Judge Grudgingly Awards $3.6 Million In DRM Circumvention Case 227
Fluffeh writes "The case involves an online game, MapleStory, and some people who set up an alternate server, UMaple, allowing users to play the game with the official game client, but without logging into the official MapleStory servers. In this case, the people behind UMaple apparently ignored the lawsuit, leading to a default judgment. Although annoyed with MapleStory (The Judge knocked down a request for $68,764.23 — in profits made by UMaple — down to just $398.98), the law states a minimum of $200 per infringement. Multiply that by 17,938 users of UMaple... and you get $3.6 million. In fact, it sounds like the court would very much like to decrease the amount, but notes that 'nevertheless, the court is powerless to deviate from the DMCA's statutory minimum.' Eric Goldman also has some further op-ed and information regarding the case and judgement."
Re:Seems partly justified (Score:5, Interesting)
of course i am not a lawyer...but i think a good lawyer could get the amount reduced. They would argue that there was only 1 infringement, not 17k. they only made 1 copy on their server and so should only owe $200, they did not make a copy for each user that connected, which the fine amounts to.
Here is the DRM circumvention. (Score:5, Interesting)
The server is not the issue here, or at least not the main one.
The part that is landing UMaple with the $3.6 million fine is that in order to make the official MapleStory client look to UMaple's server instead they had to write a little launcher app (UMaple Launcher) which would presumably do something like an in-memory edit to change the server address the client used. Possibly with a modification to some sort of handshaking protocol.
It's the technological equivalent of ignoring a 'do not enter' sign, rather than the actual bypassing of security, but sadly it still seems to count.
This launcher is the part that is being used by the 17K users, and so where the court is getting the 17K counts of infringement from.
The judge, had the power to dismiss it. (Score:5, Interesting)
But he chose not to.
Re:Here is the DRM circumvention. (Score:5, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
The real reason the judge was annoyed (Score:5, Interesting)
Instead, Plaintiff merely submitted 252 raw pages of documents obtained through discovery without so much as a summary of the information contained in those documents or an explanation to the Court how any of the line items contained therein directly relate to Kumar’s UMaple activities.
Seems to me that's the real reason the judge wasn't feeling like awarding any more damages, not some kind of protest against the DMCA or statutory damages.
Re:Default judgment (Score:4, Interesting)
If both parties don't show up
That isn't what happened. In this case, only the defense didn't show up. Since they provided no defense, they are guilty. If both parties don't show-up then there is no evidence of a crime so common law jurisprudence requires that the judge rule in favor of the defendant.
Re:Seems partly justified (Score:4, Interesting)
And those protection methods were bypassed because they caused problems with other system processes totally unrelated to the game, to the point of system instability.
In fact, Nexon's code does some rather unethical, possibly illegal things.
>mfw I worked on part of this code