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by bilekas 957 days ago
I don't know for sure, but I would imagine there are more severe actions taken against circumventing paid material (content behind a paywall) than there is for free content supplemented by advertisements..

Edit : The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) prohibits circumventing an effective technological means of control that restricts access to a copyrighted work. I guess that would apply here.
4 comments
mckirk 957 days ago
Given how liberally the DMCA is applied, you definitely don't want to be on the wrong side of that.

I remember some guy that wrote a WoW bot and got sued using the DMCA, with the argument that his bot was circumventing the anti-cheat and the anti-cheat could be seen as a 'mechanism protecting copyrighted material', because it was safeguarding access to the game servers, the servers were generating parts of the game world (such as sounds) dynamically, and those were under copyright... Wild stuff.

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kkzz99 957 days ago
It happened to Honorbuddy, a very advanced bot for World Of Warcraft made by a German company. The argument in relation to DMCA was that the bot was circumventing warden, the games anti-cheat system. The legal battle was long and they ultimately had to strip many features of the bot, until the company went under.
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judge2020 957 days ago
As far a I know section 1201 has never been prosecuted. Distribution of the copyrighted material is what's focused on.
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mckirk 957 days ago
This seems a good summary of the case I was talking about:

https://massivelyop.com/2020/02/28/lawful-neutral-cheating-c...

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nerdbert 957 days ago
Isn't anything that can be circumvented ineffective?

Or, looking at it the other way, if you put a small sticker that says "do not do X" and even one person follows that, isn't that therefore an "effective" method?

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Aaargh20318 957 days ago
> The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) prohibits circumventing an effective technological means of control that restricts access to a copyrighted work. I guess that would apply here.

It doesn't if you're not in the US.

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zeusk 957 days ago
Kim Dotcom believed so too, didn't fare too well.
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Aaargh20318 957 days ago
Megaupload did business in the US, they had a lot of servers in the US. IIRC that was the basis for his arrest: the crime took place on US territory.
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zeusk 957 days ago
12ft.io and vercel have servers in US, so what's your argument here?
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nottheengineer 957 days ago
Good old section 1201. The EFF has been fighting it for a while, but hasn't had much success unfortunately.
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