How did it went? read Bossland relation here:
I did not have any big expectations or hopes for the district court in Hamburg, as there already where few decisions made in Hamburg, that where not in favour of the bot creators or forum operator of a bots/cheats forum
Around 14:30 we were in the local court, in front of the newly assigned courtroom A 156. Unfortunately our case was not included on the list of cases. After consultation with the officials, a government servant moved us to courtroom B 336 ( which was good as the we were asking the judge to give us a bigger room).
As we arrived, Rod Rigole, the the Blizzard Head Office Lawyer from the US, Rod Rigole was there with a translator.
The process took about 90 minutes. The court accepted in principle all of the charges, however you also could tell that the Attorney of Gleiss Lutz did not have the slightest idea of neitherWOW, nor Honorbuddy. Luckily Rod Rigole was there to help him out a bit.
You could see it on the mostly not important charge of trademark law, Blizzard lawyer wanted to hammer Honorbuddy because it violates trademark law and their protected trademarksWOW and World of Warcraft. When asked if he is sure that it includes any trademark violation in the Software itself, the lawyer told the judge that he did not download HB and did not know for sure. Then he said that while the WOW Bot Honorbuddy on the webpage is linked to the file to download, that the file has to have this violation in itself. In one word, it was weird and I do not know if anyone understood him and it does not need an expert to understand the difference about a webpage, a link and a software. if the Link tells you "mothers best pie" and you download pie.exe, it doesnt mean that you downloaded the software "mothers best pie" just because the link says so. You just downloaded a Bot that can be used with the trademark protected game WOW.
After spend so much time on so non-essential argumentation, we went on.
In the opinion of the judges, Honorbuddy is a competitor toWow, and that for its deliberately interferes with Blizzard as an competitor and its TOS and EULA which are included in the agreement between Enduser and Blizzard.
Our argument was not given reasonable time, but we received a five-week period to describe our point on UWG § 4 paragraph 10. (Act Against Unfair Competition)
We will take our chance and hopefully we will get a little more attention. The presiding judge is aware that the whole thing will go up to the Supreme Court and so it is hopefully interesting case for him, because something like this does not occur daily.
A decision will probably be there between May and June.
As you can see there's not much to say now, case still isn't close to be solved, and for now we need to wait few weeks for Honorbuddy to describe their point of view.
Either it's for legal reasons, or change in personal attitude - Bossland doesn't seem to be as eager to fight for their laws as he was at the day Honorbuddy got sued.
Will Honorbuddy get closed and share the fate of bosts like Gilder and Pirox? We don't know yet, but we know for sure that Honorbuddy is one of the best / biggest bots available, and Bossland surely won't just easily give up and disappoint Honorbuddy subscribers.
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