Blizzard's Unfortunate Official Stance

I've had a correspondence with this Blizzard fellow, Michael N., for a bit now.

He says you cannot copyright anything made with Blizzard's models, skins, sounds, etc. Nada.


So, I'm guessing that despite what the EULA says (very little on the issue of map copyrights, but quite a bit on the copyrights of WC3 itself) the protection issue is: your maps are owned by blizzard, you shouldn't be protecting them.

I will keep talking to him, seeing if there is some way in which maps may be legally protected, but I dont think there is. Which means any such 'protection' issues hinge entirely on the ownership of the map. Does the creator of the map really own what he made?

I'll keep pestering him, hopefully I will talk to somebody higher up or at least find some way in which maps are protected legally... I don't see how Blizzard could maintain the stance that its not your intellectual property.

Do u know some blizzard guy...?
Ive been trying to get hold of blizzard for ages and i really need to ask a question, but so far to no avail.

I want to know that if you make a complete conversion of a game, can u make ur own internet servers for people to play each other on. A bit like battle.net but not battle.net. It will be a different Internet server for my own game.

If you could ask the guy who works at blizzard that...that would be very helpful. Or if any1 already knows the answer plz tell me.

Thnx.

Sure, the maps are property of Blizzard, that's what we all agreed to when agreeing to the EULA.

Still they wouldn't do anything against protectors, would they?

Since maps have to be readable by the game you can't protect them in a way that they are really protected (unless you make them unplayable). Hence there is no problem for Blizzard. As long as you don't sell your map you can virtually do with it what you want.

@Doomsberg:
That's neither possible nor legal. There have been attempts to make an underground-Bnet. The result was that Blizzard sent out a squad of Lawyers to deal with the problem. :)

There is a huge difference between copyrights and map protection. And deleting the wtg or any other stuff is not really a map protection, cause map protection doesn't exist, and even if you heavy lock the map it is still open source, just World Editor is too "buggy" to open it.

So, map protection doesn't exist and what we call map protection is completelly legal

I figured more of you would care about copyrighting your work.

Why would we want to?
Like vexorian said, copyright and discouragement from edition (aka map protection) are different things.
Maps are open source and should remain that way. Really, there are only three reasons that someone would want to copyright his map (the same reasons for map protection, except copyrighting is stronger):
- Someone might just claim credit for it
- Tons of other unofficial crappy versions get releasd
- He doesn't like everyone to know how he did the map
The first reason is understandable, but really, if you made a map and everyone likes it, that should be enough. Why do you need credit?
The second reason is perfectly reasonable and has been happening all over the place, but we don't mind.
Wc3 maps aren't like complex 3d games. All but the most complex maps can be reproduced just by playing them and figuring out what's happening. So save the guy the trouble of reproducing the map and just let him have it.

Also, Doomsberg, don't bother asking Blizzard. It's not legal, but it's socially acceptable (kinda like speeding). There are some programs to create a server that is joinable (even on a computer without wc3). Now the problem here is the objective. You really can't restrict them to playing "your own game". Since it's a wc3 server, they can do anything they like.

LOL thats interesting terminology. What did these people recieve? Fines?

yep, in the grand total of 100,000 each if i remember correctly.

NO i mean not a WarCraft 3 server, but one for my total conversion. I know some peoppe who have the equipment to do it, and i can do the rest, but sadly enought its illegal....no fun. That would've been so cool.

Even if its a "Total" conversion it still uses the WCIII Engine, dynamics ect ect, as such it is illigal to create any Battle.net copies ANYWAY, so it dosnt matter.

I don't know if they had to pay fines. I only know that soon after their appearance the underground server was out of service.

There will always be underground networks (especially in the beta phases, because Blizzards beta tests are restricted to a few people), but they can't exist for a long time.

Hmmm... I was made aware by someone that works for Blizzard while on AIM about half a year ago and he pointed something out to me that he thought was funny, but could be potential trouble for Blizzard. In the WE contract that shows up in the loading screen there are a series of legal statements that only apply to the WE. The part that is of interest is this: Blizzard does not support the WE in any way. Hmmmm. According to new laws released in the past few years any software that is declared to be non-supported by the creator loses ALL copyright law protection. This means, that anything within the WE has no copyright. Not only that, Blizzard has not officially renewed their copyright on the WE since 2002. What all this means is that maps created by you and me are actually the property of no one, and if all copyrighted logos and names were removed from the WE then it would be ownerless.(Meaning, if you removed every instance of "Blizzard" and "Warcraft") This IS a major issue for Blizzard that they seemed to overlook. Don't flame me if you don't like this message, I am only the messenger.

but don't the maps only run on the war3 engine?

No, your missing the point. They do run on the engine, BUT Blizzard has nothing to do with th editor and because of the new laws that means they can't copyright ANYTHING within the editor besides the names of things.