Slashdot Mirror
Legal Analysis Critical of Blizzard v Bnetd
anewsome writes "As reported previously
several times,
Blizzard has sent a cease and desist letter to the ISP of bnetd (which develops an open source
Battle.net emulator). Lawmeme.org (from the Yale Law School) has
published a long piece with lots of background and legal analysis on the
case. Conclusion: Blizzard has an uphill legal battle."
Sorry, such file doesn't exist...
Maybe they didn't like the idea of getting slashdotted... I'm getting "Sorry, such file doesn't exist..."
Sorry, such file does not exist.
And, now I suppose I'm supposed to go look for it MYSELF!?
The Real URL for this story is:
http://research.yale.edu/lawmeme/modules.php?name= News&file=article&sid=149
--Azaroth (KW)
The article.
The Correct URL
Bnetd didn't reverse engineer any of Blizzard's software to create their server, so what right does Blizzard have to stop any of this? Sure you can make the case that bnetd allows software pirates to play their illegal copies of Blizzard's games more easily, but bnetd should be treated as a completely independent software developer.
Don't get me wrong. I'm a huge fan of open source, bnetd, yada yada, and I agree that the official Bnet has tons of issues (ranging from lag to dealing with people whom I'd at least rather not deal with).
However, to my understanding they're doing this largely as a reaction to the WC3 beta. It was cracked within days of release, using bnetd and other "fake" bnet networks that don't check cd keys. This is allowing many people who shouldn't be playing the beta to play the beta.
"Big deal" you say. And part of me is inclined to agree, as it doesn't hurt Blizzard to have a few extra thousand people playing the beta.
Well, I'm a beta tester, and I can tell you that the "official" beta network is sorely underused. Of the 5000 beta testers there are probably only 30-60 games going at any given time. I know, you might think that is a lot, but it's basically the same people over and over. From the buzz I've heard, a lot of legit beta testers have even been going to the bnetd networks, just because there are more people there (easier to find big 3v3 and 4v4 games, etc.).
So yes, DMCA bad. Making reverse engineering bad. Open source good, bnetd good. But Blizzard still does have a point, and perhaps some sort of compromise needs to be reached...
Thanks (the site's full of SQL connect errors now)
unfinished: (adj.)
The "long piece" link seems to be broken.
("Sorry, such file doesn't exist...")
Here's a link to the LawMeme page.
The Blizzard article is at the top.
I think the link should be http://research.yale.edu/lawmeme/modules.php?name= News&file=article&sid=149
... for the purpose of enabling interoperability of an independently created computer program with other programs, if such means are necessary to achieve such interoperability, to the extent that doing so does not constitute infringement under this title.
Here's the important stuff...
Does BNETD Violate Blizzard Copyrights?
Unlikely, although it must be stated that Vivendi/Blizzard has yet to claim which exclusive rights are infringed by which programs hosted by bnetd, so this analysis is based on speculation as to likely complaints.
In general, copyright infringement consists in copying or distributing another's work without authorization. In this case, the bnetd server is the original work of its various developers (BNETD Project Credits ). The developers have never had access to Battle.net software, so it would be impossible for them to have copied it. As there is no copying there is no infringement. Indeed, Blizzard's FAQ on the case admits as much since it is called the Emulation FAQ . In computer science, emulators are software designed to imitate the same function as another piece of software. They are not copies. If it was a copy, it would not be "imitating" the function of another piece of software, it would be the same software.
In order to create a Battle.net emulator, the bnetd developers engaged in a combination of reverse and value engineering. Their method of reverse engineering did not require any decompiling or disassembly of the code of the client (again, they could not have deassembled or decompiled the Battle.net code since they did not have access to it). It is decompiling of code that frequently gets reverse engineers in copyright trouble -- that is not a problem for bnetd since it was not required. Bnetd was able to reverse engineer by simply looking at the traffic between server (Battle.net) and client (game player). For example, a player would start a game as one type of character on Battle.net in Diablo II (e.g., a Necromancer) capture the packets, then start a game as a different character (e.g., a Barbarian) and capture the packets. By comparing the two packet dumps, one of the bnetd developers would be able to determine which packets identified specific elements of the game. The developer would then make changes to the bnetd server and check his work by performing the same test with client on the bnetd server. Through trial and error, the bnetd server improved.
To my knowledge there is no law that holds that reverse engineering a protocol through packet dumping implicates copyright in any way.
Vivendi might claim that special programs to assist users of bnetd to edit their Windows registry violated copyright. As mentioned above, the Windows registry consists of configuration files that can be modified by the user using regedit.exe which is part of every version of Windows. It is not at all clear how provision of a program to make editing certain portions of the registry easier would violate an exclusive right of the copyright holder. Moreover, it is not clear whether a user who alters the registry is violating copyright. They may be violating the EULA (more below), but that is not a violation of copyright.
Does BNETD Violate Section 1201 of the DMCA?
Unlikely, but the statute in question is quite complicated and the law has not yet been clarified by the courts. It must also be made clear that simply because something may facilitate piracy does not mean it violates section 1201 of the DMCA.
The first issue is whether or not the CD-Key authorization mechanism is an access control device under section 1201(a). Section 1201(a) states that a device controls access to a work, "if the measure, in the ordinary course of its operation, requires the application of information, or a process or a treatment, with the authority of the copyright owner, to gain access to the work." One significant question is access to what work? Bnetd does not facilitate unauthorized access to Battle.net, it is a substitute. Bnetd does not facilitate access to the single player version of the game. Bnetd does not faciliate access to the LAN multiplayer aspects of the game. Bnetd does not facilitate access to Internet multiplayer, since that is accomplished through LAN emulators such as Kali. At worst, bnetd facilitates access to Internet multiplayer using the client's Battle.net interface. It is questionable whether access to a particular interface counts as "access to the work." It is questionable whether enabling certain functionality is "access to the work." Even granting that the interface or functionality is a work that can be improperly accessed, does accessing it require tha application of information, or a process or a treatment to gain such access? For every Blizzard game prior to the Warcraft III beta, clearly not. Bnetd servers don't send any "access" information to a client, they simply do not bar a client from accessing them.
This is made clear by the definition of circumvention in 1201(a)(3)(B), which "means to descramble a scrambled work, to decrypt an encrypted work, or otherwise to avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, or impair a technological measure, without the authority of the copyright owner." Bnetd does not descramble, decrypt, remove or deactivate anything. It does not avoid, bypass or impair, it ignores. Ignoring is not circumventing. Indeed, section 1201(c)(3) states that, "nothing in this section shall require that the design of, or design and selection of parts and components for, a consumer electronics, telecommunications, or computing product provide for a response to any particular technological measure." The reason for this is to prevent copyright holders from forcing copy protection measures onto computer and consumer electronics manufacturers. An example would be a music publisher who releases a CD that has watermarking in the music. The watermark states, "do not rip into MP3 format." There is no obligation for CD manufacturers to build in a system that can detect and obey that watermark.
Moreover, even bnetd did circumvent an access anti-circumvention measure, it would still be legal to distribute it so long as:
* It was not primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumvention. A very good case can be made that the primary purpose of producing bnetd was to provide an alternative to the drawbacks and limitations of Battle.net (About the BNETD Project). One quote from a Review of Diablo II on MacGamer.com will provide some idea of the frustrations many feel with regard to Battle.net: "Provided that Battlenet doesn't make you want to pry your eyes out with a grapefruit spoon, you will find that you can go online and play your character in the Diablo Battlenet Realms." Even Blizzard's Senior Director, Bill Roper, admits that Battle.net's stability left something to be desired in an interview with Eurogamer , "There was certainly a period of time in the history of Battle.net where the team was constantly playing catch-up. They work on stability, they work on how many people could be online, they work on access and bandwidth issues, they get all those things fixed, and then we get another 25,000 people online concurrently and all [the] new stuff will break."
