So in the 2002 suit against bnetd, "Blizzard sued them for analyzing software they'd paid for, while it was running on their own computers." ...

because IP law is (correctly) understood as "the law that lets a company tell you how you can use your own real, physical property." Hard cases make bad law, hard IP cases make batshit law.

Now:

Sony argues that the Datel device – which rewrites the contents of a player's device's RAM, at the direction of that player – infringes copyright. Sony claims that the values that its programs write to your device's RAM chips are copyrighted works that it has created, and that altering that copyrighted work makes an unauthorized derivative work, which infringes its copyright.

and:

How bad can it be? Well, get this: the German publishing giant Axel Springer (owned by a monomaniacal Trumpist and Israel hardliner who has ordered journalists in his US news outlets to go easy on both) is suing Eyeo, makers of Adblock Plus, on the grounds that changing HTML to block an ad creates a "derivative work" of Axel Springer's web-pages

And Cory says all this to convince the public to reject Intellectual Property rights as a form of "rent" which he equates to dangerous feudalism.

I can't argue him. In the cases cited in the piece, his complaints seem valid. On the other hand, I feel like there has to be a case for saying that if you, say, try to fix your iPhone yourself and botch it badly, Apple doesn't have to honor a warranty. The tricky part is whether they would have any grounds to terminate your service or stop running some software because .... oh, maybe some security feature can no longer be verified or something. The only case for that which pops to mind is if you hacked it to copy/relay the identity of other phones such that you were stealing from other people -- which is already a crime, but you'd want a way to stop it immediately rather than rely on the hope someone catches the perpetrator.