MDY Industries, LLC v. Blizzard Entertainment, Inc.

ORDER

Our opinion filed on December 14, 2010, is amended to include the following footnote at the end of Section V(E)(2):

With this amendment, the plaintiffs-appellants’ petition for rehearing is DENIED. No further petition for rehearing will be entertained.

OPINION

Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. (“Blizzard”) is the creator of World of Warcraft (“WoW”), a popular multiplayer online role-playing game in which players interact in a virtual world while advancing through the game’s 70 levels. MDY In dustries, LLC and its sole member Michael Donnelly (“Donnelly”) (sometimes referred to collectively as “MDY”) developed and sold Glider, a software program that automatically plays the early levels of WoW for players.

MDY brought this action for a declaratory judgment to establish that its Glider sales do not infringe Blizzard’s copyright or other rights, and Blizzard asserted counterclaims under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (“DMCA”), 17 U.S.C. § 1201 et seq., and for tortious interference with contract under Arizona law. The district court found MDY and Donnelly liable for secondary copyright infringement, violations of DMCA § 1201(a)(2) and (b)(1), and tortious interference…