Yes i know there is another thread about this issue and the news of Blizzard's legal action is very old but i just saw this extra credits episode they put out this week regarding this whole story and something bothered me, again.
They start the episode with the same thing every other wow fan started back when this news was trendy "if they don't take Nostalrius down they won't be able to protect their IP". You all heard this, you heard this so many times that you automatically assume it's true and then you start copy/pasting it on every thread but what does it mean exactly?
I know this was Blizzard's response aswell, they phrased it as "would damage Blizzard's rights", the folks at extra credits say "it will make it harder to shut down real pirates" but your average forum joe thinks that if they don't shut down Nostalrius they won't be able to shut down any other pirate server ever.
So is there any legal basis to these claims? is there a part of the copyright law one can point to that says you must deal with pirates else you lose your IP? What does a "damaged right" look like in the eyes of the law? and most importantly is there a legal precedent for this?
Blizzard's inaction doesn't create a precedent here, failure of defending their IP does but only in a court of law, a judge decides if it's a failure to protect their IP as a result of a law suit, not some guy on the forum.
You may think that if you start a private server now and Blizzard sues over it you can point at Nostalrius and the law is on your side, but it's not, it's not how it works. You can only point to past decisions from a court of law, there must be a judge to side with Nostalrius first and THEN you can point at it.
Also following this logic can Nostalrius point to an older server that's still running? and then that server can point to an even older server? Did all those smaller vanilla servers that ran and are still running prior to Nostalrius somehow obstructed Blizzard from shutting down Nostalrius?
Is there some part of the law that says you must deal with your copyright cases in chronological order?
Another question is how does this quirk of the law extend to other areas? is it limited to copyright or other areas aswell? again i couldn't find any interpretation of the copyright law that deny a company the right to protect their IP if they didn't take action to a prior case. Should we all be allowed to distribute pirated material and defend ourselves against lawsuits by saying piratebay exists?
How about domestic abuse? yeah i know it's far fetched but hear me out. Even though a lot of domestic abuse cases go to court they are often resolved outside and the victim drops the charges or sometimes it doesn't press charges at all. Does this mean this person now won't be able to press charges against any further violence because they let that first one slide? cause this is the equivalent of this copyright argument.
Also there is another issue regarding how blizzard handles it, they could just look another way or grant operating license to nostalrius, from what i understand both option lead to this "damaged IP" issue but how would this work? would every pirate be entitled to an operating license because they gave it to Nostalrius? this doesn't make any sense to me
Again, for everyone that copy/pasted this argument, do you know of any legal precedent where this happened?
For the record i think Blizzard has every right to shut down Nostalrius if they want to, the problem is that i can't use this "has to protect their IP" argument because it sounds incredibly stupid to me.
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