(EDITOR'S NOTE: I've been working as the editor-in-chief of StarCityGames.com for almost six years now, and in my time here I've met quite a few people in the CCG industry. Earlier today, a designer and friend of mine from a rival CCG company thought I'd be interested in how the competition viewed the current leak lawsuit — so he sent me this article, telling me that I could post in the forums for him, post it anonymously, or 86 it.

(My friend isn't in contact with either Wizards or MTGSalvation, so he can't speak to the finer details of the case - but until Mark Rosewater gets around to writing about the official Wizards take on spoiler leaks [assuming that he does], I figured I'd share this professional's opinion on the matter with you — The Ferrett)

In the discussion about the suit between Wizards and MTGSalvation.com, the points I saw raised most often were, "It's not like Wizards is being harmed,” "The information will be out soon anyway, so they don't have a leg to stand on,” and "Awfully draconian, ain't it?" I have an atypical perspective on this case due to my own job, so I figured I would offer some of my own observations and play devil's advocate.

First, a little about myself, as well as a disclaimer or two. I do not work for Wizards, nor have I ever. In fact, I work for a competing company as the primary developer for two CCGs that compete with Magic. I am not identifying either myself or the company I design for because I am not speaking for the company as I write this, and the relative anonymity allows me to speak without stepping on any toes. I am not a lawyer (other than the occasional rules lawyer), and can not even begin to speak to the strength of the case - nor could I even if I actually knew the details of the case beyond what is in the press release.

But returning to my opening paragraph, the first two points are closely intertwined. If Wizards can't show injury, how can they win a suit? Or, put differently, what is so hurtful about the spoilers coming out a week (or a month, or a year) early that Wizards thinks a judge won't simply toss the case immediately? For any company making and selling a product - from books to movies to games to unicycles - part of their means of selling is their marketing strategy.

In the CCG world, spoilers leading up to a set's release are precisely that: a tool for selling more packs. Revealing a bit of what the consumer will receive for his or her money is a means of building up excitement for the product - whether it's a card game, a movie preview, the blurb on the back of a book, the headline of a newspaper, or a car commercial. As part of the strategy, the company must decide which cards to preview, where to preview them, and how to preview them.

Some companies like to show every single card before the set releases. Others prefer to keep it close to the chest, and not reveal any at all before the original date. What strategy is most effective? That's still open to debate, and I've heard good arguments on either side. The games I work on tend to have all cards revealed beforehand (or all cards except for a special few set aside as surprises) - but even with a "show them all" strategy, we are careful about timing and order of the revelations.

After all, a new card has the strongest emotional impact on first revelation. Some cards look like shlock without seeing what other new cards are coming along to form more interesting combos with it. If the first card someone sees from the set is a bland or underpowered one, they're likely to have a poor opinion of the set. And if the entire set is revealed all at once three weeks before release date, there is no buildup of excitement, and much of the excitement that would arise from seeing all these cards will die down by the time the set actually hits the streets.

(And in case you're wondering, it is not generally possible to move up the release date in response. For most companies, the release date is the earliest possible day that the product can reach a majority of its retailers. If it is being held back until a date later than that, there is generally a compelling reason.)

If the excitement has died down - or worse, if it hasn't built in the first place — then sales suffer. The set can be pure genius, but even genius has to be presented properly for strongest sales.

Consider another example: the trailer for Phantom Menace was pretty good. Imagine, if you will, the public response to the movie if someone had posted lots of Jar-Jar footage instead. Images of intense light saber duels and ships fighting in space helped sell the movie long before the word “Naboo” ever crawled up a screen. If some third party had managed to get a hold of Jar Jar being himself, how many fans would have held off, fearing a reprise of the Star Wars Holiday Special?

Going beyond sales strategies, there is a question of competition. Suppose Mozilla decides their next version of the Firefox browser will include the ability to cook breakfast. Ideally, they want to release this information early enough to excite everyone who wants their computer to slip them a Pop Tart when they walk into their office in the morning.

But if they release the information too early, Microsoft will hear about it, make a huge public announcement that Breakfast XP™ will come bundled with all future versions of Internet Explorer for free, killing any market advantage that Mozilla would have gained from adding in their functionality. Even worse, if someone gets a hold of the help file being written for Firefox Short Order Chef™ early enough and posts it on the web, Microsoft will have a much easier time working backwards to copy the entire idea.

The fact that it would have been available for public consumption sooner or later is beside the point. Because some third party posted text written by Mozilla in a time and manner not desired by Mozilla, Mozilla is hurt financially. Though it's much more difficult for CCGs to hurt each other's market shares in this sort of manner, the concept still applies.

For that matter, a leak in one division of a company - such as a playtester leaking CCG spoilers, believing firmly that spoilers are cool and good for the game - can lead to other leaks, such as the same playtester telling his friend on the forum about the great new D20 book Larry is writing about how to use Gibbering Mouthers as player characters. Someone at rival company X hears that is in the works, says, "I can do that!" - and suddenly a rival company is beating you to the store with the Ultimate Gibbering Mouther D20 Tome™.

There is one other factor which plays into the leak of unauthorized spoilers: inaccurate spoilers. In the course of playtesting, few cards survive unchanged. Some are tossed out entirely, keeping nothing except the art. If one of these is posted as a leaked spoiler, it creates false expectations. If the card is bad, then prospective buyers may point to it and say, "This set will suck!" even though that card isn't even in the set anymore. If it is too good, they'll say, "The set is broken!" — and again, they're operating off of inaccurate information. If it was a card they like better than the final version, they will want to know what happened to it, and they'll feel miffed that their toys were taken from them. If the leak came from a playtester with an old version of the files, this is common. (I've dealt with it all too often myself.)

What does this all mean in legal terms? For that, I'll have to let someone respond who has something more resembling a legal background than anything I have. Based on my own experience in the field, I honestly can't predict how it will turn out from a legal point of view. While I can illustrate real-world examples of why Wizards would want to pursue this, and why they might have enough grounds to think their case will hold up, I can't quote either U.S. or Canadian law - either of which is Byzantine enough to make even rules lawyers hide in a corner and whimper.

The other major theme I saw raised the question of whether Wizards was going overboard in suing the web site and the John Does. The plain truth is that most of us simply do not know enough about the history to answer that. On the one hand, it is possible that Wizards has never asked the Canadian site to restrict their spoiler content before, and Wizards is arbitrarily coming down on them like a ton of bricks. On the other hand, it is more likely that there is a long history between Wizards and MTGSalvation, with repeated requests from Wizards to stop posting unauthorized previews and to reveal the source of the leak.

On the gripping hand, there could be other factors, entirely separate, that those of us outside the case will never be privy to. And why would they tell us? We're not involved, and there's no reason for them to share their internal logic and strategies.

Is this heavy-handed? Possibly. That said, I have a hard time believing that they would not be conscious of their image; hence, I suspect they would resort to something which generates a negative PR like this only if they had a strong reason to do so.

Note that I am not saying that Wizards made the right choice, either from a legal point of view or from a PR point of view. But I'm not willing to say that they made the wrong choice, either. As someone who has had to deal with related issues in the past (some quite recently), and who expects to face more such in the future, I can safely say that I will be watching closely to see what happens in this case from all angles.