Welcome to this week's episode of the Lawbringer! Each week we'll dive into the intricacies of law and the World of Warcraft. Your mission, should you chose to accept it, is to slay demons of ignorance for the benefit of your fellow denizens of Azeroth. Demons of ignorance slain: 1/4782*.

*Number of ignorant demons may be subject to nerfing.

So last week I introduced y'all to a bit of legal theorizing about how law and WoW might mix if they got pugged together. (Hint: not very well.) Y'all also were clamoring for my dissertation on gold farming. I want to give a big thank you to commentator Arnold for his excellent suggestions for improvements to make, and I promise I will be making those corrections soon. This week we'll be moving into some more concrete topics, prompted by a email from my mailbag:
The new armory prints out date and timestamps for every little move you make in game. Run a heroic, it will show the date and time for every boss you kill. I didn't mind when it printed a date for achievements. But such fine-grained detail being so publicly available is .. invasive of privacy. This is an excellent issue, Wendy, and a subject of much qq-ing on the forums. However, before we can look into what privacy Blizzard may be invading, we need to understand our relationship with Blizzard; to do that, we need to look at a bit of contract law.

Basics of Contract Law

Contrary to popular belief, contracts don't need lawyers, signatures, or even paper. To be binding and enforceable in court, a contract just requires three things: offer, acceptance, and consideration.

• Pro-tip I: Use a lawyer to ensure the contract says what you want it to say.
• Pro-tip II: Write the contract down so everyone knows to what you are agreeing.
• Pro-tip III: Make sure everyone signs the paper so you can prove that the other party agreed to it.
• Pro-tip IV: I am not your lawyer, so don't send anything to me. (See disclaimer below for additional details.)

Offer is a pretty simple concept in most cases. An offer is a request to do anything that a person is not legally prevented from doing in exchange for another legal service or legally exchangeable objects. "Can I mow your yard for $30?" – valid offer. "Can I blow you for crack?" – not an offer that can become a contract enforceable in court. For WoWers, our relationship with Blizzard started with them saying, "If we let you have accounts on our servers and play in our world, will you pay us and agree to our End User License Agreement and Terms of Use?" Our responding, "Yes!" is the next step in the process – acceptance.

Acceptance is the point at which the other party agrees to the offer, though it should be noted that instead of accepting, the other party can make a counter offer which then has to be accepted by the other party before a contract has been formed. Now, to accept an offer, you generally have to be a legal adult and of sound mind. Some of you of a devious bent might see "sound mind" and wonder about what happens if you agree to an offer while drunk. For the record, "high as a Georgia pine" is not intoxicated enough to void one's acceptance. Now, our acceptance of Blizzard's terms is done by clicking the "I agree" box after we have scrolled to the bottom of the terms.

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