Legal: 9th CCA joins us with Vernor v Autodesk!

[Mercury]

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals issued an order today that joins our case with Vernor v. Autodesk. This is pretty exciting stuff, since Vernor's entire case (and a huge part of ours) hinges upon whether people who buy software at the store are owners or licensees.

Vernor won his case in district court already and his case is rather simple, so I consider this to be good news for us. If Vernor can't convince his panel that his customers own their copies of Autodesk, then I can't imagine we'd have a better chance at all.

I don't know if this will make our oral argument come up any sooner, but it'll be a lot more exciting when it happens. It also punches a bit of a hole in Blizzard's theory that "owner of a copy" means something different under 109 than 117. We all knew where that would end up, though.

Anyway, the very short order is linked below.

Download link:
http://mmoglider.com/legal/12_23_2009_Consolidate.pdf