In September, the Ninth Circuit held that buyers of software (and possibly DVDs, CDs and other "licensed" content) are not owners as long as the vendor saddles the transfer with enough restrictions to transform what the buyer may think is sale into a mere license.
OPEN SOURCE WORLD OF WARCRAFT BOT LICENSE
For example, in Section 117 of the Copyright Act, Congress gave owners of computer software the right to use their legitimately purchased software without having to rely on permissions in license agreements but that right applies only to owners. Ownership matters, because otherwise Blizzard and other software vendors can wipe away important consumer rights with legalese contained in license agreements. The district court agreed, and MDY appealed. On this dystopian view, Blizzard owns every WoW DVD ever shipped for all eternity and may be able to use copyright law to punish WoW players who use the software in any manner not authorized by the "license" (like using Glider). Blizzard won in the district court, successfully arguing that WoW purchasers do not "own" their software, but merely "license" it.
The case (which we've covered previously) pits Blizzard, the maker of World of Warcraft, against MDY, the maker of a program called Glider (what Blizzard calls a "bot") that lets you play WoW on "auto-pilot" up to a certain level. Autodesk, the court today said yes but there’s a twist. Following its previous ruling in the first of these cases, Vernor v. The Ninth Circuit today issued its decision in the second of a trio of cases that raise the critical legal question of whether "magic words" in a end-user license agreement (EULA) slapped onto a consumer product can turn buyers (or gift recipients) into mere licensees, rather than owners.
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