The Glider outcome and copyright law

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

2-04-2009 @ 7:39PM

sleeptastic said...

Blizz suing you for damages over a name? The best they could win is forcing you to change your name. If you're talking about monetary damages, you only get those if you can show harm. For example by selling a bot that ruins that integrity of the game, thus causing some other people to quit and stop paying Blizz their subscription dollars.

In practical terms, since violation of ToS and helping other people violate ToS are already illegal under contract law, there is very little real impact except to the scholarship of copyright law, because in the real world, software devs will still win under contract law.

2-04-2009 @ 8:28PM

Balsa said...

Agreed. Violating a EULA or TOU does not, in and of itself, constitute copyright infringment. Other specific factors were cited like cercumvention of measures to protect copyrighted material. Violating some randomly chosen term of use doesn't necessarily cermumvent measures to protect copyrighted material, so this case doesn't automatically become precident for all future cases involving EULAs and copyrights. The similarity between this case and some hypothetical future case would be taken into consideration in its validity as precedence.

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