Mercury posted an announcement on the MMOGlider website regarding some updates on the case between MDY and Blizzard.
In a rare bit of legal news, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals just issued an order that strongly supports our DMCA argument. We’re probably going to file a little prod to our court here and let them know about it.
The court in that case found that circumventing a protection measure to use a piece of software didn’t count as a DMCA violation. They agreed with Chamberlain, which says you have to circumvent and then (gasp!) actually infringe on a right protected by the Copyright Act.
Circumvent + make infringing copy = DMCA violation
Circumvent + no infringing copy = A-Ok, no problemoSee if you can figure out which of the above examples describes Glider.
Hopefully, it’s not too late to get this in front of the court, because it really strengthens the core of our DMCA argument. And, of course, it means that if they don’t adopt Chamberlain, they are splitting against the Federal and 5th Circuit. Mind you, the 9th Circuit seems to be pretty crazy sometimes, so they might not care. But they really ought to.
Thanks again to Brian Carver, who has an eerie ability to pick this stuff out of the ether and analyze it down to a single sentence.
TL;DR
The 5th Circuit followed the Federal Circuit, making it more likely that the 9th Circuit (ours!) will also.The order
http://mmoglider.com/legal/MGE-PMI.pdf
We’ll see how this decision affects this long and drawn out case. Stay tuned!
