So you ask the person at the store, call the company, or go to the company's website. What do you want, the entire box plastered with the EULA so you can't see the title of the game you're buying?

5% is quite a bit. Most people don't report problems.

. . . so complain about the drop rate, don't write or use a bot. In any case, WoW's drop rates aren't that bad.

Yeah, and they're spending loads of money too. You think their servers are cheap? You think Diablo III and Wrath of the Lich King were designed by volunteers? That money goes back into their products.

It's the basic principle of economics - money is exchanged for services and goods. It's also a basic principle in most religions - "thou shalt not steal."

Whining about how big/small the loss is doesn't change the basic principle. A thief is a thief, be it a candy bar or a luxury automobile.

Yeah, apparently they have no troubles buying new accounts and using the bots again.

Mutliply that by a few thousand and one "insubstantial and correctable annoyance" becomes a real problem.

I believe the point is to get people to play their game . . .

If you want a two day game, maybe you shouldn't be playing a MMORPG.

Yeah, the point is that you play it a long time.

If you don't like it, don't play it . . . sounds kinda simple to me.

If you want a MMORPG that's easy to get to max level, you can play Guild Wars. You don't need to play WoW. And it's not any more ethical or legal to use a bot because you hate the game.

I think all of this stupid talk about the government blah blah blah is really just because you hate the game, not because you have any sort of real legal or ethical point.

That's part of the point, but MDY is correct in arguing that a temporary injunction that destroys their buisiness is overkill, considering how long the current situation has lasted.

As for the sorce code, remember that Glider is so much more effective than other bots due to the fact that they stole the source code for the Warden program to make it. No one else has that, and Blizzard doesn't want it getting out.

You keep pulling out these apples and oranges comparisons and throwing them out as being somehow relevant. Why?

Of *course* mortgages and such are enforcable. Maybe you've never done a mortgage or a bankruptcy or a loan, but my home mortgage had a PhD thesis worth of paper, a realtor to answer every question I had, two lawyers. Hell Willy, my *lease* before I bought my house was five pages with me initialling relevant paragraphs.

Yet you keep bringing out these as being somehow relevant to a sales contract where you bought something at a store.

Willy - Yes or No question to you.

Does the UCC offer definitions for "Consumer" and "Merchant"? Yes or No

Does it then state that there are specific requirements for a modification to a sales Contract that must be in place if the buyer is a "Consumer", but not if the buyer is a "Merchant"? Yes or No

If you answer yes to both of those questions, then the question about whether the definitions are clear or how they apply in a specific circumstance is an argument for a specific case. Personally, while I agree the definitions *could* be clearer, I don't think there is all that much in the way of grey area open for argument, and frankly, I think you're trying rather desperately to emphasize the minor theoretical ambiguities so you can simply ignore the fact that, in reference to a game, there really is absolutely no ambiguity about the fact that a game is bought "primarily for personal, family, or household purposes."

Guess what - the fact that you don't *like* the way the definitions are worded doesn't render them irrelevant. Moreover - go actually read the wording of UCC 2 where it distinguishes the two. Typically the main law is written with the merchant consumer interaction in mind, with the *exceptions* being stated as "Except as Between Merchants", so if those definitions were to be magically swept away so as to not annoy you, my argument against this interpretation of the law would actually be *stronger*.

Regardless, the definitions *are* there, UCC 2 defines definite differences in the creation of contracts based on where the two entities stand in reference to those definitions, and unless your argument is that they are annoying to you therefore meaningless, they make a difference.

You have posted several cases. I did not bypass them and move on - I explained, point by point, *why* I thought they were not relevant.
Generally it was because the defendent seemed to obviously fall under the definition of "Merchant" - which, perhaps not coincidentally, seems to be about the time you decided that you really hated the definition of "Merchant" and "Consumer".
If you post a case that has a consumer, and I can post a link back to the definition of consumer and undermine the argument again, then sure, yeah, I'm, going to argue it's a bad decision. If you can post a case that involves a consumer, and I *can't* undermine the argument simply by posting a link to the UCC text (again), then it's just possible that you've got the case that supports your point of view.

But so far, you keep posting cases that even you haven't seemed to actually read, because the defendants are typically merchants. Don't blame me for that.

