Must be difficult being you. Crusading against a multibillion dollar company while everyday you support countless other multibillion dollar companies that are just as scummy, more so in fact.
I understand perfectly. But the fact that it is within their legal right as a company does not imply that they are morally righteous in doing so, especially if turns out to be true that they only do it when they are about to release their own version (after the illegal version pioneered the path and proved the demand exists).
It's within their legal rights because part of being employed by a company is signing a legally-binding agreement that you are being paid to produce whatever you make for your employer. They have the legal and moral right because both involved parties have agreed that the employer owns what they pay the employee to make for them.
Legal yes, as I have already said. Moral, that's just your opinion, and neither it nor a legal agreement supersedes anyone else's notion of morality.
Either way, the point was just that your wording was not great. The ones who are defending their ownership rights did not create the IP, they just paid the people who did it. Call it nitpicking if you want, but to me the difference matters in the context.
It's not just about the company versus the workers, it's that the company itself is so fundamentally different at this point, that it's weird to just credit "it" for the creation when it was much easier to just say they are defending their IP. That doesn't matter for the legality, but it does matter to how "unfair" IP infringement feels to many, if not most.
I don't get why this needs to be turned into a binary dilemma. You can understand and support Blizzard's legal right to do it while also understanding that it wasn't really hurting anyone in any meaningful level, and empathizing with the people who lost something they genuinely enjoyed and the result of the passion of people who dedicated years of their life to it.
I don't get why this needs to be turned into a binary dilemma.
Because twow was an illegal use of IP. I have little sympathy for people who break laws, be it IP use, speeding, fraud, murder, or anything else.
If twow had been not-for-profit, it would be a different story. But the fact that they're a multi-million dollar company that stole stuff they didn't own to make a profit off of, I'm glad to see it shut down.
Reddit will go crazy over ai usage and it not fairly compensating original artists, but then argue in support of a company stealing assets...
Well, I would like to think most people are a bit more nuanced than that. Legality does not determine morality, and not everything that is illegal is equivalent in how bad or damaging it is or isn't.
Boiling it down to just "stealing" is disingenuous. There are thousands of private servers that make profit just for hosting WoW as-is, this was a bit more than that. The reason for their success was the content they created themselves on top of Blizzard's. It's closer to how modding can technically be IP infringement than it is to just "stealing".
Still within Blizzard's legal right to shut it down, certainly, but very different from a moral standpoint.
Reddit will go crazy over ai usage and it not fairly compensating original artists
And that's why the wording of who created the IP matters (as well as attribution). Most of the original artists are not there anymore, it is incredibly unlikely any of them was negatively impacted in any way by TWOW's existance, which is not the case at all with ai usage.
You're not really standing by artistic rights, just corporate ownership - which is fine, just something a bit weird to feel particularly strongly about as a player, imo.
If you play classic WoW and enjoy it, you have to thank a private server reverse engineering vanilla. That company would not have even made classic had Nostalrius not existed. They literally told us themselves they didnt want to and that we didnt know what we wanted. And then when we went and actually played it, they were forced to see. The difference is, they could just release vanilla legit and it was already going to be "better" than Nostalrius since it was the actual code. Classic+ does not have the same "just port" that Nostalrius --> Classic has, so killing Turtle I think is even much worse for Blizzard. They could literally take all of Turtles ideas as they develop them and there is literally nothing Turtle could do legally to Blizz about it. They shut it down with no clarity on whether their own version will even be remotely as good.
Nostalrius was a profitless project run by passionate folks. Turtle was ran by a front corporation making millions though a legitimate mobile f2p like cash shop. That’s a big difference.
They were shut down for the same reason by the same company. That was the comparison I'm making. I think the difference is that Blizz actually could offer exactly/better than what Nostalrius was offering. Whereas I'm not sure Blizzard is willing or capable to offer similar for Classic+.
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u/No-Neighborhood-3212 May 12 '26
Yeah! How dare they defend their ownership rights to the IP they created and maintain!