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

Seems partly justified

[mehrotra.akash]

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

Re:Seems partly justified

[mehrotra.akash]

There is absolutely no reason to believe that the money people donated to UMaple would have otherwise been spent with MapleStory.

I'm not talking about a potential loss of revenue for MapleStory, I'm talking about the gain in revenue for UMaple
Kind of like the difference between downloading a movie off TPB and selling copies of the movie for a profit
And, yeah, the penalty does seem excessive.As I said, "partly" justified

Re:Seems partly justified

[Lucky_Norseman]

"minimum of $200 per infringement" why is the $200 multiplied by the number of clients? Its the server that they claim is infringing, why not just $200 per server?

Re:Seems partly justified

[AngryDeuce]

Just another example of why mandatory minimum sentences make absolutely zero sense in any way, whether financial or in the way of jail time.

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.

Re:Seems partly justified

[__aaltlg1547]

Only hundreds of years of patent and copyright protection.

But this is a case of unauthorized intrusion not copyright violation.

Re:Seems partly justified

[TheCRAIGGERS]

If it were collectible, it would be quite noteworthy as one of the biggest anti-circumvention awards of all time. But, it's not collectible.

The linked op-ed doesn't say why.

This is pure conjecture on my part, but my assumption is that the creators and the servers it runs on live outside the US, which is also the reason they ignored the lawsuit. Just like TPB happily ignoring (and proudly displaying) all the various nastygrams sent from US lawyers over the years.

Re:Seems partly justified

[Asic Eng]

UMaple was after all making money from software written by MapleStory, without their permission

So what? If the users legally obtained the software, they don't owe MapleStory any further income.

ObCarAnalogy: If you buy a car you don't need to have it serviced by the manufacturer, you don't need to buy fuel from them and you can get your tires elsewhere.

Re:Seems partly justified

[c]

> Its the server that they claim is infringing, why not just $200 per server?

Because the plaintiff's goal is to maximize the damages. It was a default judgement, so the defendent didn't show up to do anything to minimize anything.

If there'd been an actual trial with both parties, there's a good chance that the judge might have bought that argument. Or the argument that it was the actual users who did the circumvention. Or, IIRC, there's an exception for compatibility purposes. Plenty of options.

There could be an appeal. Or, if UMaple doesn't have much in the way of assets, they might just declare bankruptcy and walk away from the whole thing. That'd probably be the smart move.

Re:Seems partly justified

[nschubach]

It's more like someone writing a web server that works great with Chrome or some Chrome features and creating a website that they charge access to get to...

Now, is it appropriate for Google to go after that company because they are making money?

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.

Re:Seems partly justified

[NatasRevol]

No, you missed the lesson.

The lesson here: If you're being sued in a US court and you're not a US company, ignore it because you won't have to pay for it. And the US company will still have to pay it's lawyers while looking idiotic.

Re:Seems partly justified

[mcgrew]

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.

Re:Seems partly justified

[geekoid]

Not true.

Someone getting a copy for free that they otherwise wouldn't have bought is not a lost sale.
Someone getting a copy for free that they otherwise would have bought IS a lost sale.
Someone getting a copy for free that they otherwise wouldn't have bought, and then they buy it, is a sale gained.

Re:Seems partly justified

[DarwinSurvivor]

IT WAS NOT AN INFRINGEMENT SUIT! They were sued for circumventing DRM. completely different issue.

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

17938 infringements or just 1?

[c_g_hills]

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.

Re:17938 infringements or just 1?

[91degrees]

I agree. I'm sure the law says "per work" infringed. not per person infringing. The rationale for the damages I thought was that you can't know how many users infringed.

Re:17938 infringements or just 1?

[tomhath]

FTA:

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.

Re:17938 infringements or just 1?

[Megane]

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.

Re:Is this similiar to the Battle.net case?

[NotQuiteInsane]

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)

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.

Default judgment

[TheSpoom]

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.

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.

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.