We have talked about private servers on the site here before,but in case you have not heard the term:they are unofficial servers,very much against WoW Terms of Use,that are run by companies other than Blizzard.They are shady as get out -- some make you pay(and these are not people you had ever want to give any credit card information to),some will delete or change characters on a regular basis,and many times they are created just so whoever is running them can mess around with GM powers,and cheat with any items they want.

So you can see why Blizzard would want them shut down,and that is exactly what they are trying to do with this lawsuit filed in the California Central District Court against a company called Scapegaming that runs at least one private WoW server(and they have apparently been running microtransactions in-game -- selling in-game items for donations of money).The law firm working for Blizzard, Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal,also worked on the Bnetd case, which was another piece of unofficial server software that allowed players to play off of Blizzards Battle.net setup.

The complaint lists copyright infringement as the cause, which means they are probably using the same argument targeted at other private servers in the past.We will keep an eye on this, but it is very likely Blizzard will win this one unopposed,and Scapegaming(or at least just their WoW server) will get shut down for good.