8TH CIRCUIT AFFIRMS BLIZZARD V. BTNED.ORG DECISION
The 8th Circuit Court of Appeals has affirmed a lower court decision Blizzard vs. BnetD which ruled that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act prohibits the reverse engineering needed to create an open-source program that extended a video game for people who lawfully purchased the original. The court also affirmed that clickwrap licenses are enforceable to prevent reverse engineering.
If you are in the business of creating add-ons for, or extending, copyrighted software (for profit, open source, or both), check out this decision at:
As well, this ruling is of interest to those who wish to protect their code from reverse engineering via a clickwrap license.
2 comments:
"This is a case of critical importance for the software industry," said EFF Staff Attorney Jason Schultz. "Allowing companies like Blizzard to lock out competition and complementary innovation will destroy future
generations of products and services. The Internet itself is simply a collection of complementary software programs, and this ruling threatens
the existence of all of them."
The real issue with the precedent set by the decision is that it restricts competition and innovation, a growing trend supported by the DMCA legislation.
More about the DMCA's unintended consequences here:
http://www.eff.org/IP/DMCA/20030102_dmca_unintended_consequences.html
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