Good Lord - Make long detailed posts, they complain that your posts take forever to read. Try to make them concise, and they quote you with no context at all like a girlfriend that remembers a slight from three years ago and brings it up when she's ticked that you left the toilet seat up.

I'm sorry, you're being - the polite word is disingenous. While I will happily argue for more limited enforcement even between "Merchants", I believe I've been consistent is stating that my primary concern is that a consumer should not be required to have a lawyers skills in order to play a fricking game. That is not at all the opinion you claim I've repeatedly expressed, nor the fact that I posted, in the actual Questionairre post, the annotation that the UCC did specifically allow for waivers.

Given how much it bothers you that there are protections for consumers against legal chicanery, I would be more than happy to donate some funds for the wormhole that helps you migrate to some Ayn Randian paradise where you can live your life in contentment knowing that if you buy a pack of lifesavers with an EULA on the inside wrapper annotating that you've donated your kidneys, you can expect to wake up in a bath-tub sans kidneys. But First, I have a few forms for you to sign off on because, well, frankly, I don't think you are nearly as smart as you think you are, and I want dibs on your stuff afterward.



Original Case? The first post was "In his summary ruling on Blizzard's case against World of Warcraft cheat-maker Michael Donnelly (released yesterday), District Court Judge David Campbell has stated that the act of using a bot in violation of a game's license or terms of use qualifies as a copyright violation. Huh?"

So, no, it's pretty much the Summary Judgement ignoring "Consumer" that I care about - the rest of the case is still in a state of flux.

Sure, I think MDY and Donnely is a bunch of pricks myself, but whether I'm right or wrong, the court has methods for enforcing it's orders, MDY has Lawyers for arguing it's side for injunctions, and Blizzard has lawyers with Word templates specifically for filing injunctions.

Unless there's something new that pertains to the original summary judgement, I'm not sure I care that much about the rest.



They have my sympathies on that - the last thing they want is GLIDER 2.0, with a GPL license - {G}. But althought I've heard a number of people throw around accusations of their having stolen "Warden" everything the case actually says in the summary judgement seems to be that they reverse engineered it, which, being protected under the DMCA, seems to have been one of their wins. If they stole it, that would fall under trade secret law, not DMCA *or* copyright, and you can get your company raped right royally violating that, so if it's not mentioned in the lawsuit, I'm inclined to assume it never happened.

Jonnan

So far, the judge seems to be more concerned about whether they're breaking the law than about their financial well being.

. . . which is, after all, his job. He's a judge, not a financial consultant.

. . . and it's been almost an entire month since that motion was filed, so it would appear the judge is simply ignoring it. I think the jude is simply going to follow the time schedule that he has proposed.

If I could find even a single major case where one party was a consumer (or that you would accept as as consumer), this might matter. The whole point is that the license contract itself contains the remedies available in the case that a consumer breaches the contract - and in the one major case (Zeitenberg) where the guy actually WAS a consumer at the time of purchase, you simply said he was a merchant, so none of my (or the court's) reasoning following it mattered. Zeitenberg is the closest I've found to an actual consumer case, and you ignored it out of hand.

You've also repeatedly cited that every other district except 7-9 have ruled EULAs uninforcable out of hand, but not produced caselaw to support this assertion. Please do so, to give me a chance to address them. I think I have found cases from the 3rd and 6th districts that you would use to support this, but both have absolutely NO application to merchant-consumer sales. Both involved a company trying to enforce an EULA over an actual negotiated contract with different terms, and yet they come up on database searches as "landmark" cases defeating EULAs. I fail to see how that type of precedent speaks to a consumer software product WITHOUT such a specifically-negotiated contract.

From Blizzard's statement of fact in the case:

"At one point, after Blizzard developed a new method of detecting Glider, Donnelly sought and received help from Joseph Thaler who sold information about Blizzard’s new detection measures to MDY for $18,000."

The actual details of what this "information" was is part of the sealed testamony. Whatever it was, I believe we can safely assume it was information not available to WoW users, and thus could not be legally used as part of any reverse engineering. This bit was left out of the ruling because it simply doesn't matter for the purposes of this case if Glider is an illegal derivative work or not.

