http://www.ca9.uscourts.gov/opinions/view_subpage.php?pk_id=0000011049 (Opinion for: MDY INDUSTRIES, LLC V. BLIZZARD ENTERTAINMENT, INC., 09-15932)
The question of copy ownership aside, the court rejected the copyright claim and held: "Were we to hold otherwise, Blizzard or any software copyright holder could designate any disfavored conduct during software use as copyright infringement, by purporting to condition the license on the player's abstention from the disfavored conduct. The rationale would be that because the conduct occurs while the player's computer is copying the software code into RAM in order for it to run, the violation is copyright infringement. This would allow software copyright owners far greater rights than Congress has generally conferred on copyright owners." It seems the court here ruled that certain requirements in a software license may be construed as "covenants" rather than "conditions" (or license scope limitations like e.g. a limit on number of copies to be made). In other words, the WoW license may say, in a nutshell, "We license you the right to use this software so long as you don't use a bot." (Among other things). The court considered that a "covenant" of a contract, not a "condition" of the license (and not a license scope limitation). What impact could that reasoning have on the copyleft-like licenses? The copyleft basically says, "We license you the right to distribute verbatim or modified versions of this software so long as you provide source code." Could a court following the MDY precedent construe the "source code" requirement as a "covenant" and not a "condition", thereby rendering the copyleft ineffective? I see no reason why not... regards, alexander. -- http://gng.z505.com/index.htm (GNG is a derecursive recursive derecursion which pwns GNU since it can be infinitely looped as GNGNGNGNG...NGNGNG... and can be said backwards too, whereas GNU cannot.) _______________________________________________ gnu-misc-discuss mailing list gnu-misc-discuss@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnu-misc-discuss