* It has more than limited commercially significant purpose. Again, a very good case can be made that bnetd does have significant commercial purposes. Bnetd currently supports a number of features that Battle.net does not, such as the ability to connect with IRC, create custom ladder games and tournaments, and send broadcast messages.
* Is not marketed for use in circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title. Although, as an open source project, bnetd has little control over how some individuals may promote it -- the bnetd and Warforge developers have never promoted piracy of Blizzard's games. Indeed, the developers of bnetd are some of Blizzard's biggest supporters and fans.
The next issue is whether bnetd violates section 1201(b) which prohibits distribution of devices which "effectively protects a right of a copyright owner under" the Copyright Act. To qualify as technological protection measure under section 1201(b), a device must in the ordinary course of its operation, prevent, restrict, or otherwise limit the exercise of a right of a copyright owner." The only right at issue would seem to be the right to copy. But it is difficult to claim that bnetd undermines this as one must already have a copy of a Blizzard game (legitimate or illegitimate) in order to use bnetd. In other words, any copying occurs prior to use of bnetd. It may be that the availability of bnetd encourages some to make illicit copies who wouldn't have without bnetd, but that is not a violation of the DMCA.
It is also strange to claim that the CD-Key system prevents copying since a valid CD-Key is not necessary to connect to Battle.net and download the latest patches for a warez copy of the game. Using a warez copy one logs into Battle.net. Prior to CD-Key validation, Blizzard conveniently provides the latest patches for the warez copy. Patches are also available via public ftp (http://ftp.blizzard.com/pub/war3/patches/beta/ ). It is hard to claim that the CD-Key system effectively prevents copying when Blizzard itself updates warez copies of its games to the latest version. Most bnetd servers are set up by owners of legitimate copies and the server ensures that those joining have the same version of the game. If Blizzard were truly concerned about piracy they would at least try to make it more difficult to get the latest patches.
Furthermore, under section 1201(f)(2):
Notwithstanding the provisions of subsections (a)(2) and (b), a person may develop and employ technological means to circumvent a technological measure, or to circumvent protection afforded by a technological measure
It seems pretty clear that even if bnetd is a circumvention device, then it clearly falls under the exemption of 1201(f)(2), since any circumvention is only for the purpose of achieving interoperability between bnetd and the Blizzard game. Such interoperability does not constitute infringement, since it does not violate sections 106-118 or 602.
unfinished: (adj.)
"more easily" ? No, it is the only way for software pirates to play blizzard's online multiplayer...
I'm making an assumption here, but I don't think the guys running the bnetd project don't have piles of money to take this thing to court. The ISP isn't going to burn tons of cash for these guys, and ignore Blizzard.
It's unfortunate that a company with deep pockets and a shaky legal footing can shut down projects it doesn't agree with. I used to play DII like a fiend, but got sick of the cheating/tradehacks/etc., so I don't have anything to gain from this project. I do, however, think it's a real shame that a nice project like this is getting squeezed. I hope the bnetd team can weather the storm.
I also wonder if maybe Blizzard's time and energies might be put to better use by focusing on things like Realm stability, and getting rid of the cheaters that are bringing the realms down, looking for the next duping method.
Between Vivendi and Jack Valenti, it seems that things with names that begin with the letter V are out to get us...
That may be true, but more people use it to play thier properly licensed Blizzard games than to play those illegal versions.
Just because it turns out that something can be used illegally doesn't mean it can only be used illegally, or is primarily used illegally.
Do you Gentoo!?
LOL
If they allowed bnetd to pass-through authentication to battle.net, they might have a better point. They've specifically ruled that out. (Presumably because their crypto is lousy.)
And it isn't the bnetd group that even enabled Warcraft III support.
