Response from Bryan "Kaelten" McLemore

Does your site host your own addons, or ones created by other authors? If you host other authors works, who is allowed to submit addons to your site? How do you handle questions of copyright or license violations?

We mostly host addons created by others. We do have a few that has been created by our company, but thats in relation to our database sites. To submit an addon to our site you have to be either a) the orignal author or b) have permission from them. Otherwise it will be removed as soon as we learn otherwise. We take reports of infringement very seriously, and will investigate all claims. If we find the claims valid we take down the offending files and notify the author who posted them, many times banning them.

Were you aware that WowMatrix is scraping your site for new versions of your addons, and allows users to download directly from your server without visiting your site?

Yes.

Were you aware that WowMatrix shows ads in their client, but potentially bypasses the ads shown on your site?

Yes.

Did Wowmatrix ever contact you to tell you they did this, or ask permission?

No. However, during talks with them about purchasing the software and paying them for the time they spent developing it, they did offer us an extremely low amount to compensate for the bandwidth used. It didn't even begin to cover their portion of a normal month's costs.

Are your addons licensed for free distribution (for example, GPL)?

Some of the addons we host are, many are not. It is completely up to the author who posted it.

If the addons are licensed for free distribution, did they ever ask or inform you that they were providing them through their client? Do they host it themselves, or pull from your site?

Until we implemented deeplink protection they pulled many of them off our site.

If your addons are NOT licensed for free distribution, did WowMatrix ever come to you and offer to host your addons on their server?

They tried once a few years back. When they first started they were scraping WowAce en masse. You can see the resulting conversation "on the WowAce forum":http://forums.wowace.com/showthread.php?t=8947. This is also the only instance I know of them talking in public.

Did you contact WowMatrix and ask them to remove your addons or stop scraping your site? Did they respond? Were your addons removed?

Yes, they did stop mirroring WowAce. However, they never did stop scraping Curse, until we blocked deep-linking a few weeks ago. Before this any attempt to block them was circumvented by their devs. Including User-Agent forgery and patches to update their page parsing.

Even just the fact that each client acted as a scraper made it harder to block. Not even mentioning that by doing this instead of hosting the files themselves it saved them thousands of dollars every month.

Did you ever ask WowMatrix to compensate you for the bandwidth their client uses, or did they ever offer? Do they compensate you?

As I mentioned earlier they did offer while we were in talks regarding other matters. It was a fraction of the costs they incurred us, and no agreement was ever reached there.

Have you seen significant bandwidth increase that you believe is due to WowMatrix, especially since patch 3.1?

No, we saw a significant drop in bandwidth usage due to our protections. About 30% on a normal day. Which is something like 100-150 mbit/s, and during patch days it could be as much as 1-2 gbit/s.

Do you agree with Curse and WoWI blocking WowMatrix from their servers?

As Co-Founder of WowAce and a senior employee at Curse I support them 100%. I've always found it extremely distasteful that WM was scraping other sites to show their own ads.

WowMatrix says: "Although we do not agree with their actions, we respect their position in this matter, and so WowMatrix does not currently download AddOns from either Curse or WoWInterface." Do you feel they've respected you, your site, and your addons?

No, absolutely not. When asked or blocked in the past they ignored us and happily worked around each block. As a direct result of their _lack_ of respect we've had to go to extremes and ended up disrupting the usability of the site for some of our users. This is definitely not something we wanted.

Do you want your addons available through WowMatrix? Do you feel this decision has been influenced by the recent events?

As an author, no I don't. As a site administrator, no I don't, and even if I did, I don't have that authority to sublicense the hosting or distribution. My decision has been influenced by more than a year and a half of watching their actions and policies.

Do you have any comments you would like to make about the current situation with WowMatrix?

I would like to say one thing.

My complaint with WowMatrix has only been about how they've done business. I fully acknowledge that they had a clean product that did what the end user wanted. If they had came in and setup a nice hosting site and done things that way from the beginning (or even changed early on) I'd have zero problem with them. Now it seems they're trying to go this way. However, I anticipate that if they started to host the majority of their own addons they'd begin to feel the weight of their own bills much as we felt them (probably more given that we only got a portion of their traffic). It does, however, irritate me that they're using the profit they've gained by leeching other sites to try to set up something more legitimate.

I've made my position pretty well known. I've been all over the community the last few weeks trying to tell people what's happened and why. I've been yelled at, badgered, insinuated against, and even been told my ancestry mingled with sheep. This has been a very trying time for all of us involved. However, I'm still willing to participate in any interviews or other questionaries such as this one.