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Court Upholds Blizzard's Anti-Bot DMCA Claim, Denies Copyright Infringement
An anonymous reader writes "The Ninth Circuit reversed a $6.5 million judgment for Blizzard against MDY Industries, saying that making bots is not copyright infringement. The bad news for MDY? The court found that they did violate DMCA Section 1201(a)(2) (PDF), which prohibits trafficking in products that circumvent technologies designed to control access to copyright-protected works."
Now if blizzard would only take care of its battle net servers. I swear the damn bots are everywhere in D2 bnet, every single realm.
You can't have a non password protected public game without them constantly entering and advertising websites to buy items. (which should also be illegal)
To say nothing of the bots that autorun the game and hunt for items killing the damn economy fffffffff....
As Blizzard I would have gone with a case about improper access and interfering with the operation of computer system. The game clients are authorized to access and interact with the servers, the bots are an unauthorized access mechanism to the game servers. Simple plain and shut and clearly puts the bot runners in with the people that do destructive access to systems.
-- and not enough characters to put "with a computer" in the title :(
I am not sure if it's because of the advent of modern media, with its up-to-the-second news cycles that maybe only makes this seem true, but it really seems to me that our government is becoming more and more openly aggressive in showing that corporations are in complete control of our system.
Some may think that this story is not related. It is. In a world where corporation control everything, laws like the DMCA are able to pass. I just can't imagine something like that happening 30 years ago, but perhaps it's just because they didnt have the tech which gave them the need.
More and more, it seems you own nothing you buy.
People complain sure, but no one does anything about. What can we do? Sure, I vote with my pocket book, since that's the only votes that actually matter anymore.
Many it's time to go all French on our government? Maybe it's time to say, fuck no, the RIAA does not control our lives. Fuck no, the MIAA does not control our legal system. Fuck no, the government does not get to say that we look at on the Internet.
Then again, perhaps not. Better just to wait until it's too late.
There is a famous saying in Russia; Until thunder strikes, a man won't cross himself. Nice to see we have something in common.
> As much as it hurts me to say it, it seems that the DMCA is useful in this case.
What leads you to that conclusion? There is nothing useful about the DMCA.
The article seems to imply a dangerous precedent:
"Thus, even though – as discussed above – the court ruled that Glider did not facilitate copyright infringement, MDY could still be liable under the DMCA for circumventing Warden's detection features."
So the DMCA can apparently be used to attack reverse engineering that was not necessarily used to facilitate copyright infringment.
do you even have a remote clue what you're talking about?
they're saying that wowglider broke encryption via running a scripting bot that has nothing to do with it.
This is blizzard's "we're protecting our business model via lawsuit" argument.
so it's a bad precedent, which a lot of people lose on from this.
I'm looking at the destination, not the journey. :)
AKA "The Ends Justifies the Means."
Meanwhile this particular end has nothing to do with what the DMCA "was made for" or "the original spirit of the act."
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
getting rid of bots fails to answer as to what has gone on to encourage bots in the first place.
if you think getting rid of bots is good, you are missing both the destination and the journey.
the underlying question should be: how has this game become so repetitive that people can automate it in the first place?
oh right, blizzard, grind, etc.
The game clients are authorized to access and interact with the servers, the bots are an unauthorized access mechanism to the game servers.
Except glider doesn't access the game servers.
They access the game client - which then accesses the game servers.
Glider itself doesn't send or receive any data across the network, only the client does and that traffic is no different in nature or content than what could be generated by a human accessing the game client.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
What leads you to that conclusion? There is nothing useful about the DMCA.
Favorite $MEGACORP wins case. Must be justified. Case closed.
Look where all this talking got us, baby.
Um, go on. What was the original spirit of the act?
The cynical view was that it was intended to prevent anything that anyone doesn't like. In that respect, you're right.
The naive/front purpose of the act was that it was intended to prevent copyright infringement, by making prohibiting some of the prerequisites to copyright infringement (as well as prohibiting the prerequisites to many fair uses as well, but you can't make an omelet without ruthlessly crushing dozens of eggs beneath your steel boot and then publicly disemboweling the chickens that laid them as a warning to others). In that respect, this application of DMCA has nothing to do with its original purpose.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
the underlying question should be: how has this game become so repetitive that people can automate it in the first place?
I'm not trying to defend Blizzard, I've never found any of their games attractive, but tell me this.. what games can you think of that it wouldn't be easy to make a bot for? I can't really think of any.
Getting a computer to play a game is easy. It's trying to get it to play a game while appearing human that is a challenge.
which is totally what she said
"Glider itself doesn't send or receive any data across the network, only the client does and that traffic is no different in nature or content than what could be generated by a human accessing the game client."
The same could be said of using ssh to connect to a server, it is no different in nature or content from what a human could send.
Yet if you used the ssh connection and a client side script to cause the server to send lots of spam that would be improper use of the connection.
Wrong. A malicious script behind a ssh client is significantly different in nature and content. A regular human typing those same commands would be just as unauthorized as the script. But a human using the game client to generate the exact same commands as glider does would be considered authorized.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
This is great news.