I'm all for wiping out the gene that causes people to post to the wrong fucking story.
not true, they can use fcgs too.
bnetd/fcgs were used far more with legimate people than not tho.
is getting someone to support it against Blizard.
;) Nice graphics and all, but the gameplay is piss poor.
Unless the EFF or a major player steps in, its not like anything is going to happen. With so many copies of bnetd out there, its not like it is a major issue, but hey.
By the way, don't bother with wc3, the game sucks dick for bus fare and then walks
Anyone else feel that support@bliz sounds like a bot if you mention bnetd? Try sending the peeps a legit question and somewhere mention bnetd and see if you get a response to your question or the canned Piracy FAQ response.
lamerize "bnetd" and then send more emails to support . . .
1q2w3e4r5t6y7u8i9o0pqawsedrftgthyjukilo;p'azsxdcf
Bnetd can not put the money into legally fighting Blizzard long term, and thus their "uphill legal battle" may never even exist...and yes that's a shame.
Bnetd probably needs to find a lawyer who sides with them so strongly that he is willing to work pro-bono...and it's not the kind of case that is likely to generate much fervor among the typical legal people.
If i BUY Blizzard , i should be able to play it ANY way i want .. it's mine .. i purchased it.
..... No ... they are not legal until a judge says they are.
... without a court order .. they are just .......... some trash that a company makes to intimidate u.
.. thinking that you have to obay corperate babble as if it were law
Is every one here really thinking that all those funny EULA statements are really legal
So companies can put whatever they want in a EULA , and it does not mean u have to follow them or even look at them
How far have we gone
* Carthago Delenda Est *
So you're claiming that gene manipulation caused bentd to get written? Or that the lack of moles in Blizzard's legal department made them issue this Cease & Desist document?
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
I don't think you can say Blizzard faces an "uphill battle" even if they are on dubious legal ground, they have the funding, and the bnetd people will have a hard time coming up with funding to pay for a long legal battle, especially since there is no profit motive for anyone on the bnetd team to stick a neck out and fight this thing. I can think of another company that is also on EXTREMELY dubious legal ground, but managed to win. They are called Microsoft, and they, with thier superiour funding just trenched in until the political climate suited them better. I hate to compare Microsoft to Blizzard but in this case they are sort of in the same position - dubious legal ground, but superior funding and legal resources. :-(
- Geddes
This is one of the most anticipated titles in years. I've been looking foward to WC3 since WC2, considering what a jump WC2 was over WC1.
All these people playing the beta versions cracked are still going to buy the game? Who knows.
I feel that Blizzard, by providing great games for years, has earned the right to not have people floating around cracked copies of their games. We all wants WC3. I'm willing to wait.
If that means harassing some people with questionable lawsuits to stall for their software, so be it. I feel that we worry too much on Slashdot about legalisms and not enough about common decency.
If you love Blizzard games, show some respect and let them launch their games as they desire. They haven't disappointed yet.
Realize that the early demos of Star Craft were seen as WC in space and were hated. Blizzard rewrote the game in the next year and put out a game that people loved.
Had Warez kiddies put out those early Star Craft demos, then when the game was released it might have bombed because people had played a crappy game with the same name a year earlier.
Ripping off a company that puts out products you love is poor form.
Alex
Of those 97% MSIE users 99% read at +1 and above, so you lose. Those who enjoy reading inane posts and looking at really nasty pictures are mostly Linux users.
Paste, from here
Ok not many of you may know, but I am the host and admin for the bnetd.org
server. I am also an ISP and the one who hosts the server here at no cost to
anyone. I also have been known from time to time to help with development and
ideas on the bnetd server, but I am not even close to one of the main
developers. I have also been know from time to time to hack on the web pages for
the site as well.
I have talked with the lawyers at EFF. They are interested in taking on the
case, both for us as a small local/rural ISP and to help defend the developers
as well. So for now the web site is sort of closed down to keep Vivendi/Blizzard
lawyers from suing us as a small ISP and to help prevent them from suing each of
the developers. They could still sue both of us, and say that they will at least
sue the developers and owners of the website (which I guess would techincally be
me personally).
