[Megathread] Blizzard is suing Nostalrius

Just like every other argument for intellectual property, this one misdefines the word "stealing". Theft is the act of taking someone's legitimately owned property into your possession without their consent and depriving them of it. That is not what is occurring here.

If someone goes and buys a vanilla WoW disc, and decides they want to buy a server and host the game on it using the files on that disc, there is no theft taking place. Blizzard has not lost any of their property. Ironically, by enforcing Blizzard's intellectual property claim in this scenario, the only actual property rights being violated are those of the person hosting the private server. If that person legitimately bought the disc, and legitimately bought the server running it, then any attempt to prevent him from using those things (peacefully) as he pleases is a violation of his property rights. It is to claim that a person can own a certain sequence of characters -- a certain sequence of 1's and 0's -- and deny, using the force of government, anyone else from using the same sequence of 1's and 0's in a way the person who came up with the sequence first doesn't want them to. It is absolutely ridiculous.

The other part of the argument which claims it's "potentially causing them damage" by causing them to lose potential profit is equally bogus. For one, you can't actually prove that any of those people playing on the private server would otherwise pay Blizzard to play on their servers, so the argument falls flat due to that point alone. Secondly, merely causing someone to lose profit does not constitute theft. Is it considered theft to open a coffee shop next to Starbucks and sell better quality coffee at a lower price, thus potentially lowering their profits? Of course not.

Yes, developers are great, and supporting developers is great. But don't let that sentiment blind you into supporting illogical and unethical actions. Trying to use the force of government to restrict and control how people use (in a peaceful manner) their legitimately owned tangible property is not ethical or virtuous, even if the purported reason is to help developers.

/r/wow Thread Parent