Next week, on the Lawbringer, Amy Schley discusses the legal implications of making a single week's article so ridiculously long that no one has the patience to read it.

I believe that had been covered in other suits prior to the Glider suit. IIRC the judge decided that having one copy of the program in RAM* didn't count as infringement because it was necessary for the use of the program (and therefore you don't need a EULA to allow you to run the software, which is why EULAs have switched from "on running this software" to "on purchasing this software").

Which is a common bloody sense decision as otherwise reading a book or listening to a song would be copyright infringement as you are making copies of the work in the neural pathways in your brain (you filthy pirate you!).

* I believe (IANAL) that MDY got pinged because it made an unauthorised derivative work by altering the RAM copy of WoW. Which is something you would need a EULA to allow you to do under most copyright regimes.

The main issue with that is that the case didn't actually make a judgment about that, and as far as I know, it could still be interpreted both ways... Which means it'll just come up in some other case where proponents of free Intellectual Property will be unpleasantly associated with someone disreputable.

Oh, and the word you intended was "affect". It's a common mistake, but the verb to change something is "to affect", while the verb to create or begin something is "to effect". These often get confused because the noun referring to a change is "an effect", and the noun referring to the physical evidence of an apparent emotional state is "an affect".

"The 800 lb gorilla is the ownership of the memory space in which the game runs."

Not in law, it isn't. This is like saying "Is that stuff REALLY still stolen once I get it into my house? I mean, I OWN everything in my house."

If they can prove you had to violate a copyright to get it into your RAM, or that the act of executing it from RAM was copyright infringement, it doesn't matter if you saved for years for your little RAM stick or if you're using a public computer in a library.

"If they can prove you had to violate a copyright to get it into your RAM, or that the act of executing it from RAM was copyright infringement"

That's not the issue exactly. It's if blizzard owns the memory space that is being used, is the issue. Glider would look into the active memory space that WoW is using. By "hijacking" the memory space or by launching the WoW client within the Gliders own memory space it could examine the unencrypted data.

This process was made famous (he did not invent it) by the guy that made the Diablo Trainers back when Diablo 1 was the big kid on the block. He went by the name "enigma" ( if I remember correctly ). enigma's software invaded the memory space then read the decrypted data and modified it on the fly. This type of invasive software was one of the reasons ( one of many ) MS moved to the isolated memory style we have now ( and was already in the server software of the time ).

So the big question ( at least for software developers like me ) is if the company that owns the software and licenses it for use, owns the memory space it is using at run time. There was a lot of noise about this early on, but seems to have been swept under the rug.

I realize this might not seem like a huge issue but looking at it from the idea that it becomes legal for software makers to examine what you are looking a, when they feel like it, sort of bothers me. what will keep them from embedding code to allow remote viewing of your current work? I can see the responses now, "your not important enough to watch", which is mostly true. That's not the point. The point becomes, do you own what you are working on if the EULA ( which no one reads ) stats that they can examine your work and take ownership if they desire? Or can they sue for royalties when their software is used in the creation of a product.

I also realize most companies will not go this route but if the possibility is there then someone will use it. It seems to be human nature.