I and I believe most of the developers plan on fighting this as much as we can
given the support that we are able to get from EFF and others. It remains to be
seen what kind of legal advice we get in the next few days and up comming week
as to when the site will return. The site was taken down in its current form by
concensus amoung all the developers that could be reached at the given time that
action was required. I, as an ISP, did not force anyone to do anything. As an
ISP I plan to fight this as much as I can, as a developer (the little developing
that I have done) plan to fight this as well.
I plan to fight this and return the site back to its "normal state" (whatever
that may be), it is just a question of when and how long at this point.
Vivendi/Blizzard's main complaint, as was voice to me in an hour long call with
them yelling and threating me, the ISP to hurry and take it down "why do you
need to wait and figure all this out?" was that the bnetd program/server does
not impliment the online CD-KEY checking and thus allowed pirate copies to play
online, and that the true battle.net server have this code as an anti-piracy
protection. Since bnetd doesn't have this feature, it was circumventing the
piracy/copy protection and thus was in violation of the DMCA. It was at this
point that Vivendi/Blizzard just wanted me, the ISP, to shut the whole site
down, not remove the offending files but shut the whole site down or risk having
them sue me along with the "owners" of bnetd.org. They were very unhappy that I
want to talk with a lawyer to see what my options were, and said if they didn't
hear back from me by the next day one way or they other they would start
proceedings to sue me and the "owners" of bnetd.org who were refusing to respond
to their messages. Now who they were contacting as the "owner" of bnetd.org is
beyond me, and the lawyers were unable to tell me who they tried to contact and
said "its beside the point anyway", which happens to seem to be their favorite
phrase.
If you want to support this fight, I suggest you email Blizzard and Vivendi
letting them know how displeased you are that they didn't even contact us first
or try to work anything out, but rather just hammered us with legal threats and
the DMCA. I also suggest that you get an EFF membership to help them fight cases
like this. If you want to donate to a defense fund for our court costs I would
assume that you could contact EFF and they could work something out.
If you have any other questions let me know. I will try to answer them as best I
can.
Tim Jung
System Admin
Internet Gateway Inc.
"The WarCraft III beta works a little differently then previous Blizzard games. The CD-Key for WarCraft III performs exactly the same as previous games, but with one addition. Having validated the CD-Key, the Battle.net server will return an encrypted response to the client (challenge-response). Without this response the client will not function. Warforge surmounted this by creating a program that changed a single byte in one of WarCraft III's Dynamic Linked Libraries (DLL) so that the client no longer expected a response. "
First of all kudos to whoever figured that one byte out.
Second, isn't this the client then who is breaking the DMCA not bnetd?
Yes but every time I try to see it your way, I get a headache.
All of this press couldn't be helping their case. I saw the WC3 beta posted somewhere, but I didn't bother downloading it thinking I couldn't play it without a valid key anyway.. now that I know about this bnetd project I've rethought my position.. wonder if that post is still there...
Sigs are awesome huh?
Bloodsuckers, all.
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
But who has the deeper pockets to fight this? It doesn't matter if you are in the right if you don't have the money to fight.
Maybe I am missing something but this isn't a EULA issue. They aren't going after you for violation of the EULA. They are going after BNetD because, in their opinion, they are developing a device for the circumvention of copyright protection under the DCMA.
Awwww crap... I agree. :(
The only thing that we learn from history is that nobody learns anything from history.
Atually it isn't. The way Battle net works, you can play it... provideing nobody else is on with the CD key already.
Mmm, good point. Although from a proactive stance, IIRC, defeating the EULA may be necessary as well because Blizzard includes something about the user agreeing not to access any server besides Battle.Net for Battle.Net type usage.
