EULAs: Confusing and Misconstrued

The designer of a very popular and productive bot for World of Warcraft is being sued by Blizzard according to an Ars Technia news report. The man wrote a sophisticated program that simulates a persons actions at the mouse or keyboard to perform very broad tasks in the game, such as killing enemies in a certain area defined by the user. According to the article, this bot is a step better than the rest because it basically simulates almost anything a user could care to have a bot do: the boring stuff that results in a better character. This could include gathering items and defeating menial enemies. The cool part about this bot is that it takes into account your health, mana, and other stats to figure out what to do while you're off at lecture (as if you wouldn't be playing in lecture).

The lawsuit focuses on the EULA (End User License Agreement) only allowing one copy of the program to be loaded into the computers memory to be run. Theoretically this could be breached when the bot reads the health, mana, and location of the user and stores it off for use in another location in memory. However, I believe that this is not a breach of the EULA for the maker of the bot, just the user of it. Online game companies have been banning users since they figured out how to catch cheaters; This I have no problem with. The problem is that Blizzard is demanding that the maker of the bot stop selling it and "return" all profits to Blizzard.

How did Blizzard and the other game companies not put a stop to this in their EULAs. It could be very simple. A normal commercial EULA forbids the modifying, deassembling, deconstructing, ect, of the program for any purpose. This basically means that you cannot take the program and reconstruct the code that created it, which would then give you the ability to make software that looks and acts similar, but is impossible to tell from the legitimate program. I would like to respectfully add one little thing to this. "Any use of this program to create derived works is strictly prohibited unless agreed to in writing beforehand." A bot would fall under this clause because it could not necessarily be used for other purposes.

I do not know of a better wording that would disallow programs that could interact with programs without this clause (thus putting the blame back on the user), but anything that can interact with that many programs could be classified as artificial intelligence, and AI is still classified as Sci Fi.

As for this whole "profit" thing; I wonder if the man could make a payment to his wife for "Secretarial Services;" She would pay the taxes on it, and it would not be classified as profit. Perhaps my mind is running away and I've lost the definition of money laundering. It could at least work for a normal accepted value of secretarial work as long as someone can prove that she did some sort of job.