Last week Blizzard filed a lawsuit against a botmaker over alleged copyright infringement. This isn’t the first time that Blizzard has gone after developers of bots, but this time it looks like the botmaker will not be going down without a fight. In fact according to a report from TorrentFreak, the botmaker is turning the tables on Blizzard.
Bossland’s CEO (the company behind the bot) Zwetan Leschew has accused Blizzard of stealing their code. Letschew said, “Today Blizzard acted in a manner as shady as possible for a multi-billion-dollar corporation. 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.”
For those unfamiliar, Stormbuddy is the bot used for Blizzard’s Heroes of the Storm game. Apparently what happened is that Blizzard had their lawyers request the code from James “Apoc” Enright, one of the freelance developers working for Bossland. This was part of a deal that would see Enright hand over the code to Blizzard presumably in exchange for the lawsuit against him to be dropped.
In response to Bossland’s claims, Blizzard released a statement to Kotaku which reads, “We’ve already won numerous cases against Bossland in Germany (where they’re based), and despite their tactics to delay the ongoing proceedings and the related repercussions, we’re confident that the court system will continue to validate our claims and ultimately stop the distribution of these cheating bots.”