So Blizzard has won its case against the programmer who wrote Glider. Michael Donnelly and the blogosphere are up in arms because it did it by claiming breach of copyright. Way to miss the point everyone.

Glider is a program that is used for botting in World of Warcraft. It has no other purpose. If you are running Glider, it is because you want to farm gold or grind for primals or powerlevel your character, without actually sitting in front of the screen.

If you want to cheat your way through a role-playing game, cheat in Oblivion. When you cheat in WoW, you are wrecking my game as well as yours. If you think the game is too boring to play as intended, fine, you're welcome not to play.

Absurd

Should Blizzard have been allowed to claim that loading a game into RAM constitutes an unauthorized copy? No, that's clearly absurd. But for Blizzard to have lost would have been even more absurd.

Suppose I write a program that allows me to instantly kill any player anywhere on my server. Should I be allowed to make money selling this to every jackass who doesn't fancy his chances in a fair fight?

All this ruling really shows is that Terms of Use agreements need to be legally enforceable in a way that allows me to sue you if you facilitate others breaking it. Much in the same way that selling guns to preschoolers is illegal.

In this country, anyway.