Nostalrius, the former private server of World of Warcraft, is facing new allegations. What is true about the accusations?
The developers of MaNGOS are considering a lawsuit
The story surrounding the closed private server of World of Warcraft, Nostalrius, seems to never end. Now other parties are getting involved.
As the online magazine Buffed reports, which claims to be in contact with a “Daniel” who, along with his team, holds the copyrights to the emulator software MaNGOS, the story around Nostalrius could develop into a much more complex legal dispute. The private server Nostalrius reportedly only operated thanks to the MaNGOS software, which underwent some modifications.
According to “Daniel”, the Nostalrius team now wants to resell the emulator’s data to Blizzard to prevent it from circulating – further private servers of this quality should be prevented. However, this creates another problem, as the MaNGOS software is also copyrighted, which would be violated upon selling the modified version.
“The interesting thing is that Nostalrius will likely sell that very emulator with some improvements (which in their scope do not create any copyright over the software as a whole) to Blizzard, thus not only violating Blizzard’s rights but also our copyright over the software, which we certainly will not accept.”
According to the email, the Nostalrius team is using the server’s data as a “basis for negotiation” to do business with Blizzard. According to Daniel, such deals are “normal” and have occurred with many server operators – although very little has come to the public’s attention.
Mein-MMO says: Whether there is really any truth to Daniel’s statements is hard to say. At least in recent years, there have been no publicly known cases of Blizzard buying the code from private servers to prevent it from being distributed online. Perhaps we will never know if these accusations hold any truth, but probably only after the Nostalrius team’s conversation with Blizzard in the coming days. Until then, this is all just unfounded speculation.
For more news and articles around Blizzard’s MMORPG and the Nostalrius debate, you can find them on our World of Warcraft gaming page.
