Blizzard is amping up its assault on gold-selling-and-bot-distributing company Bossland GmbH. The World of Warcraft maker was defeated by the German court system back in May when it filed for an injunction against Bossland, which owns and maintains the HonorBuddy, DemonBuddy, and StormBuddy bots that plague World of Warcraft, Diablo III, and Heroes of the Storm.
Undaunted, Blizzard filed a lawsuit against Bossland’s apparent American contractors, including James “Apoc” Enright, this time in a California court. The company alleged last month that “Enright and his team” are responsible for the botting programs accused of violating Blizzard’s copyright and causing “massive harm” to Blizzard’s business in the order of “millions or tens of millions of dollars in revenue and in consumer goodwill.”
Bossland CEO Zwetan Letschew disavowed Enright and the unnamed defendants as “at best random freelancers” at the time, but Torrentfreak, which broke the story last month, now reports that Enright is cooperating to a degree with Blizzard’s attorneys and has “agreed to hand over the source code for the Stormbuddy software.”
Torrentfreak says that Letschew is “outraged that Blizzard took its code” and has now accused Blizzard of copyright infringement. “Today Blizzard acted in a manner as shady as possible for a multi-billion-dollar corporation,” Letschew told its forumgoers, apparently without a shred of irony. “We were informed that the deal compelled Apoc to submit the entire source code of Stormbuddy, which is actually the intellectual property of Bossland GmbH, to Blizzard. […] Blizzard now possesses the whole Stormbuddy source code. There was no permission given by Bossland GmbH, nor were we contacted by Activision Blizzard, nor had Apoc the rights to give out our intellectual property.”
Bossland says it has put a halt to sales of its Heroes of the Storm bot for now out of concern that “Blizzard may take action against the users of its software” (TF’s words), but it said that back in May too, so don’t hold your breath.
And to be clear, we currently have only Letschew’s word that Blizzard has done anything at all. Blizzard has not commented on the case.