Conclusion: Blizzard has an uphill legal battle
How so? No matter how much you want to estow the virtues of open source yada yada, blizzard will probably win.. hell they probably won't even have to go to court to win.. the bnetd guys will probably appologize and settle out of court just to keep from losing millions of dollars trying to fight this.
Conclusion: Money talks. Period.
This would be the most interesting point if it could be contested in Court. The claim made here is that by ignoring the CD-Key authentication request BNET is NOT subject to the circumvation clause?
One has to wonder, to bypass is to ignore is it not? Doesn't the "emulator" specifically just change the system to not expect a response? How is that "ignoring" ? To me that is an active bypass.
While I like the idea of emulators, this article twists words as well as any lawyer would. Amazing I did not see an argument over *is*
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Bnetd does nothing illegal.
;)
Some hoser comes along and takes Bnetd and does illegal things with it (*cough Warcraft 3 Beta*).
Yeah, go after Bnetd, they're certainly at fault. I mean, they offered a tool that could be manipulated to pirate games!
Wait a minute. Blizzard offered a WC3 Beta. The very nature of that offering means it can be used as a tool of piracy. Why, without WC3, people wouldn't be able to pirate WC3. Let's sue Blizzard for aiding software pirates.
Bah. I've never liked Blizzard's games in terms of gameplay anyway. Sure, the stories are *damned* impressive, but c'mon. RTS.. Rushing? Rushing is pathetic, yet they keep designing games that allow it.
Hell, they don't even do balancing. Give me a few Protoss carriers, and I'll annihilate you.
I'm done buying Blizzard games. I enjoyed WC1/2, SC.. Probably because I didn't play them on battlenet.
Ahh, the glories of lans, where you know your opponents aren't hosers.
bnetd isn't violating the DMCA, furthermore, it isn't causing Blizzard any money. Since b.net is a free service provided by Blizzard upon purchase of their products, the only license required to use b.net is the one purchased with the game. That being said, bnetd is not circumventing any licenses, the fact that using b.net requires a license is irrelevant, the license is an eula prompted when you first use the service. No licenses or failsafes are being circumvented, for no particular license is required to play any of Blizzards products online, only to use their services.
Of all the Universal Constants, here's one I know: Nice guys finish last
Will it be where in the EULA they say that you have to give them your firstborn child?
I don't care if they write software that guarantees peace in the Middle East, they don't have the right to harass people that are not breaking the law in order to get to people that are. Period.
At least mafia-owned pizzarias make excellent pizza. Compare to Bill Gates.
static mirror can be found here.
That may be true but it only matters if they come after you and I don't see that happening. Coming after so-called "pirates" is not too bad but coming after legitimate customers would not be very popular.
If I were Blizzard, here's what I would have done:
"Hi this is Blah Blah Blah from Blizzard, apparently people are using Bnetd to play pirated versions of Warcraft III. Is there any way that you guys could remove WC3 support from Bnetd? - I would hate this to have to be a legal issue. Tell you what, I'll give a free copy of WC3 for the dev team if you get it done quickly."
While I can't predict what their response would have been, I'm guessing it would have been better than the current shithole that Blizzard has dug itself into...
-dbc
But they make an interesting, if slightly irrelevant point. If I had mod points I would definitely mod you up.
Even if Blizzard did allow pass-through authentication to battle.net and even if the bnetd people did implement it one of the problems here is the Open Source nature of bnetd. It would be a trivial task for a lot of people to remove this authentication from bnetd so the problem still remains.
Also implementing high level crypto for real time strategy games that you want to provide access to for free on servers would at the very least greatly increase the computing horsepower required by those servers (thats assuming that sort of real time high powered encryption is even possible). Blizzard wants to provide a free service to anyone who wants to play their games online, but they can only continue to do that while it is economically viable. Anything that increases the cost of this service will also have a knock on effect on its quality.
