Greg Lastowka

I’ve just posted a draft of a book chapter on amateur creativity and digital games: Minecraft as Web 2.0. I’m… Read More »Minecraft as Web 2.0

[Post title playing on Mike’s post re Harry Potter…] In my article written a few years back about Google, trademark,… Read More »Cars lives in Target (but not in me)

The Supreme Court just struck down the California statute challenged in Brown v. EMA, upholding the lower court decision.  The… Read More »Brown v. EMA decided

(NB: This rather longish post is cross-posted at Terra Nova, where the average readers are a bit less erudite about copyright law than present company.  Apologies if it gets a bit pedantic/pedestrian.)

Legal commentators in the blogosphere (e.g. Nic Suzor, Technollama, Rebecca Tushnet, Venkat & Eric) have already offered some initial thoughts on the Ninth Circuit decision in MDY v. Blizzard. Since I talked about the district court opinion in this case in Chapter 9 of my book, I thought I’d post a few reactions too.

This post is going to be a bit on the long side, but that’s only because the issues raised on this appeal are a bit tricky, meaning that I feel the need to lay a little doctrinal groundwork before getting to my thoughts about the case.

Though there was an interesting tortious interference decision in the appeal, I’m going to focus on the two copyright issues that were decided by the Ninth Circuit, one involving a claim that users of MDY’s Glider program breached World of Warcraft (WoW)’s software license and the other claiming that users of MDY’s Glider program violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)’s prohibitions on circumventing technological protection measures that limit access to copyrighted works. This second claim focused on the operation of Blizzard’s Warden program, which monitors a player’s computer to see if it is running any unauthorized software.

The appellate court essentially found in favor of MDY on the licensing issue, reversing the lower court, and in favor of Blizzard on the DMCA-Warden issue, affirming the lower court. That adds up to a win for Blizzard. That win could be reversed, in theory, if MDY pursues further appeals.  An en banc review of the Ninth Circuit is possible and there’s always the slim chance of getting the case reviewed by the United States Supreme Court.

The School of Communication and Information at Rutgers is planning a major conference to be held April 8-9, 2011.  The conference will cover the cultural, business, legal, and artistic aspects of the videogame and virtual worlds industries — pretty much everything practical and academic about gaming.  If you’d like to spend a couple of days conversing with other folks who think seriously about gamers and the video game industry, please consider submitting to the Call for Papers, which can be found here: http://bit.ly/gbgcall (Deadline for 500-word abstract = Dec. 15th.)

For more information about the conference see this link:  http://bit.ly/gamebehindgame

More details about the sorts of topics we’re looking to explore below the fold: