[skylark]

This reminds me of a court case a decade ago when Blizzard sued the creator of a popular World of Warcraft botting program called MMOGlider on the grounds of copyright infringement. Blizzard won and was awarded $6m. Not a lawyer, but maybe there's some legal precedent?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7645059.stm

[icebraining]

That may help Golden Modz - in the appeal, the Ninth Circuit said it wasn't copyright infringement:

Were we to hold otherwise, Blizzard — or any software copyright holder — could designate any disfavored conduct during software use as copyright infringement, by purporting to condition the license on the player's abstention from the disfavored conduct. The rationale would be that because the conduct occurs while the player's computer is copying the software code into RAM in order for it to run, the violation is copyright infringement. This would allow software copyright owners far greater rights than Congress has generally conferred on copyright owners.

[stefan_]

The Blizzard argument was that because the license is granted to you only under the EULA, breaking the EULA then becomes copyright infringement. That didn't hold up.

No, what worked for Blizzard was DMCA. Because they had an ineffective "anti cheat" system in place, somehow they found a judge willing to consider a bot evading that a violation of a DMCA copy protection device.