Hey guys, Qhan here. The News Team is working on bringing smaller, front news stories to the website atm, so you may see some posts like this come up over the next couple weeks. Enjoy
We all know about the Glider vs. Blizzard case that has been going on for a while now. Both sides have been taking wins and losses but it is agreed that for a while Glider was slowly losing the battle.
Some positive news on the horizon though, Michael Donnelly has announced the following in a new thread on the MMOglider forums located here.
The post is as follows.
You might be wondering though, wtf is Vernor vs. Autodesk? Well, if you are interested read along to the next page, else skip to the end for a little fun.The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals issued an order today that joins our case with Vernor v. Autodesk. This is pretty exciting stuff, since Vernor's entire case (and a huge part of ours) hinges upon whether people who buy software at the store are owners or licensees.
Vernor won his case in district court already and his case is rather simple, so I consider this to be good news for us. If Vernor can't convince his panel that his customers own their copies of Autodesk, then I can't imagine we'd have a better chance at all.
I don't know if this will make our oral argument come up any sooner, but it'll be a lot more exciting when it happens. It also punches a bit of a hole in Blizzard's theory that "owner of a copy" means something different under 109 than 117. We all knew where that would end up, though.
Anyway, the very short order is linked below.
Download link:
http://mmoglider.com/legal/12_23_2009_Consolidate.pdf
[BREAK=Vernor vs. Autodesk?]
For those of you who do not know what the Vernor vs. Autodesk conflict is about, you can either click here or read the below quote.
Yes it is biased towards one side, but it explains the details none the less.
For the conclusion plus an interesting short joke, please continue to the next page.Well, there’s a statement I wasn’t expecting to make. Let me preface these comments with a disclaimer. I have no legal qualifications whatsoever. I make no claims of knowing who is legally right in this David v. Goliath legal battle; that’s for the courts to decide. When I make the statement that I think Autodesk is right, I don’t mean legally right, I mean morally right.
I have been following this fight with interest, but only in a half-baked way, third-hand via commentators (like myself, now). Based on my skimming of that commentary, my natural inclination to support the underdog, and my general dislike of of Autodesk’s previous and current legal adventures, I had been of the firm but privately held opinion that Vernor was right and Autodesk was wrong.
Today, after noting that new filings had been made, I had a proper look at some (not all) of the actual court documents themselves (thanks to Owen Wengerd’s CAD/Court), and surprised myself by coming to quite the opposite conclusion. I am now convinced that I was totally wrong.*
Until today, I was hoping that the court would support Vernor’s assertion that the First Sale doctrine applies in this case. Why? Because I feel that Autodesk is morally wrong in attempting to prevent the transfer of its software from one party to another.** At one time, Autodesk allowed AutoCAD to be resold (despite the EULA of the time saying that it wasn’t allowed) and indeed actively supported the transfer process. I felt at the time that Autodesk’s introduction of this restriction of a customer’s ability to resell AutoCAD was morally wrong. I still feel that way.
I also feel Autodesk is morally wrong in geographically restricting the sale of its software, and in several other areas of its EULA. I would be quite happy to have a court find that Autodesk is legally wrong in those areas, too. Despite that, I feel that it would be A Bad Thing if Vernor won in this case.
Why? Because Vernor was selling software that effectively didn’t exist. He was selling used copies of Release 14, when those copies had already been upgraded to AutoCAD 2000. To me, that’s clearly morally wrong.*** If the court finds that First Sale applies here, then that opens the floodgates to allow anyone to sell old copies of any software that has been upgraded, and keep using the new stuff. I really don’t think that would be good for anyone.
Those of you who have been upgrading AutoCAD for the last 25 years, I hope you held on to all your old copies, because you could be sitting on a gold mine. Of course, unless the court is going to compel Autodesk to acknowledge all these new “owners” of AutoCAD and support them with the various magic numbers required to keep them alive, there are going to be a lot of disappointed buyers around, the word will get around, and the bottom will quickly drop out of the market.
* This is not a first, I assure you.
** It has been stated elsewhere that Autodesk can actually be persuaded to allow the transfer of its software outside the usual restricted areas of merged companies, deceased estates and so on. This may be so, but it’s not something I would rely on.
*** This is a quite different moral proposition from somebody continuing to use an old version of software after upgrading, alongside the new version, on the same computer. That’s something I find entirely morally acceptable, whatever any EULA may stipulate.
[BREAK=Conclusion/Joke]
Nothing is carved in stone and this obviously doesn't guarantee a win for Glider or even an end in sight, but hey it's still news!
Sooo I thought I'd throw in this funny Glider related joke:
Mike Donnelly:
Well, that's it for today guys. I'll try and keep smaller posts like this coming up as often as I can to keep everyone entertained.People keep asking about this and I don't believe it was documented outside of the very dry court record. So here it is.
The background: Warden is a piece of code inside World of Warcraft that looks for apps like Glider. It's updated dynamically by Blizzard, so any time they want to sent you some new Warden code, you get it. Silently and without your consent. Then it runs, does its thing, and sends results back to Blizzard.
Typically, they'd update Warden to go around whatever I'm doing. Then I'd update Glider to avoid it. Consider a mouse hiding in your kitchen:
Warden: I'll look in the cupboard!
Mouse: He's looking in the cupboard, I'll go hide under the sink.
Warden: I'll look under the sink!
Mouse: He's looking under the sink, I'll go hide... etc
Every time Warden updates, I have to examine it very carefully to see where it's looking. I have to know in case it's looking for (and finding) Glider. Then I can have the mouse go hide somewhere else.
So one day Warden updates and there's some new code in there. It takes some encrypted data, gets the decryption key from the server, and decodes it into a little string. Then it tries to use that string to call part of the Windows operating system, if possible. Naturally, I don't have the key to decrypt it myself - so I can just see this encrypted blob of crap that's gonna be decrypted into something and maybe make a call into Windows. Looks pretty harmless, but you never know.
So I fire up the game and start watching it without Glider. Sure enough, they send the key down and Warden starts decrypting the little string. Keep in mind I've been at this for a couple hours and it's incredibly difficult work, not to mention the extreme stress of knowing a mistake will wipe out all my customers' accounts (and pretty much my whole business).
I step through it and it decrypts the string into... a URL. Which makes no sense to me. What is the game going to do with a URL? It's not a web browser. I wisely take the URL and paste it into a browser... and it leads me to good old Rick Astley. (LOL)
It's a rickroll and I was thoroughly fooled. Funny stuff. The code did nothing other than decrypt that string in memory and then throw it away. I figure at the time, maybe 3-4 people in the world (including myself) were analyzing Warden at that level on a daily basis. Glider, of course, was Target #1 for Blizzard.
Also: If you don't know what that is, read this - Rickrolling - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Merry Christmas!
Sources:
Website #1
Website #2
Website #3