12mo ago

A profoundly stupid case about video game cheating could transform adblocking into a copyright infringement

https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/29/faithful-user-agents/#hard-cases-make-bad-copyright-law

@socialism

4 comments

So in the 2002 suit against bnetd, "Blizzard sued them for analyzing software they'd paid for, while it was running on their own computers." ...
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.
Now:
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.
and:
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
And Cory says all this to convince the public to reject Intellectual Property rights as a form of "rent" which he equates to dangerous feudalism.
I can't argue him. In the cases cited in the piece, his complaints seem valid. On the other hand, I feel like there has to be a case for saying that if you, say, try to fix your iPhone yourself and botch it badly, Apple doesn't have to honor a warranty. The tricky part is whether they would have any grounds to terminate your service or stop running some software because .... oh, maybe some security feature can no longer be verified or something. The only case for that which pops to mind is if you hacked it to copy/relay the identity of other phones such that you were stealing from other people -- which is already a crime, but you'd want a way to stop it immediately rather than rely on the hope someone catches the perpetrator.
- Does that mean that NAT is copywriter infringement?
  Your client connects to their server via a home router.
  The server replies with a packet. The packet is rewritten by the router so it can reach the client.
  
  Doubtful since NAT is a service with multiple RFCs defining various methodologies for mapping. That is: software expects NATing. Software expects IPs, ports, etc. to get redirected. I guess if you wrote your own NAT service that did not conform to RFC standards, it might be considered a modification of the original intent, but I suspect the issue would have to be with changes to packet data rarther than the header.... now try explaining that to a copyright judge -- because I bet some will choose to not understand.
- Sure changing something you own might create a derivative work, but isn't that totally fine if you don't try to commercialise that output? Like I can "improve" a painting I own all I want, creating derivative works, but that's allowed unless I try to sell them afaik.