Federal Judge David G. Campbell issued his final ruling Wednesday in a case brought by Blizzard Entertainment last March, stating that the popular WoW bot Glider can be classified as a circumvention device and thus violates the DMCA:

Judge Campbell has distinguished between the actual bits stored on the World of Warcraft disk (which he called the “literal elements” of the game) and the interface elements the user encounters as he’s actually playing the game (which he dubbed “non-literal elements”). In his ruling last summer, Judge Campbell ruled that Glider did not violate the DMCA with respect to the “literal elements” because Warden did not “effectively control” access to those elements: they are stored, unencrypted, on the World of Warcraft disk. But he deferred until this month’s trial the question of whether Glider violated the DMCA with respect to the “non-literal elements.”

In Wednesday’s ruling, Judge Campbell found that [Blizzard's anti-bot program] Warden did effectively control access to the “non-literal elements.” That is, while Warden does not prevent users from accessing the individual elements of the game separately, it does effectively bar users from accessing all of the elements together while playing the game. Therefore, Judge Campbell concluded, [Glider creator] MDY violated the DMCA when it evaded warden’s checks.

In addition, Judge Campbell affirmed Blizzard’s theory that violating an EULA is indeed copyright infringement:

Blizzard argued, and Judge Campbell agreed, that when users violated the World of Warcraft EULA, they no longer had a license to play the game and were therefore guilty of copyright infringement. As Siy noted in a blog post last year, Blizzard’s theory, if taken literally, would mean that violating any of the rules in the EULA and Terms of Service, such as choosing a screen name that didn’t meet Blizzard’s guidelines, would be an act of copyright infringement. And distributing software that helps users infringe copyright itself constitutes secondary copyright infringement, which could expose MDY to copyright law’s draconian “statutory damages” of $150,000 per act of infringement. The law gives aggrieved parties to contract disputes much less potent powers.

This is horrible. True, Glider is a big way for people to cheat, and some would argue that’s against the spirit of the game, but hauling every EULA violator into court for copyright infringement is nuts. Not only would it clog the courts, but it gives large corporations another big stick to use against people who might do something innovative with their products outside the sphere of approved uses.

• Ars Technica

Gears of War - Credit: Gears of War

A defect in the DRM on Gears of War has made the game unplayable as of the 28th.

Gamers who tried to play Gears of War on the PC Thursday ran into a slight snag: it seems that the digital certificate that allows the game to run expired on January 28, 2009. Basically that means if you keep your PC’s clock up to date, you can no longer play the game. The official Epic forum is ablaze with complaints about this issue, as the still-kicking community becomes enraged.

…

Did Epic assume no one would be playing the title once 2009 came around? It’s hard to understand why there would be an end-date hard-coded into the title’s DRM, especially one that came less than three years after the game was released. Many PC gamers are leery of any kind of DRM that must dial into a central server to authenticate, wondering what happens if those servers are shut down. Now we know—in this case, the game shipped with DRM that was essentially counting down until the game would cease to work.

While it’s not rare for games to ship with bugs every now and again, it’s pretty shocking when one ships with an issue that causes the title to stop working for everyone who paid. Those who pirated the game, as usual, continue to play with no issues.

Ha, funny. (That’s what you get for buying proprietary games.)

• Ars Technica

US Pirate Party

The Pirate Party, after having failed in becoming a recognized party in Utah, is trying to become a recognized party in California.

Luckily, the U.S. is still a democracy, and the U.S. Pirate Party has now set course to the golden state. In California, the party aims to be recognized by the State Secretary in the months to come. In order to do so, the party has to collect 88,991 signatures within 15 months. A tough challenge, but not impossible according to Glenn Kerbein, chairman of the party.

Indeed, hundreds and thousands of Americans – especially the more tech savvy ones – realize that stricter copyright laws are not the silver bullet that will stop piracy. They believe we have to stand up for Net Neutrality and protect our privacy. However, mobilizing all these people to register as a Pirate is easier said then done.

The goals of the party are clear though. “Frankly, we feel that the RIAA and MPAA’s ruthless campaign of suing their own customers out of their livelihoods must cease immediately. The terrible litigation facing international bodies (ACTA) must see the light of day, and the DMCA must be repealed,” they write.

Huh, I thought they were recognized in Utah.

• TorrentFreak
• US Pirate Party

Knoppix - Credit: knopper.net/knoppix

Knoppix 6.0, a boot-only GNU/Linux distro, has been released.

Knoppix 6.0 has now been released with several new features and updates. The last update to Knoppix was in March of 2008 with version 5.3.1. Knoppix is a bootable CD distribution of Linux that incorperates automatic hardware detection. The CD can be used to demo Linux, as an educational CD, a rescue system, etc. It uses on-the-fly decompression so it can have up to 2 GB of data and software installed on it.

Version 6.0 of Knoppix is a complete rebuild from scratch and is based on Debian/lenny (draft). It incorporates a new boot procedure with highly parallelised hardware detection and configuration, using LXDE as the default desktop and includes the newly released OpenOffice 3.0.1. Also included in the release is Firefox 3.0.5. Due to space limitations on the CD some applications previously included have now been removed, however these removals are not listed in the change-log.

