p2pnet.net News:- A US District Court decision that makes it illegal in most cases to reverse engineer a commercial software program, making it impossible to create new programs that interoperate with older ones, has been appealed by the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation).

The BnetD open source game server lets gamers play Blizzard titles such as Warcraft on servers that don’t belong to Blizzard’s Battle.net.

Now 8th Circuit Court of Appeals will decide whether or not the three BnetD authors were in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and Blizzard Games’ end user license agreement (EULA).

A lower court decision squeezes consumer choice out of the marketplace by essentially allowing companies to outlaw competitors’ products that interact with their own, says the EFF.

"This is a case of critical importance for the software industry," states EFF staff lawyer Jason Schultz.

"Allowing companies like Blizzard to lock out competition and complementary innovation will destroy future generations of products and services. The Internet itself is simply a collection of complementary software programs, and this ruling threatens the existence of all of them."

The EFF hopes the 8th Circuit judges will follow in the path of the Lexmark and Skylink cases, which held that the DMCA can’t be used to limit the aftermarket sales of printer cartridges and garage door openers.

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See:-
Blizzard titles - BnetD decision wrong: EFF, p2pnet, October 1, 2004
squeezes consumer choice - EFF Appeals Anti-Competitive BnetD Ruling, EFF, November 4, 2004
Lexmark - Lexmark loses DMCA case, p2pnet, October 27, 2004

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