Hacker News Reader

Can't he just change the name and keep working on it? Surely the name isn't a big deal.

The interesting thing is there are plenty of SC2 maps/mods that use the word "Warcraft" in their name. There are even ones with "World of Warcraft" in their name. Yet Bliz only chose to go after this guy. None of the other maps seems be getting this kind of attention. The practice of Bliz fans making mods using other Bliz IP has been going on for years. Even the original Starcraft game had Diablo maps. Something really struck a nerve with this one and showed up on the Bliz legal dept's radar.

I think you mean Activision. They own Blizzard.

No, I do mean Blizzard Entertainment. Besides the fact they have total independence from Activision in terms of operation. They've also had a long history of doing stuff like this. They shutdown the open source project Freecraft in 2003 long before the Activition merger.[1] Yes, Vivendi owned them at the time. But they have done some equally sketchy things before the Vivendi acquisition as well.

The original StarCraft client silently snooped through the players hard drive and sent the gather information back. They later patched out the spyware "feature" after being hit by a class action suit.[2] I see a lot of fans with the idea that "Bliz is this innocent goodie good game dev who was forced to do evil by their giant greedy parent publisher corps". Trust me, I worked for them. That is absolutely NOT the case. All of these decisions came from with in.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratagus

[2]http://attrition.org/errata/company/blizzard01.html

Reply on news.ycombinator.com