Letter to Editor: Response to Florian Mueller's Release re: "Anti-IP"

Letter to Editor: Response to Florian Mueller's Release re: "Anti-IP"

Florian Mueller assumes that a copyright holder (actually both parties here have copyright, the Bnetd team of course own Bnetd - but you can rely on Blizzard's lawyers to imply as heavily as possible that it is somehow "stolen" property) is entitled to unlimited protection from competition merely because doing so would allow them to better enforce their existing rights. Specifically Blizzard says that if Bnetd is illegal it would not be available (which is contentious) and once unavailable there would be less incentive to make illegal copies of Blizzard's video games (probably true). They prefer not to draw attention to the fact that it leverages one product (video games) to construct a legal monopoly elsewhere (the servers) perhaps because they naively assumed that mere obfuscation had given them the latter for gratis.

A solution has been proposed[*] which would allow Blizzard, if the illegal copying were genuinely their only concern, to be entirely satisfied. But it was rejected, and instead this is now a matter for the courts. Broadly construed, as corporate entities like Blizzard would prefer, this /change/ to copyright rules would essentially open the floodgates to similar lawsuits in any case where a copyright holder controls one thing, and would prefer to also have a monopoly on related things so long as they can invent a fancy story about "intellectual property rights" that connect the two.

Want to buy a new TV remote? Spare parts too expensive? Today you can buy from a 3rd party, but that's not going to happen if Florian Mueller's argument wins over the higher courts. If it isn't a documented standard pinout, protocol, wavelength, etc. you're a reverse engineer and any hypothetical rights given to you as a citizen are taken away as a consumer. The justification will be (as in this case) financial, and the results will be (of course) ordinary people paying more to get less.

Of course the courts will probably (as a futile gesture) hold that an individual customer is welcome to do whatever she likes in the privacy of her own home. So long as the individual has a software development team, electronics specialists and maybe a chip fab in the kitchen, she'll be no worse off than she is now.

I believe we need the First Sale doctrine strengthened, not more over-reaching of "intellectual property rights", creators have never been more protected that they are today, yet our world is being drained of color using those very same protections. Protest against Software Patents is worthwhile, but only if we also watch our other fronts - such as the use of copyright to remove freedom to interoperate.

[*] So far as I understand it BnetD could be trivially altered to validate against a Blizzard provided authentication system in any of several ways. This would mean people intent on illegal copying would have to create "underground" servers, a situation that exists today and will exist regardless of any court case.