BnetD looses in Blizzard case
p2p news / p2pnet:- Bad news. The 8th Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled against three software programmers whose free, open-source BnetD allowed Blizzard videogame owners to set up their own online MPGs (multiplayer games) and enjoy dozens of additional features instead of being locked into Blizzard’s proprietary Battle.net game service.
“The court held that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) prohibited the reverse engineering needed to create the program and that ‘click-wrap’ and ‘browse-wrap’ licenses are enforceable to prevent reverse engineering,” states the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation), which says it took the case to “defend the fair-use right to reverse-engineer software and create new programs that interoperate with older ones”.
Foundation staff lawyer Jason Schultz says the decision, “essentially shuts down any competitor’s add-on innovation that customers could enjoy with their legitimately purchased products. Add-on innovation is one of the hottest areas of creativity and economic growth right now in software, and this decision will slow investment and development in that field.”
Congress’ explicit protections for reverse engineering and add-on innovation in the highly controversial DMCA are too narrow and weak to protect innovators from lawsuits when the software they create is used for illegal copying, even if the copying occurs without the knowledge or participation of the program’s creators, the court ruled.
It also decided that clicking on a EULA’s “I Agree” button, common when installing almost any software product purchased today, “can be used to force both consumers and competitors out of the marketplace for add-on innovation”.
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See:-
EFF – Federal Court Slams Door on Add-On Innovation, September 1, 2005
September 2nd, 2005 at 6:42 pm
Who’s pockets do you think the US judiciary lives in?
September 3rd, 2005 at 8:19 am
COOL!!!!
Someone in the US dob Blizzard in to the relevant authorities for reverse engineering Warcraft 2 to create the Warcraft 2 Battlenet edition!!!!
Battlenet wasn’t created until after Warcraft 2, and i’ll bet any money Blizzard didn’t think to get permission from Blizzard to reverse engineer Warcraft 2 to enable it to work on Battlenet.
You might think i’m insane reading that last paragraph, but hey, we’re talking about US law here ;o) I’d so laugh if they got done for violating the DMCA by reverse engineering one of their OWN products! I mean does the ruling specifically say that the owners of the apps CAN do it?
It’s not very likely that they’d actually have had the source code to warcraft 2 sitting around to use to rebuild with battlenet support added to it. Maybe they did, but do they still have the original diablo code? Will they still have the diablo 2 code safely stored in another 10 years time? I doubt it very much. Companies are very bad at keeping things like source code, and now they’re all forbidden to reverse engineer their own apps. Yay US law, wtg!
September 3rd, 2005 at 7:22 pm
This ruling enforces nothing. The code is already out there, hell doing a simple google –> bnetd source, can take you to the source code if you are interested in it.
Considering the people who create the server emulations are not usually apart of some organization, means it’s simply not enforceable.
There are many emulators other than bnetd, it’s far to late for this ruling to have any real effect on the online communities.
Now apart from all this, doesn’t blizzard consider this to be bad publicity for them? i mean it makes them appear to be a bunch of monopolistic bureaucrats.
September 4th, 2005 at 4:41 pm
If they don’t have their own source-code, then they’re really very very bad business, I’m sure even M$ has still the sources for windows 1 & the 1st M$-DOS (you know, the one they bought $50000 *after* telling IBM they have it…).
There’s no way Blizzard doesn’t have the Warcraft2 & Diablo source-codes anymore, that’s just so plain stupid.
September 5th, 2005 at 4:06 am
Just because it’d be pretty damned stupid of them to lose it, doesn’t mean they haven’t. Just like everyone knows they should back up their important files, but hardly anyone ever does.