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."

Comments

Re:Seems partly justified

[leonardluen]

of course i am not a lawyer...but i think a good lawyer could get the amount reduced. They would argue that there was only 1 infringement, not 17k. they only made 1 copy on their server and so should only owe $200, they did not make a copy for each user that connected, which the fine amounts to.

Here is the DRM circumvention.

[PSVMOrnot]

The server is not the issue here, or at least not the main one.

The part that is landing UMaple with the $3.6 million fine is that in order to make the official MapleStory client look to UMaple's server instead they had to write a little launcher app (UMaple Launcher) which would presumably do something like an in-memory edit to change the server address the client used. Possibly with a modification to some sort of handshaking protocol.

It's the technological equivalent of ignoring a 'do not enter' sign, rather than the actual bypassing of security, but sadly it still seems to count.

This launcher is the part that is being used by the 17K users, and so where the court is getting the 17K counts of infringement from.

Re:Here is the DRM circumvention.

[sandytaru]

That is actually pretty common. I use a modified launcher for my MMORPG, which then allows me access to third party plugins. Since the group that made the launcher has not solicited donations, and all the play still occurs on the main servers so we still pay the original licensing fees and monthly fees to the actual company producing the game, they haven't gone after the group that made the circumventing launcher just yet.

The judge, had the power to dismiss it.

[Lumpy]

But he chose not to.

Re:Seems partly justified

[hairyfeet]

Yeah but since they aren't in the USA (and most likely in some place that don't give a shit about the USA, like Russia or some parts of Asia) then it doesn't matter if he makes it $50 or a bazillion as nothing is gonna happen.

Of course this is why the entire copyright idea doesn't really work because thanks to the internet being global all one has to do is set up in a country with laws favorable to doing whatever you want (or with officials easily bribed) and then all that draconian copyright laws are worth exactly jack and squat. Not saying they should have the right to snatch anybody else's code, but the only way you can treat something that can be copied instantly and at no cost as a scarce resource is if everybody plays along and its obvious that will never be the case.

The real reason the judge was annoyed

[MasterPatricko]

Instead, Plaintiff merely submitted 252 raw pages of documents obtained through discovery without so much as a summary of the information contained in those documents or an explanation to the Court how any of the line items contained therein directly relate to Kumar’s UMaple activities.

Seems to me that's the real reason the judge wasn't feeling like awarding any more damages, not some kind of protest against the DMCA or statutory damages.

Re:Default judgment

[MobyDisk]

If both parties don't show up

That isn't what happened. In this case, only the defense didn't show up. Since they provided no defense, they are guilty. If both parties don't show-up then there is no evidence of a crime so common law jurisprudence requires that the judge rule in favor of the defendant.

Re:Seems partly justified

[Khyber]

And those protection methods were bypassed because they caused problems with other system processes totally unrelated to the game, to the point of system instability.

In fact, Nexon's code does some rather unethical, possibly illegal things.

>mfw I worked on part of this code