How seriously does Blizzard take the operation of private World of Warcraft servers? On August 10th the company was awarded a stunning $88,594,539.00 judgment against a woman who operated a business running her own WoW server and selling items via Paypal. That may seem steep, but over $3 million of that amount came from "inappropriate profits" the woman made from running the server. That's right: her private server, run under the name Scapegaming, was a multimillion dollar business. It also made her a very attractive target for litigation.

Running private servers violates the EULA, DMCA

Creating a private server, and then selling access and items to players on that server, breaks the World of WarCraft End User Licensing Agreement and Terms of Use in many ways. By agreeing to the EULA, you promise not to "host, provide or develop matchmaking services for the Game or intercept, emulate or redirect the communication protocols used by Blizzard in any way, for any purpose, including without limitation unauthorized play over the internet, network play, or as part of content aggregation networks." Playing on a non-Blizzard server is a clear violation of this agreement.

The server in question was not a small operation—at one point it hosted 32,000 players in a single day according to court documents. In June 2008 there were 427,393 members in the website's community. If you think the money awarded to Blizzard seems high, this is where the math comes in.

"Based on these allegations, it is reasonable to infer that Defendant has provided each of its users with anti-circumvention products or services on at least one occasion," the document states. "Although Plaintiff is unable to prove this fact definitively, the Court must draw all reasonable inferences in Plaintiff's favor on account of Defendant's failure to participate in the litigation process."

That's right, since the woman in question never showed up in court, she was slammed with a DMCA violation for every single one of her users. After making a few million from running a private server, you'd think it would be a good idea to save a little back just in case the company in question decides to come after you.

In fact, the statutory damages were low, according to the court. The $200 fine per circumvention is a statutory minimum, and in this case it was multiplied by 427,393 users. "To the extent that this figure appears unreasonably large, Congress has mandated this approach and the Court is unable to deviate from it," the judgment explained.

Blizzard also argued that every Paypal transaction constituted a circumvention, but the court struck that one down. The amount Blizzard claimed it was owed looking at the Paypal transactions? An additional $20,886,200 in statutory damages.

For-profit private servers are not a valid career path



It's unlikely you'll find yourself in a courtroom if you're messing around with a few friends, but Scapegaming was dealing with hundreds of thousands of members paying millions of dollars to play on what amounts to a pirate server.



World of WarCraft is Activision Blizzard's largest cash cow, and the company does not have a sense of humor about gamers finding a way to play without paying the monthly fee.