Blizzard VS private servers

It appears that Blizzard has started to take action against the WoW private servers. While there's no real evidence of this , forums posts in several places show that many of the popular servers are currently down.

A message was posted on the Vioku forums (A forum created for the community of the popular server Ani-WoW)explaining the current situation :



"Ok, so by now.. most of you should be probably aware of what’s going on..
But for those that don’t, I’ll make it simple.. “Blizzard Entertainment” have sent us a “copyright dmca notice” with a take down request, which needs to be done within 24/hours (btw 12 hours passed already). This isn’t a joke obviously, and to protect our asses we’ve decided to take the server down and cooperate with Blizzard on this request.. Is obviously that we don’t want to go jail for a game!

So here’s what we’re going to do (I won’t go into too much details): Our servers will remain closed until further notice, but is most likely that we’ll close our doors to World of Warcraft permanently.. This however, does not mean that is the end to our community and future ideas, after all.. our goal was to make Aniwow one of the best private servers by January.. remember that? Well, it might be an impossible task now that everything has turn down into us, but remember.. it’s never the end to something that received a lot of dedication (at least to my own personal rules), that being said.. there’s a second chapter coming up… no one never knows."


But there are more take-downs happening, For example Chaoscrusade (A server I used to play on a lot). They have posted the following :

"We regret to inform you that ChaosCrusade will be down until the issue with the received DMCA is cleared.
We cannot give a time/date or even an estimation at this present point in time but we will try to keep all of our users updated."

And then:

12/05/08: ChaosCrusade is pending with the law firm Sonnenschein.
12/04/08: ChaosCrusade has gotten a photocopy of a DMCA letter from the law firm Sonnenschein.

But the letter is recognises as a possible HOAX because
the letter is missing:

a) A statement made under penalty of perjury.
b) Subpoena. Lacking subpoena violates SoftLayer’s privacy policy.


Sonnenschein is the law firm from Blizzard , They have represented Blizz against those responsible for bNetd, (the software that enabled people to play Blizzard’s previous games online without using the official Battle.net server system.)

12/05/08: the DMCA passed as authentic. The future of ChaosCrusade will depend of the decisions the lawsuit will make over the next few days. All realms will remain offline.

This is all the information I got at the moment , if anything new shows up I'll add it.

-Inf