEC (ALAC), quietly settled out of court with those who sued the company over its advertising practices. As usual, details - such as how the plaintiffs were compensated by the company - were not revealed, but it seems very much that both parties wanted to back out of the lawsuit.
Fred Greaves and Dave Gatley sued Apple back in May 2007 over image quality problems with the displays used in MacBooks and MacBook Pros. In Apple's ads, it mentions displays that produce millions of colors, but it seems that they use a technique called dithering to achieve this. To display the traditional 16,7 million colors, most displays use an eight-bit channel, but according to the plaintiffs, Apple used a 6-bit display in the MacBooks, which can only display 262 different colors, which is why the rasterization "trick" was used. This degrades the machine to unusable for professional photographers. Apple didn't make a big deal about what kind of displays they used in their machines, but some research confirmed that they did indeed use six-bit displays in the MacBook and MacBook Pro products.
The plaintiffs were really annoyed that when they complained about this, they tried to dismantle them by being too hair-splitting and just imagining the problem for themselves. Therefore, they tried to find users who were similarly dissatisfied with the displays. And this proved to be much more difficult than originally thought, so the case could not be turned into a class action lawsuit. Apparently, the out-of-court settlement was the most liberating for both parties.
The situation is completely different with the World of Warcraft publisher, Blizzard and in the case of Michael Donnelly, an unofficial maker of Glider. To understand the problem, you need to know a little bit about the world of MMORPGs. An important element of the game, an important part of character development, is to obtain the right raw materials for their chosen occupation - for example, by hunting for the right creatures and skinning them, collecting flowers, fishing, and so on. This process can be quite tedious after a while.
An additional point called Glider allows our character to collect such raw materials in a pre-designated area — in the game's slang, this is called "farming". Of course, by fighting wild animals and monsters, our character also gains experience points, so if someone is persistent and patient enough, he can develop his character and level up relatively risk-free. Glider is also suitable for this after proper settings.
Opinions are divided among players about whether the use of the Glider or "farming" is cheating or not, but Blizzard's position is that it is definitely cheating, since it "robotizes" our character, the machine plays for us, ruining the gameplay , the normal course of character development. Blizzard forbids the use of such accessories, but the use of Glider, which costs $25 anyway, cannot be detected by software at the moment.
The only way for players to fail with it is if another player "spots" the character's mechanical behavior, that it follows a predefined path, does not respond when spoken to, and reports this to the game masters overseeing the gameplay. In this case, the user running Glider will be suspended for 72 hours and there is a good chance that they will be banned from the game. Blizzard sued Donnelly, who defends himself with the provisions of the user agreement, which can be interpreted in many ways. As a last resort, Blizzard claims against Donnelly and Glider that the program infringes their copyright because it copies the game into memory to avoid being eavesdropped by cheat detection programs. Both parties are awaiting the court's decision on the matter.
Roughly 100 copies of Glide have been sold - more precisely that many licenses have been sold - while World of Warcraft is played by roughly 10 million players.