1) The Copyright infringement thing made no sense. Loading software into memory is not a copy. Especially if you are the person who owns/licenses the software. If it was, every person on earth would be liable for 5 trillion counts of copyright infringement.
2) This is *exactly* what the DMCA was made to stop. So if we are to debate the merits or downsides of the DMCA, this is perfect case to make an example of it.
P.S. IF you don't like this ruling, don't blame the judge. He ruled according to the law. If you don't like it, write your congressperson explaining that this is why this is a bad law.
Although frankly, I don't see why this isn't a simple contract dispute. The contract for WoW says "no bots" and this guy made a bot. I'm unclear why this is even a big legal issue. It should be a simple civil matter.
Blizzards owns the content to WoW, and the players are licensees (which shouldn't come as a surprise to anybody since they pay a subscription).
And?
The content inside WoW can only be accessed via a client which Blizzard controls.
I understood glider uses the proper client.
The content of WoW is copyright.
This was NOT copyright infringement.
WoW put safeguards up (via Warden) to prevent unauthorized access to this content.
MDY circumvented Warden.
Bypassing a game bot is also not a crime despite it's intimidating name.
Open and shut case.
Good thing you're not a lawyer.
Exactly. This was one of the most compelling complaints against DMCA when Congress passed it:
In the name of copyright protection it allows the content creators to build a fence. This 'golden' fence gets a special status under the law and is protected by the DMCA and people who breach it are considered law breakers. But the gross injustice is that along with legitimate copyrightable works, the content creators can put whatever else they want behind the fence. Want to deny a fair use? Integrate such use tightly with the enforced-by-law copyright protection mechanism. Activities that others would legitimately be able to do with the content that aren't infringing become untouchable, because to do so they must cross that golden fence.
In my opinion, if content creators overreach and try to prevent fair-use activities by fencing things off within their copyright protection/access control mechanisms (such as this case) then the access control technology should lose its special status as legally protected under 1201(a)(2).
You are a content provider who wants the protection of the law/legal-threat for your access mechanism? Don't want 'violators' to get a free pass? Tough. Only protect things that you had the right to protect in the first place.
"You saved 1968." - Ms. Valerie Pringle to the crew of Apollo 8
The content inside WoW can only be accessed via a client which Blizzard controls.
I understood glider uses the proper client.
You misunderstood the part where Blizzard controls the client. As soon as you start Glider, you are breaking the ToS on Blizzard’s client and you no longer have the right to use it.
Where is the circumventing copy protections part? Nobody argued that is isn't against the TOS. I wonder where the breaking of law happened.
If running the client isn't copyright violation, how is warden a copy protection mechanism? It doesn't seem to be protecting blizzard's copyright according to the judge.
I really have trouble understanding how glider violates 17 U.S.C Sec. 1201(a)(1). Glider does not touch warden or the client at all. It bypasses warden in the sense that warden doesn't detect a known cheating tool as installed or running on the system. It does not impair warden's operation. You might be inclined to say Glider 'avoids' detection in such a way that it is violating 17 U.S.C Sec. 1201(a)(1), but that is acceptance of Blizzard's right to catalog and examine for their approval anything you do while using their software.
Say Blizzard wants to ban performance enhancing drugs in WoW because they give an unfair advantage. Children are now circumvention tools(say no to drugs kids). Anyone caught with children are now prohibited from playing WoW because they could bypass automated drug testing. The problem with the law is that anything can be a circumvention tool if you prohibit the right things.
Maybe I don't want Blizzard to know that I use emacs. I'm fairly certain that you can make a wow-bot with that. If I make sure that emacs has a random installation signature every time warden scans my system, then I am circumventing blizzard's right to detect my use of emacs? No, I'm just not letting blizzard know I use emacs. I have no legal obligation to report correct information to blizzard about my computer usage.
Is it just the fact that Blizzard doesn't want me to use WoW bots that makes avoiding their scans circumvention? The case can be made that they don't prohibit the use of bots through their copy protection, only the use of software that matches the signature of known bot software. Am I responsible for their inability to reliably detect software they don't like me running? Is hiding my emacs use any different from hiding my wow-bot use? If their detection is unreliable, is an unknown access vector which does not impede the operation of their detection software still circumvention of copy protection? Is it really the case that when any form of copy protection exists, even if it is almost entirely ineffective that not using the protected work precisely as proscribed by the copyright holder is a violation of 17 U.S.C Sec. 1201(a)(1) ?
Scary.
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The law:
Section 103 (17 U.S.C Sec. 1201(a)(1)) of the DMCA states:
No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.
The Act defines what it means in Section 1201(a)(3):
(3) As used in this subsection—
(A) to circumvent a technological measure means to descramble a scrambled work, to decrypt an encrypted work, or otherwise to avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, or impair a technological measure, without the authority of the copyright owner; and
(B) a technological measure effectively controls access to a work if the measure, in the ordinary course of its operation, requires the application of information, or a process or a treatment, with the authority of the copyright owner, to gain access to the work.