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Judge Grudgingly Awards $3.6 Million In DRM Circumvention Case
Fluffeh writes "The case involves an online game, MapleStory, and some people who set up an alternate server, UMaple, allowing users to play the game with the official game client, but without logging into the official MapleStory servers. In this case, the people behind UMaple apparently ignored the lawsuit, leading to a default judgment. Although annoyed with MapleStory (The Judge knocked down a request for $68,764.23 — in profits made by UMaple — down to just $398.98), the law states a minimum of $200 per infringement. Multiply that by 17,938 users of UMaple... and you get $3.6 million. In fact, it sounds like the court would very much like to decrease the amount, but notes that 'nevertheless, the court is powerless to deviate from the DMCA's statutory minimum.' Eric Goldman also has some further op-ed and information regarding the case and judgement."
17 USC 1203 sets a statutory damages minimum of $200 per act of circumvention. UMaples' client, the "UMaple Launcher," allegedly bypassed the access controls in MapleStory's client software. UMaple had 17,938 users.
I suppose one could argue what "act of circumvention" means. But apparently it doesn't mean 17K users avoiding payment to the rightful owner of the software is just one act.
You're thinking about Bnetd -- Blizzard sued the dev team under the terms of the DMCA. As I recall, the main issue was that they'd created a Battle.net emulator which didn't implement CD key checking -- Blizzard refused to allow Bnetd to validate CD keys against Battle.net (citing security and piracy fears), and proceeded to send a DMCA takedown to the Bnetd project's ISP.
Blizzard then sued the Bnetd developers and their ISP (in addition to the takedown request), alleging copyright infringement, trademark infringement, breaking the Battle.net and several Blizzard games' EULAs *and* several DMCA violations to boot. The EFF defended the dev team, but Blizzard still won the lawsuit, the Bnetd.org domain, and a judgment against the original developers.
Proof positive that Blizzard were definitely in the "evil" category long before the Activision merger.
(However this didn't stop the GPL'd source code of the Bnetd project ending up on many, *many* servers worldwide... far out of reach of the DMCA restrictions)
(Disclaimer: any opinions presented herein are my own, and not necessarily those of any other entity)
I don't see how they work out that it is 17938 infringements when they only set up one server, so they have only infringed once.
That would probably because that was the argument from the only side that showed up.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
Copyright law is supposed to protect the artist, not stop people from making a profit.
Ok, say you make a CD and put it up for sale. Someone buys a copy and burns a copy of his copy for his friend, who has never heard of you. You have lost nothing. If his friend likes your CD he's likely to buy a copy of your next one and you earn even more. Now, if your customer sells a copy of his copy to his friend, that's money that should have gone to you, but didn't.
Now, if you sell a copy of your work for five bucks and he turns around and resells his legitimate copy for ten, he's made five bucks but that's perfectly reasonable. You sold him that copy and he now owns it, and if he can sell it at a profit he's free to.
Free Martian Whores!
IT WAS NOT AN INFRINGEMENT SUIT! They were sued for circumventing DRM. completely different issue.