Blizzard Bot Ruling Sets A Dangerous Precedent On Copyright

[Evilsizer]

http://techdirt.com/articles/20080716/1046271700.shtml

are you fking kidding me? really!?!?!

[Shiggity]

I agree that bots are bad and ruin games, but the way in which they won the case was stupid.

That judge didn't even know what he did I bet.

That copyright nonsense is absurd.

[Evilsizer]

I agree that bots are bad and ruin games, but the way in which they won the case was stupid.

That judge didn't even know what he did I bet.

That copyright nonsense is absurd.

if anything the only thing the person did was violate the EULA at best. the bot to some would be considered a tool. since its being used for the same task over and over agian. im not saying bots are bad completly in the sense that in Diablo2 bots would start games and run thru only on set level. then leave remake game after boss was dead. i mean me and a few friends would have done the samething anyway. i dont see the harm in that kind of a bot but if its setup to do something else. like play your character for you while you work. then wtf is the point of paying for the game if you arent playing the game. ok well enough on that from me....

but this was the worst part of it all, IMO
Instead, the court had to spend eight pages trying to piece together two separate parts of the license agreement to make a case that copyright was somehow violated.

[noxqzs]

I am on the fence with this issue. I don't play WoW, so I don't feel qualified to discuss the details, however court rulings are usually lengthy documents. IMO, 8 pages is a drop in the bucket compared to most rulings. The wording alone takes up space, when you have to deal with citing laws and regulations.

[Malpine Walis]

I don't think that there is all that much to be on the fence about here. Let's say that you wanted to try the game. Well you can go to any of the regular download sites such as filefront/fileplanet and what you need to DL is only a 1.7Mb exe file.

Assuming that you have the trial account already set-up, you run that file and it contacts the blizzard servers to get the material that makes up the rest of the game. And what does it get directly from blizzard? Well, actually, a .torrent file with a small amount of wrapper code to obscure the fact that it is a torrent. With no special effort at all, you can convert that file into a regular torrent and then use your favorite client to get the full game.

Then, being an mmo, it does need to be patched every few days and that too is done with torrents. From this, it is fairly obvious that blizzard does not even use their own bandwidth to distribute anything other than the torrent files.

So for any reasonable purpose, they are giving the game away for free (why it costs so much to buy a boxed version in the store, I have no clue). So what is the substance of the copyright issue here? According to what I read on the EFF web site, they are miffed that anyone would dare to make an “impermissible copy” by loading the game into RAM while the cheat program is running.

Hold the phone!!!

Copyright law does not have a provision in it for such a restriction. Contract law would allow them to do that but only if such a restriction is clearly stated on the outside of the retail packaging. Hidden clauses in EULAs that you cannot read until after you have bought a product generally do not pass muster in the courts for that type of foolishness.

I suppose that one could extend that to say that the declaration could be required to be up front on any and every DL site on the planet but for two problems:

First, AFAIK, nobody has ever tested that in the courts for downloaded software.

Second, I really don't see how blizzard can both use torrents for distro purposes and control every possible source for those same torrents.