Heh, you and I would probably get along great in meatspace. I’m just a student; my urge to learn so many different subjects led me to a grad degree in Environmental Science, and I still feel like I’m just a student. I loved my law classes. If it wasn’t for the extra four years of school and few hundred thousand of loans (and if I didn’t love my work), I’d be a lawyer. May still be someday.

What is your law background, just out of curiosity?

If I weren’t a musician/marketer, I’d be a lawyer. I’m just a student. I enjoy legal studies because the various rules and arguments boil down to logic games. Challenging yourself to think ultra-objectively and uber-rationally is fun. I guess that’s why I actually get good grades in law courses. ;p

Hah! True. Having taken some law classes as well, I’ve heard several stories…

What is your law background, just out of curiosity?

the judge would be within his or her rights to simply toss their case out, and judges have a lot to do.

If the judicial system was actually as efficient as presented in the movies… I remember one of my law professors, who is a practicing attorney, talking about the various judges he had. One judge had a glass eye and what he’d do was hunch over the bench with one hand against his good eye… and fall asleep. The lawyers would do their thing and the judge would wake up and make his ruling. ;p

I’m not really speaking in terms of WoWGlider, but of the more general ruling over the class of software modification programs and packages. Truthfully, I don’t really know how it works either.

As far as renting versus buying, eh, I have to confess ambivalence. The license and rental model is already very well established, it’s just not often found in the personal software field (or rather, it hasn’t been until recently). I don’t like the model much, but when you talk about businesses having licenses for X users or a site license, these have been around for a long while now. I couldn’t tell you if it’s because no one has challenged them or because they’ve been challenged and come through.

That’s another way to look at the argument, too: is a license for one still a license? When does it become an item?

One last thing to add, is that legally I’d bet that the entire copyright angle is simply a result of “shotgun” litigation: you try every angle you can think of to hang your case on, so that you don’t get thrown out for lack of standing (or lack of applicability, etc.). WoWGlider, in Blizzard’s opinion, does clear harm to their product, service and enterprise. They now need to state which laws, if any, they feel apply. Better (procedurally) to have too many answers to that question than too few, and so it begins…

@Morgan

Yes, we live in California, and the laws have gradually gotten more relaxed when it comes to those sorts of paraphernalia (not that I feel that’s a bad thing). I still remember when you’d get kicked out of the shop for calling them anything other than tobacco pipes, though, and certainly in many other parts of the country all of that is still quite illegal.

True, violating the TOS or the EULA is, strictly speaking, breach of contract. But what WoWGlider does might (might!) fall afoul of more serious laws, for all I know, so I can at least see why it’s being presented to a judge. If it causes harm but does nothing illegal, Blizzard is still well within its rights to seek relief on those grounds, and it would still be up to a judge to determine whether an injunction against the distribution of the program was an appropriate remedy (though at that point it’s tort, possibly contract, but no longer criminal law). It isn’t just “wrong”: if that was all Blizzard had, the judge would be within his or her rights to simply toss their case out, and judges have a lot to do.

On the former, it’s also illegal in quite a number of places too. I wasn’t trying to comment on whether or not it was necessarily completely valid in how it *should* be done, because then I’d need to get into a discussion about whether or not drugs are validly illegal, or whether the artistic merit of the paraphenila as an object of art is sufficient grounds to bypass the argument, and I don’t want to go there, but in an extremely narrow set of circumstances, it’s possible to have an item that can only be used for a completely illegal purpose, and you can make a very strong argument that such an item should be heavily regulated at best, and banned at worst. And it wouldn’t necessarily by tyranical to do that, depending on the specific circumstances. It can easily tip over into that, especially if the action that it’s used for really shouldn’t be illegal, but it doesn’t *have* to.

Nah, more like drug paraphenalia, which in most places *is* illegal.

There are more than several smoke shops in San Diego where you can legally buy bongs, hookahs, and other drug paraphenalia. There’s a grocery store down the street from me that sells and displays hookahs.

Outlawing a platform for use is a step ahead of recalling a product because the “wrong” market is using the product in “unintended” ways. Both are presumptious and typical behaviors of tyrants.

If the actions that WoWGlider takes are in fact illegal, then since WoWGlider can *only* be used to do them, and can never be used for any legitimate purposes it’d be considered illegal.

I’m familiar with the VHS argument. WoWGlider can be used for legitimate purposes on emulated WoW servers, which I believe are legal (e.g., WoWscape.) I think the fact that violating either the TOS or EULA is not criminal should be recognized.

Nah, more like drug paraphenalia, which in most places *is* illegal. If the actions that WoWGlider takes are in fact illegal, then since WoWGlider can *only* be used to do them, and can never be used for any legitimate purposes it’d be considered illegal. Your list is full of items with legitimate uses. This was the defense used by peer to peer filesharing programs btw, and they were found legal because there were legitimate uses beyond copyright violations.

@Peter,

I’m not so clear on how WoWGlider works on a technical level, but as far as I can tell, it’s not actually stripping any copy protection, and the “copying” that’s occuring is the same “copying” necessary to run the program in the first place.

That’s why this whole thing is extremely silly. It’s basically stating that copyright of WoW applies to personal use in the same way that you mention in scanning a picture and photoshoping it without uploading it anywhere, except it’s going even further and stating that the actions required to use the software *at all* is something that they hold the exclusive right to license to you.

So you’re renting the program at best. This is very stupid. Software doesn’t deserve special rights in terms of how it’s treated. It’s a non-tangible item, but it’s still an item.