Finally if you check the licence agreement that comes with your Blizzard games you will see:
you are not entitled to:
(iv) host or provide matchmaking services for the Program or emulate or redirect the communication protocols used by the Licensor in the network feature of the Program, though protocol emulation, tunneling, modifying or adding components to the Progran, use of a utility program or any other techniques now known or hereafter deceloped, for any purpose including, but not limited to network play over the Internet, network play utilising commercial or non-commercial gaming networks or as part of content aggregation networks withoug the Licensor prior written consent.
Unless all the people involved in the bnetd project have never purchaesd and played a Blizzard game they are violating this licence agreement.
But the really sad thing is that if Blizzard feel that the public beta is lending itself to piracy in such a manner that it is affecting sales then that will be the end of their public betas. I also find it really depressing that Blizzard have been unable to find a group of 5000 people to test, whom they have trusted with their beta versions and who have no doubt signed all sorts of non-disclosure agreements, but who are willing to abide by that and not release the games to warez sites. Regardless of what happens to the bnetd project I really hope that the people who released the warez versions of the WC3 beta feel the full strength of Blizzards laywers brought to bear on them.
Slashdot: Proof that a million monkeys at a million typewriters can create a masterpiece
Hold a meeting or conference with the authors of Bnetd, then instead of suing the pants off them, hire them, have them help improve the original Battle.net services. It's kind of like ISP's and large companies hiring hackerz, sorry, Security Specialists to help develop stronger and more secure networks and communications, why not let this fall under that same umbrella? Win-Win situation. Battle.net can make a deal that gives these guys rad jobs, and they get improved service.
But, seeing as most companies would rather slam the cuffs on the little man rather than display gestures of good will, I doubt such a happy ending will even come into the minds of Blizzard. But, here's one for hoping.
Whats stopping the developers from representing themselves?
I mean it when into complete detail describing the situation as un biasly as posible, and picked apart the letter, and the legality of it all.
One would also think that many (ethical) law students would jump at the chance to do this. Or are there no ethical law students?
The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive
they're doing this largely as a reaction to the WC3 beta. It was cracked within days of release, using bnetd
Yes, this is their logic. And it is essentially flawed.
bnetd does not allow you to play Wc3 beta, a hacked copy does.
So what you have is Blizzard pissing all over the bnetd authors, when (if their reasoning was sound) they should be going after the guys who were doing the bnetd WC3 hack. (Which, if they'd done that, I'm sure everybody here would have supported.)
Incidentally, I sent a letter to them, explaining this point, and all the others in their FAQ (which I EXPLICITLY stated I had read) and all I got back was their form letter telling me to read the FAQ.
They lost me as a customer because of this.
This is made clear by the definition of circumvention in 1201(a)(3)(B), which "means to descramble a scrambled work, to decrypt an encrypted work, or otherwise to avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, or impair a technological measure, without the authority of the copyright owner." Bnetd does not descramble, decrypt, remove or deactivate anything. It does not avoid, bypass or impair, it ignores. Ignoring is not circumventing.
Now, tell me, how is ignoring the key not avoiding or bypassing it? He even mentions that they had to go and modify the DLL that comes with WC3 to enable it to skip the CD check. Isn't that deactivating it, or removing it? Most of the article seems solid, but when it comes down to compliance with the DMCA (I'm not saying the DMCA is good, I'm just going off what's law right now), it seems to fail, badly.
As they say, Yale Law web pages are born, live and get slashdotted.
Generally, 'legal analysis' implies that there is some...well, legal analysis. This article from Yale has none. It is just a statement of portions of the DMCA and the author's opinion on how the courts should find.
Phrases such as "to my knowledge" have no place in a 'legal analysis'. It either is, or it isn't. If you don't know for sure, you look it up and quote the source.
My favorite portion of the 'analysis' was at the end:
This 'analyst' conveniently omits a reference to 1201(f)(1) (which requires the circumventor have a legally obtained copy of the circumvented program). Additionally, 1201(f)(2) clearly states that the circumvention program falls under the exception if it is necessary to achieve such interoperability.
