At the district court level, MDY had been found liable under theories of copyright and tort law for selling software that contributed to the breach of Blizzard's End User License Agreement (EULA) and Terms of Use (ToU) governing the World of Warcraft video game software.

WoW is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game, in which players control characters and complete a variety of tasks, such as exploring the landscape and performing quests.

Michael Donnelly, the founder of MDY Industries, LLC, created a software bot called Glider to play WoW for its users.

[1] In its ruling on Blizzard's contributory copyright infringement claims, the district court first considered whether purchasers of WoW were legal "owners" of the client software.

[2] The Court agreed with Blizzard's arguments that WoW purchasers were not legal owners of the game software but instead licensees, in line with the prior Ninth Circuit ruling in Vernor v. Autodesk, Inc..[3] As licensees, players are required to make use of the software within the scope of the End User License Agreement.

In the terms of that agreement, Blizzard specifically prohibited "the use of bots or third-party software to modify the WoW experience.

The court therefore upheld the judgment that MDY violated the provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act against trafficking in copyright circumvention technologies, at least with regard to the dynamic nonliteral elements of Blizzard's content, i.e., those portions provided by the World of Warcraft servers.