A busy week for the courts [LWN.net]

A busy week for the courts

Posted Oct 7, 2004 17:32 UTC (Thu) by fergal (subscriber, #602)
In reply to: A busy week for the courts by allesfresser
Parent article: A busy week for the courts

I agree with everything you say except for one thing. I don't think this is a fair use issue, it is a right to reverse engineer issue. Fair use is more about being able to install the game on multiple machines - home, work etc. I think this is possible with the game, what's not possible is connecting to battlenet from these machines at the same time, which is quite a reasonable and common restriction in the non-Free (as in FSF Free) world. One might say that reverse engineer is just a sub set of fair use but in that case you cannot argue that it is right that has been around for centuries as reverse engineering is a recent thing.

I think the bnet guys were perfectly entitled to do whatever was necessary to create an interoperating server but I think they were wrong to produce software that enabled piracy when it seems they could have prevented it partially or even fully with some extra effort. Yes it would probably have just been a gesture because sufficiently savvy end users could disable it but if they had made that gesture they might not be in their current predicament - although it seems that judge was so confused it wouldn't have a made the slightest difference, surely someone must have pointed out Redhat as an counter example to "open source has no commerical significance".

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A busy week for the courts

Posted Oct 7, 2004 18:09 UTC (Thu) by mcelrath (guest, #8094) [Link]

I think the bnet guys were perfectly entitled to do whatever was necessary to create an interoperating server but I think they were wrong to produce software that enabled piracy

They did not set out to "enable piracy". In fact it is extra work for them to prevent piracy. As such, you are arguing that bnetd should be responsible for enforcing Blizzard's copyright. They did not circumvent Blizzard's copyright, rather, they chose not to enforce it. I think that is reasonable.

This is a dangerous path -- requiring all third parties to be responsible for enforcing other people's copyright. It's very similar to the "common carrier" argument used by internet infrastructure companies. This allows them to avoid enforcing other people's copyright.

So, if you want to require other people to enforce my copyright, under what circumstances should that happen? Under what circumstances is it too much of a burden on the third party? There are millions of copyrighted works and it is unreasonable to require anyone except the copyright owner to enforce them all. What about mods and maps? Should bnetd also be responsible for enforcing the copyrights on them in their server?

-- Bob

A busy week for the courts

Posted Oct 7, 2004 18:26 UTC (Thu) by Ross (subscriber, #4065) [Link]

IANAL.

My understanding of fair use does not mean making more than one copy for
multiple machines. That's pretty irrelevant anyway since Blizzard lets you
do that anyway (spawn installs).

Fair use is a right to use a copyrighted work in a way which would
otherwise be copyright infringement, but it does not allow any type of use.

Examples: time shifting a TV show on your VCR, quoting from a newspaper
article to make a point, converting your CD into MP3 format so you can
listen to it while jogging.

There are other doctrines like first sale. You have the right to sell used
books, games, CDs, etc. as if they were new. This would be copyright
infringement (distribution of the copyrighted work without permission)
otherwise.