A battle that has stretched across the WoW domain and was the deciding fate of a company known as MDY Industries, of wether or not they would stay in business with their MMO Glider product. On January 28th, 2009, the acting judge in the case — Judge Campbell ruled in favor of Blizzard in putting MDY Industries liable to pay the full extent of a 13 million dollar lawsuit that Blizzard originally had going against the Glider company

A response posted by MDY Industries Owner who is simply known as Mercury posted this in regards to the recent ruling:

I just wanted to get a quick reply up on this, since people are telling me that we’re shutting down in February, which is not quite true. That may or may not happen and the possibility of that happening is not something we can really measure. But I can lay it out and you can decide on your own. Here’s what’s going to happen:

1) February 13th, both parties file regarding injunction and whether/how we can continue to sell during the appeal process. He asked for this in his ruling on Wednesday this week.

2) Sometime after that, maybe a week or two, Judge Campbell rules. If he rules in our favor, nothing else happens – we’re good to go through appeal and this process ends. If he rules against us, then we go to step 3. We go to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals and ask for a stay through appeal. They gave it to Napster in 2000 and we have some good arguments, but who knows. If they give it to us, we sell through appeal. If not, we don’t sell and Glider stops.

So we have two chances here. Different people give us different odds at each step. For example, I am not very hopeful that Judge Campbell will give us a stay, since he has pretty much smoked us at every turn so far and clearly considers me to be a Very Bad Person. So in my opinion, that’s maybe a 20% chance. Other people, such as lawyers outside of the team, think it is much more likely that he’ll give us a stay – he wouldn’t have asked for briefing if he had no intention.

Similarly, there’s no way to measure what’ll happen at the 9th CCA if we don’t get any mercy from Judge Campbell.

Consider it two coin flips and you need to win one. We’ll know on the first coin flip in about 3 weeks.

The battle is over, however, it is coming to an abrupt halt for MDY in the coming days. For those that are not familiar with what MMO Glider is; it’s a application that injects itself into World of Warcraft and will allow the player to be away from his machine while the program makes the character move. You can literally level, do battlegrounds, farm, repair without any assistance from the actual person. Sounds crazy? Well it’s actually illegal. More details will be added to this story as it develops.