Blacksnow was a company formed by MMORPG veterans, essentially for "full-time farming" ("farming" being the activity of playing a game to get valuable items to sell offline). Mythic, developers of the successful second-generation MMORPG Dark Age of Camelot (published by Universal/Vivendi) were taking steps to prevent the sale and trade of in-game items. Blacksnow sued Mythic in California District Court: "The plaintiffs charge those actions constitute an unfair business practice and interfere with 'prospective economic advantage' to the plaintiffs. BlackSnow sells game currency and characters at a fixed price on its CamelotExchange site and also sells in-game items through eBay. Along with unspecified punitive and compensatory damages, the suit seeks a court order declaring that the sale of items and accounts outside the game does not infringe on Mythic's copyrights." (CNet: Game exchange dispute goes to court).
That suit was settled by the summer of 2002 in favor of Mythic. UnknownPlayer.com has the most extensive coverage of the Case.
Remarkably, this fan site comes out in favor of the game developers/publishers, because according to evidence they gathered, Blacksnow was acting in bad faith. They were not playing these games legitimately, they were not a collective of users trying to sell their characters after long hard work gaming, but rather they were people who cheated the game to make good money. There's some use they might have served as bug-trackers for online games, but their tactics seemed mercenary and over-aggressive, judging from information attained by UnknownPlayer.com.
But the killer are the ICQ Logs given to us by BlackSnow's Lee Caldwell...within this set of logs is some stunning information, but seemingly more harmful to BlackSnow than to FunCom. In it, not only does Lee admit that BlackSnow has hacked, macroed and duped their way to their $60,000 a month income, but he offers Adam Young $7000 to "leave us alone and protect us, and we will always tell you the exploits as they come out and that is undoubtedly a win win for funcom and us."from March 2002, Problem with Exploiters, Part 1.
Jessica Mulligan has a piece exploring players and property in regards to this case, "I 0Wn Y0o, d00d" and "I 0Wn Y0u, d0Od! Part Deux," she's pretty firmly on the side of the game developers and publishers as well. Much of her argument centers around the notion that these MMOGs are more of a service than a product:
...persistent, online-only games are both a product *and* a service; they are inextricably linked. You can't use one without the other; without both working in tandem and simultaneously, you have nothing. You can't provide a derivative service without using both the unique property in the game and the unique service associated within it. The unique product(s) are suitable for use *only* within that service, not on the street or in other games by other vendors. You can't sell your 3rd party service without providing someone else's unique, controllable intellectual property through their unique, controllable service and store front.Posted by justin at October 27, 2002 05:55 PM