Ended up driving through London at some absurd hour this morning. Passed by lots of fields on the way there. They all still had that awesome morning mist hanging over them. Reminded me that it''s been such an incredibly long time since I last went for a proper walk. I used to go for awesome walks through misty fields all the time.

So, it's only been 5 months since my last blog post? That's actually less than I thought it was, and yet scarily a rather long time. Still, nothing like WoW to get things going again, right?

As anyone who actually plays WoW will no doubt know, Blizzard recently won their case against MDY, the makers of the WoWGlider botting software. I was particularly intrigued by a post made by Donnelly (the guy who originally wrote the software) in which is refers to William Patry (author of this here blog post) as "Google's Senior Copyright Counsel and pretty much accepted to be The Man when it comes to copyright". If Patry is "The Man", why do his arguments make no sense?

Although Patry's post is an interesting read, there are a few points that I really do have to wonder about. The first thing that started to ring alarm bells was his assertion that "WoWGilder did not contributorily or vicariously lead to violating any rights granted under the Copyright Act". While he's certainly entitled to that opinion, one feels compelled to point out that, given that the court just ruled that the exact opposite is true, he probably shouldn't so forcefully state it as a fact, especially when he makes no attempt to address the specific points of law on which the ruling was based.

He then continues: "To get to its result, the court had to first find that WoW, even though sold over the counter, was licensed not sold." As much as I might disagree with it, it has been so long established that software is licensed that by now it's almost beyond questioning. Thankfully, this time he does provide a basis for his argument, the recent Vernor v. Autodesk case. (I'll confess that I was only peripherally aware of the Vernor ruling until now, but I made a point of reading up on it.) Regardless of the specifics, I found it somewhat baffling that Patry would express surprise at the court's decision to follow a well-established (tried and tested on numerous occasions) Ninth Circuit precedent instead of an apparently contradictory ruling from a lower court. Even if we were to consider the specific nuances of the Vernor precedent, that case dealt specifically with distribution, whereas this case (bizzarely, considering the claim of copyright infringement) deals solely with usage, so it's entirely possible that the decision would have been the same.

Lastly, I was all about ready to disagree with his assertion that "there was in fact no provision in the license that barred use of WoWGlider", except that I discovered, to my surprise, that it's true. The provisions barring the use of automation software lie solely within the ToU agreement (arguably where they belong), and not in the EULA. Given that the ruling so unexpectedly relies on such software being a breach of the EULA, one can't help but wonder if a future update will correct this oversight. And yes, I actually read the sodding EULA.