Curse

Burst Cancel · Mar 29, 2008, 07:02 PM // 19:02

Most of you are ignoring the real issues in this case. The moral or practical ramifications of botting, gold selling, etc. are immaterial here - this is strictly a question of legality, and a question that really should concern you in ways totally unrelated to gaming.

What makes this case legally interesting is that Blizzard invokes, as their defense, the Copyright Act and the DMCA under expansive readings. I don't normally follow the case law in this field, being a patent person myself, but it appears that there is at least some body of support for Blizzard's interpretation of the statutes that I, as a plain citizen and user of software, find rather disturbing.

Their first point is that Glider violates Blizzard's copyrights of WoW by causing an unauthorized copy of the game to be made in system memory (i.e., "RAM"). Of course, it has previously been held by the Court that copying software to RAM does constitute a "copy" for the purposes of analysis under the copyright statute (i.e., you don't have to burn pirated software or download it to harddrive to infringe copyrights - simply having a copy in memory is infringement). Further, Blizzard asserts that an "unauthorized copy" is any copy made in breach of the EULA or TOU.

Let that sink in for a moment.

If the Court agrees with Blizzard's analysis on this matter, a lot of people are going to get very nervous. Why? Because, as a matter of law, any use of a program in contravention of the EULA or TOU would constitute not just a violation of the EULA/TOU but also statutory copyright infringement.

Somehow, I don't think legislators intended copyright law to reach that far.

A second prong of Blizzard's argument is under the DMCA. Specifically, Blizzard characterizes bot detection mechanisms (specifically, Warden and scan.dll) as "access control" under the DMCA. Although these mechanisms control only use, and are not intended to prevent copying or transmission, the DMCA provisions do not appear to explicitly distinguish between different types of "access". As such, Blizzard asserts that any method to avoid or circumvent the bot detection measures constitutes violation of the DMCA.

The practical ramifications of this argument should be pretty obvious - in any case where use of software is restricted in some way by technological means, circumvention of that means results in violation of the DMCA (I don't know how Fair Use would work here, but given Court history, I don't expect Fair Use to be much of a defense). Under this reasoning, you could so far as to argue that software written for specific operating environments have built in technological access protection measures that 'effectively control' access to the copyrighted work (since you can't run it on anything except the environment it was written for), and that running, for instance, a VM of that environment (say, Mac running a Windows emulator to play a Windows game) would constitute circumvention of that access protection measure.

In short, you have to access software the way they want you to access it. Even the simple act of skipping the normally un-skippable copyright notice at the beginning of DVDs is legally questionable (the access protection measure is disabling fast-forwarding during this section - by skipping forward using some software means, you are circumventing the protection measure).

If there was anyone out there that still thought copyright legislation was reasonable, this case should give them pause.

Numa Pompilius · Mar 29, 2008, 10:53 PM // 22:53

Quote:

Originally Posted by Burst Cancel

What makes this case legally interesting is that Blizzard invokes, as their defense, the Copyright Act and the DMCA under expansive readings. I don't normally follow the case law in this field, being a patent person myself, but it appears that there is at least some body of support for Blizzard's interpretation of the statutes that I, as a plain citizen and user of software, find rather disturbing.
---
Somehow, I don't think legislators intended copyright law to reach that far.

My understanding is that the industry lobbyists wrote the DMCA and got politicians to sponsor it without understanding a single word of either the law nor the issues. I mean, we're talking corrupt troglodytes like Ted "the internet is not a dump truck, it's a series of tubes" Stevens here. That man, who's a living argument for limiting the number of terms one can serve as member of congress, was head of the committee in charge of regulating the internet.

Quote:

If there was anyone out there that still thought copyright legislation was reasonable, this case should give them pause.

The DMCA is a very, very, bad law, with very, very, far reaching consequences. Unfortunately the public doesn't know, and the legislators neither know nor care.

Burst Cancel · Mar 29, 2008, 11:07 PM // 23:07

Quote:

Originally Posted by Numa Pompilius

My understanding is that the industry lobbyists wrote the DMCA and got politicians to sponsor it without understanding a single word of either the law nor the issues. I mean, we're talking corrupt troglodytes like Ted "the internet is not a dump truck, it's a series of tubes" Stevens here. That man, who's a living argument for limiting the number of terms one can serve as member of congress, was head of the committee in charge of regulating the internet.

I've heard similarly. Although, I should point out that the part of my post that you quoted was dealing with § 501 of the Copyright Act, which is distinct from the DMCA. In my humble opinion, this is really a case of the Courts interpreting an outdated law in a broad fashion and Blizzard jumping on the opportunity to further expand the interpretation. The key point that Blizzard uses is that "copying" is interpreted by the Courts in an expansive fashion - it doesn't have to be a permanent copy or a removable copy (i.e., what most people think of when they think "copy" or "piracy"). Given that software progams have to be copied into RAM to be executed, the Court's interpretation of "copy" is similar to holding that reading a book involves making a "copy" of it in your brain. It's a pretty troublesome interpretation that has everything to do with the language of the statute being outdated (i.e., not taking into account modern technological advances).

Quote:

The DMCA is a very, very, bad law, with very, very, far reaching consequences. Unfortunately the public doesn't know, and the legislators neither know nor care.

I've followed the issues surrounding the DMCA off-and-on; although I was much more interested in it back when I used to do my own video encoding. I hadn't, however, heard too much about it recently except in conjunction with things like Chilling Effects. I don't honestly believe that anyone who's looked into the implications of the DMCA believe it to be sound legislating - the problem is getting people to care about a snotty little thing like copyright when American Idol is on. In the end, it could take a few ridiculously over-reaching RIAA/MPAA lawsuits hitting the evening news before anyone really takes notice.

In this case though, having read both motions, I'm cautiously optimistic that the court will find against Blizzard.

Fril Estelin · Mar 31, 2008, 07:46 AM // 07:46

As contractual law was mentioned in this thread, I thought I'd mention this on Second Life:
http://www.massively.com/2008/03/31/...vice-versus-f/

Quote:

The Terms of Service change in that context gives the impression of being a veiled threat. It's more than that, though -- it commands you to give up your rights to nominative fair use where that use conflicts with Linden Lab's laundry list of legalese. Or else. This pulls the matter right out of the arena of trademark law, and back into contractual law, with enforcement by the governance team.