Blackmoor Vituperative

A few years ago, I read a polemic that predicted that our current legal system would eventually be replaced with one sweeping law against everything, and that the purpose of the justice system would be to prosecute those who are unpopular or lack the financial resources to fight back against their oppressors.

I hate to say it, but it looks like that day is approaching faster than even I expected.

Judge Campbell has distinguished between the actual bits stored on the World of Warcraft disk (which he called the “literal elements” of the game) and the interface elements the user encounters as he’s actually playing the game (which he dubbed “non-literal elements”). In his ruling last summer, Judge Campbell ruled that Glider did not violate the DMCA with respect to the “literal elements” because Warden did not “effectively control” access to those elements: they are stored, unencrypted, on the World of Warcraft disk. But he deferred until this month’s trial the question of whether Glider violated the DMCA with respect to the “non-literal elements.”

[…]

MDY argued that these “non-literal elements” did not constitute a distinct copyrighted work, and therefore could not trigger DMCA liability. The firm offered two arguments. First, the law only grants protection to works that are fixed in a tangible medium, and MDY argued that the “non-literal elements” were too ephemeral to qualify. The judge rejected this argument, holding that it was sufficient that the “non-literal elements” could be recorded by screen-capture software, even if Glider didn’t actually do so. Second, MDY argued that the “non-literal elements” were not created solely by Blizzard, but by the interaction of Blizzard’s software with the user. Hence, if the game experience was copyrighted, it would be the joint work of Blizzard and its users. The judge tersely rejected this argument as well.

[…]

Ars talked to two legal experts at Public Knowledge, a public interest organization that filed an amicus brief in the MDY case last year. Staff attorney Sherwin Siy compared Wednesday’s decisions to past decisions that tried to use the DMCA to limit competition in the garage door opener and printer industries. He noted that the purpose of warden seemed less to control access to a copyrighted work than to a network service—quite a different thing. Siy’s colleague Jef Pearlman agreed, warning that if the courts weren’t careful, we could end up in a situation where “because anything can contain copyrighted works, any access to anything becomes a DMCA violation.”

(from Judge’s ruling that WoW bot violates DMCA is troubling, Ars Technica)

We all knew that the DMCA was an abomination, but I wonder how many of us expected it to be this bad. I certainly didn’t. I think this case illustrates both the monstrous nature of the DCMA and the absurdity of our current copyright laws.