Long story short: person runs a private WoW server, makes some money from it, Blizzard sues for copyright infringement, judge awards Blizz $88.5 million in damages!
The long story:
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/29936/Blizzard_Wins_88M_Judgment_Against_WoW_Private_Server_Owner.php

They won't ever see that amount but I applaud this. Sets a beautiful precedent to ward off other people.
As for the 'sympathizers' condemning Blizzard over this, it's pretty sad. I wonder how many would say that if it wasn't a she. She broke the law, and she made *millions* off it.

I hope it's not his last $88.5 million.

It's a brutal punishment, absolutely brutal, but I can see the sense in it.
If she had been running some free private server, that would be one thing. But she made money off it. Good money. The kind that might tempt others to try, even if they could get in trouble, unless Blizzard could bring a suitably large hammer after them.

There was also some mention of it being uncontested, she apparently never showed up so they just got the default judgement. It'll come down when she claims she never got the court notice and goes for a retrial but they'll still bury her and quite right too

The only way to be more audacious would be to send Blizzard a cease and desist letter ;).

It's hard to feel sorry for someone who made $3 million dollars off what is essentially pirated software. If they find her, she'll probably just declare bankruptcy, so it's not like her life is ruined or anything.
The comments here are very different than the comments on Kotaku.

That would be my guess take the 3 million and run to a country the US can't extridite from.
My guess is at least a few of the commentors on kotaku probably played for free on those servers before this happened. Some of them seem to know alot about how the server ran.

$88.5 million?
Ludicrous. Lawyers can't get their heads around numbers for shit. Corporate copyright infringement mania at it's worst.

Of course its ludicrous, they only did it to make a point and scare any other potential "infringers" out of trying this stunt again. They don't actually expect to get any of the money from this suit, but now they have a crystal clear legal precedent to use as a scare tactic the next time something like this happens.
From what I understand about the person accused of this, she pretty much deserved whatever she got anyway. There is quite a bit of hate directed at this woman in the WoW private server community for how she mis-managed Scapegaming right into this lawsuit.

I think no sane person would stay, waiting for the sentence.

From the article... "Reeves had not responded to the suit, resulting in the default judgment in favor of Blizzard."
What do you expect? Had this played out in court, there might have been a lower settlement.
If she fled the country, as some speculate, to a country without an extradition treaty and only has $3 mil (that ain't a lot of money), she ain't gonna last long.

$3 million dollars is going to go a long, long way in most underdeveloped countries.
Heck, you could live very comfortably in Norway for 20 years on that (assuming they money wasn't registered and taxed, anyway). Imagine what you can do in Papua New Guinea.

Yeah... if you earned it... but she's being hunted. The value of money is different on the lam.
And... how is she moving it? A steamtrunk? Money leaves a trail...