The BBC reports that Blizzard has been awarded $6 million in damages in the company's suit against MDY Industries for license violations relating to MDY's Glider software, a bot that completed many of the rote tasks required of World of Warcraft players in order to level up in the game. Back in July, U.S. District Court Judge David Campbell ruled that the software did violate the license agreement, and in January, the case will go back to court to determine whether the software violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).
The MDY v. Blizzard case and counter-suit decision may have further-reaching implications than simply the amount of the settlement and who will have to pay it. One of the sections of the DMCA has to do with reverse-engineering of software. If the courts decide that any product that accesses functions of another product without using a publicly accessible API violates that section of the DMCA, odds are we will see a uge number of lawsuits filed over everything from helper apps to browser plug-ins.
George Mason University is already being sued over a Firefox plug-in, Zotero, that acts as a research assistant. One of the features of Zotero, a free, open-source application, is that it allows users to collect, manage, and cite sources easily for research. It integrates with Microsoft Word and Open Office, as well as blogging software like WordPress, and allows users to capture citations from Web pages, store PDF files, images, links, and Web pages, and export citations for research papers. Thompson-Reuters, however, argues that Zotero's open-source formatting of items found in Reuters' EndNote software violates the license agreement and reverse-engineers its proprietary format.
More news, commentary, and predictions from The Industry Standard:
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- Analysis: Sony's PS3 Home timeline goes from bad to worse
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- News: J.K. Rowling wins copyright claim over Harry Potter website operator
- News: Bogus anti-Scientology DMCA notices sent to YouTube linked to Wikipedia user
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