[MUD-Dev] DCMA -- another weapon in the fight against Emulators

[Frank Crowell]

From: "Eric Rhea" <eric at enkanica.com>

> Has anyone demonstrated that emulators are actually harmful to
> these businesses? If anything, from where I'm standing on this
> side of the fence, it looks as if emulators have nill impact or
> are actually harmful to the industry as a whole. Aren't these the
> future developers and peers of "the family" they are putting down?

I don't know or could even try to guess what goes through the minds
of some business people.  I have had problems with my own "peers"
and their attitudes about IP and other things.

As for the emu projects-- I have been tracking several of them for a
couple of years.  The work is absolutely brilliant at times and in
many ways keeps the old hacker tradition true to form.  These guys
are not malicious -- they are super puzzle solvers.

Concerning any loss of revenues, I think it probably works the other
way.  I am sure that more games get sold in the process of trying to
reverse engineer and understand than not.  I believe the UO emus are
the oldest and I doubt that everyone on the emu has given up their
UO accounts.

They guys in fact are very much dedicated to the game.  They just
feel constrained by corporate policies and the lack of flexibility
in the world building.  They are spending a lot more in time and
money than they can ever hope to get back.

But going back to the DCMA -- it is not about emulators, it is about
the use of copyright material.  The DCMA is probably what Verant
used to scare off Ebay and Yahoo!, and the DCMA is what some
companies are using to shut down various web sites.

DCMA has a lemming effect.  All anyone remembers is that Napster was
in a big battle over copyright music and the Music Industry lost
billions of dollars.  Chances are very good no one lost any money,
but it is a nice piece of fiction and encourages the lemming
behavior.

I worked at VocaLoca and we had a really dumb idea (sorry VL guys)
about the DCMA and what you could do with it.  The fact is that no
one in the digital broadcast business understood the DCMA.  In fact,
there were even some radio broadcasters that thought that they could
taketheir license free over-the-air content and then broadcast it
through the net for no additional licensing.  Not so.  Over-the-air
is governed by some really old laws and some really quaint notions
about media.  As a few people have learned, rights in one area
doesn't automatically transfer to another area.

The fact is the whole electronics rights is up for grabs or so it
seems.  I am spending some time studying digital rights management
so that I can better understand this.  I think that all of us have
to take the whole area of digital rights and protected digital
objects more seriously than we have over the last few years.  The
wild west version of the Internet is gone and some companies like
Disney would like to put a IP meter on our butts.

Using the DCMA against emulators reminds me of a story that I ran on
"maddog" about a student at MIchigan or Michigan State that was
getting bounced from his school because of a piece of fiction that
he wrote.  It was violent and involved a real fellow female
classmate.  It was a really disgusting story but it also was
protected by law.  The school unfortunately argued it as a
"pornography" case and the court threw it out.

In the case of Blizzard, I would have to read the whole case to
really understand it.  I just know off the top of my head that use
the DCMA approach is not going to work well in this case.  And I am
right 50% of the time.

frank

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