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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."
UMaple users can play MapleStory (using the MapleStory client software) without ever touching MapleStory's servers. UMaple then solicits "donations" that lead to enhanced privileges in the UMaple environment.
In this case some penalty does seem justified
UMaple was after all making money from software written by MapleStory, without their permission
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.
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)
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.'
The court should have ruled that a $3.6 million award would violate the Eighth Amendment prohibition against "excessive fines," and that this portion of the DMCA was therefore unconstitutional as applied to this particular case. (It's not that unusual for courts to decide that while a law is constitutional "on its face," it is unconstitutional "as applied."
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.
But he chose not to.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Let this be a lesson: If you're sued, even if you think the lawsuit is the dumbest thing on Earth, you should still show up to defend yourself. If you don't, things like this happen.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
DMCA isn't what is most fucked up here. The real problem is for default judgment to automatically mean total lack of judgment. If both parties don't show up, then for some reason the judge is required to ignore how the facts compare to the law. Justice isn't even half-heartedly attempted.
I suspect this ridiculous process is one of those things that is long-established by judicial tradition but has never been penned by any legislator, so the people have have no say in the matter.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
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.
I'd tell a UDP joke, but you may not get it. I'd tell a TCP joke, but I'd have to keep repeating it until you got it.
How is proliferating a broken and unmaintained battle.net system that's littered with bots clogging all chat channels with spam, flooding the custom list with fake games (unjoinable games or games that will never start), and permitting blatant cheating "protecting your IP" ? All of these problems can be solved in a maintained battle.net server. The real problem here is Blizzard, when faced with pioneering engineers who saw these problems and wanted to fix them on their own so they could continue to enjoy the games they had purchased, were unwilling to cooperate at no expense to themselves. That makes Blizzard stupid. But when these engineers decided, correctly, that in the game's current state, no person would ever again purchase it because it was literally unplayable, it was obvious what the next step would be: continue, even without Blizzard's support. And then, instead of realizing the potential profits a community-maintained battle.net server would bring (you know, not needing to pay people to develop and maintain it, nor to police it), Blizzard spends millions of dollars to spew lawsuits all over everything they can touch. Making money was not the goal of these actions, as clearly the costs of these suits far outweighed any actual demonstrable damages. The ONLY goal Blizzard has was to destroy bnetd and to prevent any future community involvement in bettering Blizzard's services.
THIS is what makes Blizzard evil. Nobody has denied that Blizzard has a right to profit from each user of its software (what you call "IP"), but Blizzard outright rejected that offer and proceeded to destroy a project aimed at making a Blizzard title far better at no cost to Blizzard.