If this ruling goes badly for Blizzard, I have no doubt you will soon have to sign at purchase, despite the negative effects this will have on both consumers and software makers. Worse, they might start selling boxes without CDs in them, just a serial number to download the game.

"If I could find even a single major case where one party was a consumer (or that you would accept as as consumer), this might matter." - I would think that it would occur to you to consider the possibility that *this* might matter - that you have been trying for months now, but can't find a single 'major case' where the defendant didn't qualify as having special skills in that industry or was using it in business.

I have to be honest - if on my side I couldn't find a single quote in the UCC code that justified my opinion, I would begin to consider the possibility that my opinion might be wrong. It says worlds to me about this argument that your reaction to not being able to find any support for your opinion indicates that it must not matter.

I have seen them in various districts, but they aren't very recent - those decisions were *why* the software industry tried to get UCITA passed, they tended to get dismissed early on in the process and they go back to the 90's, so they're short decisions and old decisions. I will try and dig up some time this week and track them down.

God I wish you would provide links habitually, but I found it - looks to me like yeah, that *should* be a criminal act, and if this opinion was based on that, I would have more sympathy for it. But the Summary Judgement seems to me to indicate that Glider was assumed to have reverse-engineered it rather than done something to criminally acquire it, which means the summary judgement is still relying on the EULA being able to say you can't run a program that is legal.



And hey - as long as sales-people know as much about software EULA's as I had to know about satellite network contracts, then that doesn't bother me any. *MY* suspicion is the exact opposite - that if this get reversed because of the consumer protection clauses, you will see software divide into two separate classes, those that honestly need this protection (and WoW may be one of them) and setup an EULA process the same way we sell Cell Phone Contracts and such, and those that decide they're not willing to give up sales for that kind of protection, reduce the EULA to a set of common, enforcable waivers printed on the box for the consumer to clearly see, and just stay within the regular UCC law.

Jonnan

Regarding Procd, Inc. v. Zeidenberg - Yes, it explicitly supports Willy's belief that the distinction between "Merchant" and "Consumer" is illusory, and uses that to make shrink-wrap agreements binding in the 7th district.

It's several pages long, and I'm not going to rebut it point by point, but you should read the case, and then read the law, and come to your own decision about whether I mischaracterize the case.

The first most interesting point is that it creates an interesting new right on the part of a company, and justifies the rest of the case in relationship to this new right. The new right is the right to control 'Arbitrage' - the ability to keep people that are getting a better deal on a product from making a profit by selling to those that can't get that kind of a deal, and pocketing some of the difference.

This is interesting for one simple reason. There is no law creating a right to control arbitrage. The court cites numerous *examples* of controlling arbitrage, and then generalizes from the concept that it can be done to the fact that a company has some inherent right to do it, and since you have to have a shrink-wrap agreement to enforce that right to do it, a shrink-wrap agreement *must* be enforcable.

Then the judge proceeds to discard the question of whether you're dealing with a Merchant or a Consumer:
"Anyone can walk into a retail store and buy a box. Customers do not wear tags saying "commercial user" or "consumer user." Anyway, even a commercial-user-detector at the door would not work, because a consumer could buy the software and resell to a commercial user. That arbitrage would break down the price discrimination and drive up the minimum price at which ProCD would sell to anyone". Now, if the law didn't have specific provision distinguishing "Consumer" and "Merchant", the judge would have some point, however the judges opinion deals with the specific definitions of consumer anf merchant by . . . ignoring the fact that they exist, and then treating everyone as a merchant.

You have to put that in that order, because if the judge ignored the distinction and then ignored the parts that define the two, the UCC by default treats everyone as a consumer and treats the exceptions with some variation of "Except as between Merchants", so then ANY EULA would be subject to the maximum protection of the relevant parties. By ignoring the definitions, then treating everyone as merchants, he reverses that and grabs everyone and puts them into the *least* protected class.

Which is exceedingly odd since the definition of merchant makes it fairly clear that that the buyer would qualify as a merchant - the buyer was capable of pulling this information out of a specialized database and reselling it. That's not a common skill, and as a merchant Zeidenberg would have been held to the EULA, as he should have been. He was copying and reselling the information - that's not "personal, family, or household purposes."

So, this decision *could* have simply noted that he qualified as a merchant and been done with it. Instead the court went to all sorts of effort to pretend there was no distinction.

The rest of the decision is to justify the formation of the contract.
"Zeidenberg does argue, and the district court held, that placing the package of software on the shelf is an "offer," which the customer "accepts" by paying the asking price and leaving the store with the goods. Peeters v. State, 154 Wis. 111, 142 N.W. 181 (1913). In Wisconsin, as elsewhere, a contract includes only the terms on which the parties have agreed. One cannot agree to hidden terms, the judge concluded. So far, so good-- but one of the terms to which Zeidenberg agreed by purchasing the software is that the transaction was subject to a license. Zeidenberg's position therefore must be that the printed terms on the outside of a box are the parties' contract--except for printed terms that refer to or incorporate other terms. But why would Wisconsin fetter the parties' choice in this way?"

The first question the court never answers is whether this is a separate contract or a UCC 2 modification of a contract, so strictly speaking, I think this fails because of equivocation - we don't know, for certain, whether when the court refers to this contract they are referring to a General Contract or a UCC 2 modification of a contract. From context, it would appear to be the latter, but it's not explicitly stated. However the entire "Consumer" versus "Commercial" dialogue gives us context, the court appears to be dealing in UCC 2 law, and many of the citations come from UCC 2 law. Fair Enough.

Well, the short answer for "why would Wisconsin fetter the parties' choice in this way?" is that Wisconson accepted the UCC 2 as written, which means that consumers are specifically exempted from these kind of terms without being made formally aware of them - even the contract on the outside of the box is something that requires formal acceptance for a consumer to be bound by - so it's reference to further, hidden terms never comes into play if the buyer is a consumer.

"Transactions in which the exchange of money precedes the communication of detailed terms are common. Consider the purchase of insurance. The buyer goes to an agent, who explains the essentials (amount of coverage, number of years) and remits the premium to the home office, which sends back a policy. On the district judge's understanding, the terms of the policy are irrelevant because the insured paid before receiving them. Yet the device of payment, often with a "binder" (so that the insurance takes effect immediately even though the home office reserves the right to withdraw coverage later), in advance of the policy, serves buyers' interests by accelerating effectiveness and reducing transactions costs. Or consider the purchase of an airline ticket. The traveler calls the carrier or an agent, is quoted a price, reserves a seat, pays, and gets a ticket, in that order. The ticket contains elaborate terms, which the traveler can reject by canceling the reservation. To use the ticket is to accept the terms, even terms that in retrospect are disadvantageous."

Which goes into
"Consumer goods work the same way. Someone who wants to buy a radio set visits a store, pays, and walks out with a box. Inside the box is a leaflet containing some terms, the most important of which usually is the warranty, read for the first time in the comfort of home."

The exact kind of apples and oranges comparison I've gotten on Willy about, comparing highly regulated industries with specific terms drawn out requiring you to initial various paragraphs to buying a radio at the store. I'm not sure what the district judges policy says, but I went through an entire HR session at with my employer when I was hired going over the terms of my health insurance plan. My House insurance went through the same thing - I spoke to a specialist and asked about anything I didn't understand (When I bought the house). My *Radio* on the other hand had a short pamphlet with a set of explanations of what was covered, and a set of 'Waivers' saying no further express or implied was valid unless determined by local law. I had the exact same set of rights if there was *no* pamphlet in the box, because they are set by the local consumer protection laws - the pamphlet is informational only.

So, no, it's incredibly sloppy thinking to posit that these are equivalent. They're simply not, on the face of them, even vaguely equivalent. They *are* UCC law, but where they impinge on UCC 2 then you're dealing with a merchant to consumer sale, with all the paperwork that implies, or a set of waivers - and quite often he's caparing that to things that don't even fall under UCC 2 - There are Nine UCC Articles, dealing with everything from buying popcorn (UCC 2) to investment instruments (UCC 8) - the laws aren't the same, the relationships between you and your broker are not the same as the relationship between you and the cashier at Wal-mart.

"ProCD proposed a contract that a buyer would accept by using the software after having an opportunity to read the license at leisure. This Zeidenberg did. He had no choice, because the software splashed the license on the screen and would not let him proceed without indicating acceptance. So although the district judge was right to say that a contract can be, and often is, formed simply by paying the price and walking out of the store, the UCC permits contracts to be formed in other ways."

And here is where the problem of Equivocation comes into play - because the assumption *here* is that the EULA is a separate contract. A minute ago it looked like a modification of the sales contract, but now it's a separate contract - in which case the question of questions 2B) and 3) come into play - what consideration did the buyer receive? Not the right to install - he already had that. By keeping him from exercisicing his legal right to use the program without accepting the contract, Pro CD Inc was in fact extorting his cooperation, and since he received no additional consideration in exchange for the rights he lost by signing it actually fails as a contract.

So, fundamentally, when it's convenient to the court to consider this a modification of the sale contract, the court used that. Then, when convenient to consider this EULA a separate contract, they used that. So what we get is a nifty new kind of contract that applies to anyone at time of sale, yet doesn't require consideration. Great deal if you can get it - and in District seven (Where I live, god help us all) you can.

But I still think it's a bad decision that went to a lot of extra effort to create precedents to be abused, and I think I can honestly say I've explained why.

Jonnan

Sure, that's it - all software companies just never bothered enforcing their EULA rights, just like no music company has ever sued an end user for copyright infringement. Companies are all sweet and wonderful about things like this.

Sure Willy - it's certainly got nothing to do with their lawyers telling them that they're on shaky ground regarding consumers.

Then they have need to decide if they *really* need that protection. If they do - then they go to the trouble to do it right, like everyone else has to. If not, then they realize that the extra protection isn't worth the lost sales - like everyone else does.

Life is like that.

That's a situation for courts and the UCC committee to explore in depth - as UCC currently stands, the enforcabilty is iffy and I can understand why the jurisdictions are split on it, so I'd like to see the commitee clarify what contitutes good faith information  on the EULA - the extreme version would be having a rep on a chat client to answer questions, the mildest simply having to acknowledge the EULA, but it *does* need to be clarified.

If there is a genuine need for a specific kind of protection, and it's generic enough to be applicable across all software, then the UCC committee needs to be advised of it and a specific, limited clarification that both the software industry and people like the EFF can agree on needs to be adopted, rather than having a thousand licenses for a hundred companies.

Frankly - I really don't see the need, but I'd rather come up with an honest compromise that addresses specific concerns than to allow this ridiculous attempt to trap people into contracts to keep floating along as is.

Not really, or not any more than most law. Just declares that what is sold is a negotiable Title to a Copy of the Program and the "Owner of a copy" provision under copyright handles that properly - the rest of it is method of distrubution and the internet is a valid method for moving that copy to the owner, so long as you don't complicate it with additional EULA's.

You keep trying to play the consumer clause out as if it is some really ambiguous definition. Although I see some grey area where two courts mmight disagree in a specific case, there's just not that much play involved in the definition.

Yes or no: Is selling a database you acquired from another company a use that counts as being "primarily for personal, family, or household purposes."

Yes or No: Does culling information from that database and repackaging it for resale require "knowledge or skill peculiar to the practices or goods involved in the transaction"

You complain on the one hand that to not hold consumers responsible for knowing the full permutations of an EULA when buying a game is to treat them as handicapped, then turn around and argue repeatedly that something as simple as *this* pair of easily understood definitions is somehow *way* too vague.

Pick a position - is contract law so simple any adult should be held to it or way too complex for your average IT professional?

Oh goody - ypu know, I just never get tired of reposting links:
[link="http://www.law.cornell.edu/ucc/2/article2.htm#s2-501"]§ 2-501. Insurable Interest in Goods;  Manner of Identification of Goods.[/links]
"(1) The buyer obtains a special property and an insurable interest in goods by identification of existing goods as goods to which the contract refers even though the goods so identified are non-conforming and he has an option to return or reject them.  Such identification can be made at any time and in any manner explicitly agreed to by the parties.  In the absence of explicit agreement identification occurs

(a) when the contract is made if it is for the sale of goods already existing and identified;"

I bought a box. It had a CD on it. In abscense of explicit agreement to the contrary, when I bought the box with the CD in it, I actually bought
1) A box and
2) the CD it contained.

