Back in 2002, Blizzard sued some hobbyists over a program called "bnetd." Bnetd was a program that provided a game-server you could connect to with the Blizzard games that you'd bought. It was created as an alternative to Battlenet, Blizzard's notoriously unreliable game-server software that left gamers frustrated and furious due to frequent outages:
https://www.eff.org/cases/blizzard-v-bnetd
To the public, Blizzard made several arguments against bnetd. They claimed that it encouraged piracy, because – unlike the official Battlenet servers – it didn't check whether the copies of Blizzard software that connected to it had a valid license key. Gamers didn't really care about that, but they
did respond to another argument: that bnetd lacked the anti-cheat checking of Battlenet.
But that wasn't what Blizzard took to the court: in court, they argued that the hobbyists who made bnetd violated
copyright law. Specifically, Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which bans "circumvention of access controls to copyrighted works." Basically, Blizzard argued that bnetd's authors violated the law because they used debuggers to examine the software they'd paid for, while it ran on their own computers, to figure out how to make a game server of their own.
Blizzard didn't sue bnetd's authors for pirating Blizzard software (they didn't – they'd paid for their copies). They didn't sue them for abetting other gamers' piracy. They
certainly didn't sue them for making a cheat-friendly game-server.
Blizzard sued them for analyzing software they'd paid for, while it was running on their own computers.
Imagine if Walmart – one of the biggest book-retailers in America – had a policy that said that you could only shelve the books you bought at Walmart on shelves that you
also bought at Walmart. Now imagine that Walmart successfully argued that
measuring the books you bought from them and using those measurements to create your own compatible book-case violated their IP rights!
This is an outrageous triumph of IP rights over real property rights, and yet gamers vocally backed Blizzard in the early noughts, because gamers hate cheaters and because IP law is (correctly) understood as "the law that lets a company tell you how you can use your own real, physical property." Hard cases make bad law, hard IP cases make
batshit law.
It's more than 20 years since bnetd, and cheating continues to serve as a Trojan horse to smuggle in batshit new IP laws. In Germany, Sony is suing the cheat-device maker Datel:
https://torrentfreak.com/sonys-ancient-lawsuit-vs-cheat-device-heads-in-right-direction-sonys-defeat-240705/
Sony argues that the Datel device – which rewrites the contents of a player's device's RAM, at the direction of that player – infringes copyright. Sony claims that the values that its programs write to
your device's RAM chips are copyrighted works that it has created, and that altering that copyrighted work makes an unauthorized derivative work, which infringes its copyright.
Yes, this is batshit, and thankfully, Sony has been thwarted in court to date, but it is steaming ahead to the EU's highest court. If it succeeds, then it will open up
every tool that modifies your computer at your direction to this kind of claim.
How bad can it be? Well, get this: the German publishing giant Axel Springer (owned by a monomaniacal Trumpist and Israel hardliner who has ordered journalists in his US news outlets to go easy on both) is suing Eyeo, makers of Adblock Plus, on the grounds that changing HTML to block an ad creates a "derivative work" of Axel Springer's web-pages:
https://torrentfreak.com/ad-blocking-infringes-copyright-ancient-sony-cheat-lawsuit-may-prove-pivotal-240729/
Axel Springer's filings cite the Sony/Datel case, using it to argue that their IP rights trump your property rights, and that you can only configure your web-browser, running on your computer, which you own, in ways that it approves of.
Axel Springer's war on browsers is a particularly pernicious maneuver, because browsers are the best example we have of internet software that serves as a "user agent." "User agent" is an old-timey engineering synonym for "browser" that reflects the browser's role: to go out onto the web
on your behalf and bring back things
for you, which it displays in the way
you prefer:
