A great part of a great brief: Ed Felten's declaration in the EFF's BNETD brief

As Cory notes, the EFF's hot-off-the-presses brief (mostly, I think) written by Jason Schultz in the BNETD case is really quite gorgeous. My favorite part (on page 10) is how they take Blizzard to task (with the expert help of Ed Felten) for claiming copyright infringement on the tiny little icons that display a users connection status. Another lesson in de minimis copying... after the Beastie Boys case, you'd think counsels would learn.

The icons here are insignificant as a proportion of the copyrighted works. The entire file of icons, called “icons.bni,” is only 15 kilobytes, or 15KB, in size. By comparison, Blizzard’s Diablo II video game client program is 575 megabytes in size, or 588,800 KB. Thus, “icons.bni” makes up only 0.0025% of the Diablo II game, a microscopic percentage well below established de minimis use thresholds.
[Footnotes to Ed Felten's Declaration removed. -Joe]

Posted by joebeone at Febrero 18, 2004 05:37 PM