Even for a merchant to merchant sale, the obvious existence of
1) A box with
2) a CD in it

means I bought a box and the contents thereof, unless explicitly informed otherwise.

It is worth noting that yes - I know  the PrCD versus Zeindeberg district judge ignored this. He ignored all *sorts* of stuff.


Eh - we'll see - like I said, looks like a corporate battle. As long as Apple doesn't try and say Psystar is liable because they have mutual customers, I don't care that much.

Jonnan

§ 2-103. Definitions and Index of Definitions (1) (c) "Consumer" means an individual who buys or contracts to buy goods that, at the time of contracting, are intended by the individual to be used primarily for personal, family, or household purposes.

1 ) No, but we have no conclusive proof that his intent was to sell it when he acquired it. The consumer ruling depends on his intent when he bought it, not on his final actions. Depending who you place the burden of proof on, either Zeitenberg had to "prove" he intended the database for personal use to claim consumer status, or ProCD had to "prove" he intended it for commercial use to claim he was a merchant. Any time someone is required to prove intent of anything, simple definitions fly out the window.

2 ) This can easily be answered both ways, but I believe no, this does not make him a merchant.  How does one define exactly what knowledge is required to be a merchant? If simply knowing how to do something doesn't make one a merchant, what does? Is there some degree of knowledge of the actual buisiness practices required?

If one answers yes (as you clearly do), this sets the bar for being a merchant so absurdly low that consumers are forced to limbo under it to remain consumers. Oh no, I can change the alternator on my car, I'm officially a "merchant" mechanic! I might further qualify as a "merchant" in the following fields: carpentry, plumbing, drywall, small appliance repair, lawn care, hotel operation, agriculture research, medival armor, etc, etc, etc. Needless to say, both of us would have demonstrated enough knowledge (even if our opinions are contradictory) to qualify as merchants in terms of software licensing.

Clearly the yes option would lead to most adults (hell, even children) being considered merchants in a multitude of fields, so I have to say no, this degree of knowledge did not make Zeitenberg a "merchant", at least not for the first purchase. He certainly WAS a merchant for the second and third, but he did not qualify as one for the first.

And yes, Jonnan, the Apple complaint accuses Psystar of having "induced, caused or materially contributed to the infinging conduct of purchasers." In part, they are being sued for profitting from others infringing the copyright by operating outside the license agreement.

http://stadium.weblogsinc.com/engadget/videos/Apple-Psystar-complaint.pdf

Not sure what you're looking for here - If the court had not thrown the definitions out the window and decided to ignore the actual written law, then you're right, then when remanded back to the lower court ProCD would have had to prove he was acting as a merchant and Zeindenberg in turn would have to defend his default status as a consumer. My suspicion is that the way it was used would have been sufficient to establish this - the data Zeidenberg copied from the database was at least somewhat time sensitive, so although I am merely guessing that it was a matter of weeks rather than years between purchase and reverse-engineering the database to cull the data, it's an educated guess.

Unfortunately, the way the district court worded the decision foreclosed the line of inquiry - once the district court established that being a consumer was *no* protection despite the plain text of the UCC, the original court lost any right to even adjudge that fact. I don't think it's an unfair assumption that, had Zeidenberg and/or his lawyer thought they could have *won* the question of being a consumer versus merchant, they would have appealed this decision, but either it didn't occur to them to force that adjudication or they judged the chances of winning as being so slim as to be not worth throwing good money after bad.

I redid the plumbing for my house (A joy I could have done without - 1890's farmhouse). I did a competent job of it, installed two new bathubs, redid two bathrooms, cut out old sewage lines, moved the laundry room to the second floor. I did, if I may say so, a heckuva job and I'm happy with it.

No more makes me a real plumber than Mario and Luigi. I *also* ran portions of those lines two or three times, had to fix leaks, came within a hair of completely screwing up the 2nd floor toilet in a way that would have forced me to replace a ridiculous amount of pipe, and realized after the fact that the way I had run part of the sewer pipe from the 2nd floor to the first means that there is no way for a man my size to get through the crawlspace and fix the second floor piping if I have a problem with it.

