This is one of the core contentions of Blizzard, that you are 'leasing' their software and not purchasing it. Unfortunately, even though IANAL, I find it hard to disagree with the amicus brief that was filed during the case. Personally I'd love to know what was on the judge's mind to get him to interpret as he did with such a heavy precedent out of his favor.

If you get the game client free with a subscription, without ever buying a game code (the alternate form of payment for a downloaded client), I want to find out what deal you're getting, and get my ~$150 in client purchases back.

Guess that means we need to find whoever makes a slim jim and sue them. Cuz, you know, it is a tool that allows people to violate a law (which is even more important than a contract).

Right.

On the surface, your argument seems valid. The problem lies in the fact that the copyrighted material, that is, the code and art (what the judge called 'literal materials') are not what is protected by Warden (and the judge ruled as such earlier in the case).

What Warden does protect access to is the actual protocol commands being sent back and forth across the wire between the game client and game servers. This protocol content cannot possibly be protected by copyright, as it is a) required in the due use of the copyright work (in this case, the client) much in the same way that copying a program to your RAM is a right you have by copyright law, and b) initiated by the user, and as such is held as IP by the user if it is held by anyone at all.

By this same reasoning, Fiddler's capability to read the content of SSL-encoded HTTP messages that were initiated by the user violates copyright law; it is an exterior client that accesses communicated data that is expressly protected (in this case, in the form of encryption).

If Glider were designed to access game art (which is quite strongly copyrighted), and Warden were designed to stop it from doing so, then Glider subsequently redesigned to circumvent Warden, THEN the statue applies.

And yet, the same people that will laugh and joke into a cell phone during a movie still find a way to argue with that, the most prevalent being 'I paid for my movie, I'm not leaving'. Sure they eventually give up, but that's beside the point.

Admittedly, I only go to a movie theatre 2 or 3 times a year, but that is more a price point issue than anything else. $22 for my wife and I to go see a new movie once, or wait 3 months and spend the same amount to own it forever... the choice is usually pretty clear.

I am reminded of the brouhaha that was generated when Microsoft said they'd no longer support Windows 98. I wonder how much we'll be mourning XP when it's been out of service for 2 years and Win7 is the 'standard'.

Because keeping track of what sites(and thus, their web apps) work with which browser is something the average user doesn't want to keep track of. Having a 'Native App UI' shortcut, however, is something your average user doesn't mind as much.

A 'recent video-card with 256-512MB' means PCI-E. For a LOT of people, this means a new motherboard (and, consequently, RAM+CPU) to go from AGP to PCI-E... in essence, a full upgrade, which'll easily cost you $600.

My old AGP machine ran WoW quite well, and choked on WAR like a... well, I'll not bother with an analogy here. A full system upgrade was necessary to move at all in Inevitable City... and this was on a dead server (Tor Elyr).

There are a few things you're not considering here, though:

1. The Open Office XML format (.docx, .pptx, .xlsx, etc) is the default behavior for Office 2008, and while those of your department may trade docs now in that format, sooner or later, people will get lazy and start creating docs in the newer format.
2. If you do any document transfers with other companies, eventually, you will see the dreaded .docx. What will you do then?

I'm not even going to get into the number of FOSS-based companies you leave in the cold by hanging onto .doc and the proprietary document format that it represents instead of using the freely available OOXML specification.

It'll sound like a Zergling rush?

The legal difference here is that there is no car manufacturer that has 90% of the market share of cars (and thus makes them the target of anti-trust rulings).

If Toyota had 90% market share, then yes, they'd have to install 3rd party radios to follow this precedent.

I think if you add 'than previous versions of IE' to that sentence, you'll be closer to the author's intent. At least, that's how I read it.

I think, if there is any real call to state that IE is 'forced' upon users is that it is so difficult to uninstall from the system. If it were simply 'bundled' with the OS and able to be uninstalled like any other component, it would have greater defense against anti-trust, IMO.

We call those guys 'management'.

Analogies that liken Windows users to someone with learning disabilities is so 10 minutes ago....