After two years in the courts, Blizzard has won its suit against Ceiling Fan Software, maker of Shadow Bot and Pocket Gnome. Once defeated, the bot developer dropped a legendary item, completing the bot net itemset, and ended the quest chain. Oh, and Ceiling Fan have to pay Blizzard $7 million.
According to a statement put out by Ceiling Fan:
“After more than 2 years of legal battles with Blizzard Entertainment to both pursue our right to operate and our customer’s right to play WoW as they choose, we did not prevail in the suit and have been ordered by the United States District Court in California to cease our operations.”
The suit document makes interesting reading. Along with the $7 million payoff, the suit requires Ceiling Fan stop “selling, reselling, distributing, reproducing, sharing, transferring, processing payments for, licensing, activating, or otherwise disseminating or making available to the public in any manner (directly or indirectly) the software programs.”
They also can’t continue working on the software, share their knowledge on developing the software with anyone else, must disable all the licenses to the software that they can, and everyone affected by the suit must follow these rules regardless of what company they later work for.
Not much in the way of wriggle room there.
My favourite bit is that the document ends “IT IS SO STIPULATED.”