And everytime there was a legal question about how things had to be, I had to look it up. I got fairly good at looking it up, but I had to look it up.

Being able to run pipe, does not make me a professional Plumber. Professionals are those that can do things so well that . . . people will pay them money. Professionals know the regulations for their jobs. Professionals keep books.

Zeidenberg was *selling* this database. Not giving it away, not loaning it out to his neighbor, not trading it for pizza. There was currency exchanged.

Quit trying to create some artificial confusion where none exists.


Uh - so? Nobody here has said that it was okay to copy copyrighted stuff without any legal right to do so.
A) From the description I see, Psystar was distributing the code themselves. This isn't a situation where they're being accused of 'contributory infringement' based on the fact that something they did that was perfectly legal in and of itself interacted with some EULA from a third party. They broke the law, in a fairly obvious manner or so it seems to me.

B.) They *are* a merchant, again, pretty obviously. They don't have the protections against EULA's that a consumer has.

Well, if you think Blizzard is acting illegally, you have every right to haul them off to court.

Which makes sense - get rid of the cause, and you don't have to worry about the effect.

We do what we can to give our immune system the best chance of fighting the disease. We get plenty of rest, drink plenty of fluids, etc. We avoid things like stress that could hurt our immune system's effectivenes. Oh, I'm sorry, did you want me to say take that stuff that makes you feel better? Well, that would treat the symptoms, not the cold . . .

You're trying to make the argument that they shouldn't be trying to stop the bots. Problem is, you're not doing a very good job at it.

Perhaps, but it doesn't make it more fair to the humans who can't compete with bots, and it only fixes one small problem. It doesn't address the core issue.

Cancer is generally an incurable disease, but if you only treat the symptoms and don't attempt remove or destroy the cancerous cells on a regular basis, your patient is going to die quickly. Cancer patients have a much higher survival rate today because we do in fact try to remove and destroy the cancer cells. We know we can't ultimately win the war, but we can win battles and make life much easier for the patient.

Perhaps not. There are now vaccines available for some common strains, and having a vaccine would prevent that strain from affecting you. You wouldn't need to mess with the symptoms at all for that strain, because you simply wouldn't get sick in the first place.

In any case, the only reason why we can get away with only treating the symptoms is because we already have a deadly and devastating weapon against the common cold: The body's immune system. If our body wasn't so good at killing the common cold, it would be as bad as the bubonic plague was in Europe.

Yeah, "for all we know." That's not a very convincing statement. If you aren't even confident in your own hypothesis, why should I believe you?

I really do not care where you claim to be stealing it from, and do not expect me to give you any sympathy. After all, if you do not give any sympathy, why should you receive it?

If you believe they are stealing from you, go ahead and press charges.

Really? Did the cops come into your house and take your game away from you?

Nope. I read just fine. You just failed to address my own point, which is that it's not one person - it's thousands. That's a lot of lawsuits, a lot of money, a lot of lawyers, and a lot of time. Why spend so many resources fighting lots of people when you can fight one person?

You keep repeating that, as if repeating it will somehow make it true or make me believe it.

I don't think WoW is being unfair at all with their current levelling. In fact, it's far better than many other games I've played like Silkroad and Runescape. As far as I can tell, it took no longer to get to 55 than to get to 20. No, it's not Guild Wars, but it's not Silkroad either. It's very balanced. I do not think the grind is as horrible as you claim it is, and I think it appeals to a lot of people.

. . . and just because you don't like the product does not mean you have justification for violating the EULA. As I have said before, you can always buy a competitive product like Guild Wars or simply stop playing altogether.

If you think EULAs in general are illegal, go fight it in court. If you think DRM is unethical, write a letter to your congressman. Go talk to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, they help people all the time with this kind of stuff. Whining to me certainly won't fix what you think is wrong with this court case.

That's not very likely to happen. Jonnan almost certainly won't change his position, even if the court rules EULAs enforcable for consumers. I probably won't change my opinion unless they strike down the entire concept, and I don't see that as very likely. Either way, it will be years before we get Circuit-level decisions to debate.