Hmm…I should start carrying around a Knoppix CD again.

• Heise Online
• Knoppix

Lincity-NG screenshot - Credit: lincity-ng.berlios.de (FDL)

Lincity-NG 2.0 has been released.  There are many improvements, including ecosystem simulation.

Improvements went into water simulation and landscape elements, such as grass, trees and desert areas, which are rendered more realistically. Elements include various types of bridges (including for railroads), street surfaces and fountains. Life near tainted industrial areas isn’t depicted as particularly pleasant, although parks help in reducing the damage.

Problems that the bulldozer might have caused are now fixed. Previous planning of a precious metal mine had incurred extreme costs to users that, in some cases, led to an application crash.

Wow, looks great.  I’ll have to try it out soon.

• Linux Magazine
• Lincity-NG

KDE 4.2 - Credit: kde.org

KDE 4.2 has been released.

There are major improvements throughout the entire stack. The Plasma desktop shell gained additional panel functionality, a new notification system, and support for building plasmoids with Ruby and Python; I took a look at some of these features in my coverage of the 4.2 beta release. KDE 4.2 also introduces improved support for visual effects and compositing-based window management features.

KDE’s cross-platform compatibility is better than ever in version 4.2. Many of KDE’s most impressive applications, including Amarok, Kate, and Konqueror, can be used on Windows and Mac OS X. The Windows port has matured a lot and even has preliminary support for running Plasma.

I’m a KDE user, so this makes me happy.  I can’t wait until KDE 4 has all the functionality they are missing from KDE 3.

• Ars Technica
• KDE

OiNK - Credit: oink.cd

The OiNK admin Alan Ellis and one other uploader still await a sentence, but the other 4 charged have received community service and/or court fees.

A source close to one of the convicted uploaders told TorrentFreak in a response: “[The Judge] swallowed the prosecution line completely that initial seeders were causing major damage to the copyright holders, and particularly uploaders who uploaded before the official release date. The fact that all the early uploads were only 1 or 2 days early and that 3 out 4 of the uploaders bought their CDs online did not sway him. All the retailers, quite naturally, denied this.”

We were further told that, if the defendants had not had such good references and strong legal representation, the Judge would have seriously considered a custodial sentence. This ruling, the first of its kind in the UK, will most certainly be used as a precedent for future cases.

I guess they had good lawyers.

• TorrentFreak

GPLv3 - Credit: fsf.org

The GCC Runtine Library has a new license exception that will allow GCC to be licensed under the GPLv3.

BOSTON, Massachusetts, USA — Tuesday, January 27, 2009 — Today the Free Software Foundation (FSF), together with the GCC Steering Committee and the Software Freedom Law Center, announced the release of a new GCC Runtime Library Exception. This license exception will allow the entire GCC codebase to be upgraded to GPLv3, and enable the development of a plugin framework for GCC.

“GCC includes runtime libraries that are automatically built into all the object code that GCC creates,” explained Brett Smith, license compliance engineer at the FSF. “Because we decided a long time ago to allow developers to compile proprietary software with GCC, these libraries have always had license exceptions. This way, programs that are merely compiled with GCC don’t have to be released under the GPL.”

I didn’t realize GCC wasn’t under the GPLv3.

• FSF

Jammie Thomas and Lawyer - Credit: mightyomedia

The FSF has given Jammie Thomas $3000 in order to compensate an expert witness to rebut the RIAA’s expert witness.

In Capitol Records v. Thomas, which is scheduled for its second trial to take place on March 9th, the verdict from the first trial having been set aside, the defendant has received a grant of $3000 from the Expert Witness Defense Fund of the Free Software Foundation to enable her to retain an expert witness.

In the first trial, she could not afford an expert witness to rebut the expert witness used by the RIAA.

Accordingly, her attorney has made a motion for an extension of the discovery deadline.

This is the second case in which the FSF’s Expert Witness Defense Fund has lent assistance, the first being UMG Recordings v. Lindor, where it granted $2046.92 to compensate the expert witness and $750.00 to compensate the technical consultant. A full report of the Expert Witness Defense Fund’s receipts and disbursements as of December 31, 2008, is available here.

I hope that the expert witness is successful.

• Recording Industry vs. The People

Open Standards - Credit: developer.mozilla.org

Mozilla has given the Wikimedia Foundation $100,000 to fund the development of the Ogg, Theora, and Vorbis.

Mozilla is integrating support for the Ogg format directly into Firefox 3.1, so the next version of the popular open source web browser will be able to play Ogg media without requiring any plugins or external software. The Ogg format will be supported through Firefox’s implementation of the HTML 5 video element, which allows video to be seamlessly interwoven with conventional HTML content and manipulated through the DOM. Mozilla has recently demonstrated the video element feature being used for streaming video. Opera is also integrating standards-based video support into its browser and has a working implementation of Ogg for HTML 5.

Although the technology is starting to fall into place, it will take time for the standard to be supported broadly enough to encourage adoption by sites that stream rich media. The lack of DRM support inherent in the open implementation will also likely impede adoption by major commercial content creators. Standards-based solutions may never manage to displace Flash, but the first big steps need to be taken for this to even be a possibility.

Yay for free codecs.

• Ars Technica