Blizzard Against Bot-Maker sets scary precedent on Copyright
| Category: Games By on 2008-07-17 | Digg it! |
Today a judge ruled with the size on Blizzard against a Bot-Maker (link) in a claim that a bot program, Glider was violating copyright. Blizzard was arguing that in the EULA it states that if a copy of the game is altered that it is no longer valid to be used. Fair enough, what's screwed up is that they claim that the copy was in the RAM and that the bot program altering memory allocations of that program was breaking the EULA, therefore it's copyright infridgement.
What...?
Exactly.
So now as long as the EULA licenses you to use their product under certain conditions, they can claim any program that modifies it otherwise is illegal copyright infridgement. So long as they license you it and not sell you it.
Whats screwed up is that this could possibly mean that exploits in games are also illegal copyright infridgement and on top of that does it mean that for a temporary moment in time, part of your memory is under their terms and conditions in the legal system? Would buffer overflows also be part of this? Does this mean, that if I have a copy of a book, licensed or lent to me and let's just for argument's sake say that it's a MadLibs if I fill it in temporarily and then erase it, have I broken the law?
Hopefully this doesn't help RIAA or MPAA with any legal cases. I hope EFF does something about this.
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