Blizzard tests the reach of copyright law

Blizzard doesn't care about the users.

Blizzard wants to shut down a company that makes third party software. But there is no
relationship between Blizzard and the third party company, so in law they cannot reach that
far. To extend their reach Blizzard is claiming that the users broke copyright law, and then
once that's accepted by a court, they'll say that the third party /helped/ the users to do
that, which is illegal, and therefore they must be able to sue the third party.

The thing that has Blizzard particularly annoyed is that this is a 3rd party which is taking a
monthly fee for doing something Blizzard could do but doesn't want to. Blizzard could take
Glider's $5 per month and just allow users to create level 70 characters. But doing that would
alienate other players (including, ironically, some existing Glider users).

Presumably Blizzard will be hoping to argue more on the apparent injustice of one group
ruining the fun of another rather than any actual legal precedent. In that case it will be
important for the opposing briefs to establish that the "grinding" and so on that Blizzard are
trying to preserve are actually not much fun anyway, e.g. I'd suggest they should produce at
least one witness who is a regular WoW player and uses Glider, even though obviously Blizzard
will immediately ban them.

To be fair to Blizzard, they obviously hoped to create a fair and level playing field using
technology. When I last played they'd done a pretty good job of keeping spammers out of the
way. But to be a bit more cynical for a moment they should have read any of the dozens of
semi-technical papers written on this subject which conclude that "grinding" type features of
the game will inevitably be scripted, and thus should be avoided in the game design up front,
rather than wasting time trying to prevent players from automating them. Faction grinding in
particular in WoW, is utterly soul-destroying. Killing not 10, or 100 but literally thousands
of identical minor enemies for no reason except to make the number slowly climb is the very
definition of pointless grinding. We have computers to automate every other necessary but dull
task, why not for grinding rep ?