Blizzard sues Turtle WoW emulator for 'egregious' copyright infringement

Blizzard is taking on Turtle WoW, the largest classic World of Warcraft emulator on the market, for alleged "egregious" copyright infringement.

2

It's official: Blizzard is suing the collective of developers behind Turtle WoW, a program that allows gamers to experience the classic, early versions of MMORPG World of Warcraft. In the 49-page legal complaint, Blizzard says that the Turtle WoW servers are unauthorized, illegal servers, and make the case that the emulator also "undermines Blizzard's own efforts to deliver classic and community-driven content."

Blizzard refers to Turtle WoW as a "pirated software product" because the developers not only use Blizzard's trademarks and copyrighted materials in the software itself, but also included a custom fan-made creation in the files. Blizzard says this creation is "infringing" on their IP rights.

Blizzard describes Turtle WoW developers' behavior as "brazen," especially the recent Unreal Engine 5 update video, which claimed to update the entire game in UE5.

The news comes shortly after Daybreak Games filed a copyright lawsuit against The Heroes' Journey, a mega-popular emulator for the old-school Everquest franchise.

Blizzard is asking for 11 prayers for relief, including forcing the Turtle WoW "enterprise" to stop what they're doing, destroy all copies of their client, to take everything down and transfer the web domain over to Blizzard, force an audit of Turtle WoW, and pay for monetary damages and lawyer fees.

Check below for more allegations from the lawsuit:

The Defendants in this action have built an entire business on large scale, egregious, and ongoing infringement of Blizzard's intellectual property.

As set forth in more detail herein, Defendants are the key members of a multinational business enterprise known as "Turtle WoW." Through Turtle WoW, Defendants have found a lucrative way to exploit and profit from the popularity of the WoW game experience.

Specifically, Turtle WoW purports to offer to the public paid access to a group of unauthorized, "emulated" private WoW game servers, as well as all of the software and other tools necessary to access and use these emulated servers, including pirated copies of WoW that have been specially modified to work with its unauthorized servers.

[***]

Almost the entirety of the Turtle WoW Client is comprised of software or digital files that are almost complete copies of the WoW client files from which they are derived. As such, the Turtle WoW Client distributed by Defendants contains almost all of the computer code and all of the artwork, music, objects, and other assets contained in Blizzard's copyrighted WoW client.

[***]

[Turtle WoW developers] engaged in the development, operation, maintenance, marketing, and monetization of an emulated, or "private," set of WoW servers and related client software known as "Turtle WoW." T

he primary purpose of Turtle WoW is to profit from the unauthorized exploitation and use of Blizzard's copyrighted WoW game, including by enabling members of the public to play copies of WoW without paying monthly subscription fees, creating a WoW account, observing Blizzard's rules of conduct, or obtaining a license from Blizzard.

At the heart of Turtle WoW is a group of not less than nine Turtle WoW Servers, which are accessible only via the Turtle WoW Client.

Blizzard is informed and believes, and on that basis alleges, that thousands of people have created Turtle WoW accounts and used the Turtle WoW Client and Turtle WoW Servers to play Turtle WoW.