This does not mean that it falls under the exception if it can be used for interoperability, it means that there must be no other means.
This is about the umptieth story about "IP vs. warez" this week, and it's only Wednesday.
Is there any hope for a solution here? Any hope for a compromise? Or is it going to be a constant yammering match between thousands of lawyers waving motions and C&D letters in the air on one side and thousands of |337 \/\/4R3zzzz d00dz waving keygen programs and blank CDRs in the air on the other?
Surely by now we've realized that the "all content must be stricty controlled and monitored 24-hours a day by DRM/DMCA/SSSCA/*AA position is no more or no less untenable than the "I'll NEVER EVER EVER pay for anything, especially a web site, or anything digital, and I will vigorously rip/copy/distribute every CDROM/DVD/download/movie/song/album/game I can find for the express purpose of celebrating the fact that I didn't have to pay for it, and then laugh as company after company (read: employer after employer) files chapter 11 because everything they have invested in has become totally worthless with a few clicks.... and everything sux anyway, except Everquest."
Is there any position a business can take that will allow them to avoid being cast as a "greed-driven corporate machine?" Just how much do they have to give away, and at what point can they say, "ok, here's your trainload of free stuff, now *this* we'd really like you to buy?"
SOMEONE HAS TO PAY THE BILLS. Businesses that sell things *employ* people too.
I agree that businesses by and large have not lived up to their end of the responsibility bargain. Business is given huge latitude and opportunity, and they should exchange good products and jobs for that. That's the responsible thing to do.
There must be a balance here, and if/when a new agreed-upon balance requires that some products be paid for, the responsible thing for customers to do is to meet their side of the bargain and pay for the product. It is no more fair for customers to play bait-and-switch than it is for a business.
New products are developed, usually at some non-trivial level of risk, on the implied promise that if they are of sufficient quality (usually the result of VERY hard work), then customers will buy the product, allowing the business to earn back their costs plus a profit.
But there WILL BE NO NEW PRODUCTS if businesses hear "HA HA!! I'm going use it anyway and not pay!! nyyahhh nyahhh nyahhhhhhhh!!!" often enough. There will be no way to make even a moderate business model work.
I think there are sufficient ideas among developers to find a better balance. Instead of spending time repeating "all copy protection can be defeated" over and over, how about a little time spent helping find that balance?
Just a thought or two.
The fact is that there is tens of thousands of people playing Warcraft3 beta illegal at any given time, while on Blizzard's Battle.net you can only find ~150 or so players online.
And this isn't an exaggeration. I was lucky enough to be invited to participated in the beta and 150-200 is roughly the amount of players you will find playing on Battle.net. Where as my co-worker who is using the illegal copy, showed me a page that gave the top 50 bnetd servers, ranked by population.
I'm all for open source, as a developer myself, but I'm not against Blizzard shutting down bnet emmulators at this point. People may claim that they are only doing it because the game is not availiable for purchase, but that is a crock. We all know the same people are going to get the gold version of Warcraft 3 illegaly because it is easy.
SageMadHatter
Just because some lawyer doesn't know what an emulator is doesn't mean you should go around repeating him. It's a piece of interoperable software man, there's no emulation involved. The one byte crack is certainly circumvention, but that's not bnet, that's Warforge, and as for ignoring the CD-KEY, what else could they possibly do? They dont have the algorithm to authenticate it. Personally I'm against the whole thing. The only reason bnet is/was a successful open source project is because it is largely trivial. If they sat down and tried to write their own game the project would have blown appart (or stagnated significantly like the Freecraft project - which anyone who has actually used the game and not just read the Sourceforge stats will tell you is the case).
How we know is more important than what we know.
Because its their software..No one should have the right to try and emulate something without the express written (noterized) legal consent the party?
{QUOTE}
"more easily" ? No, it is the only way for software pirates to play blizzard's online multiplayer...
{/QUOTE}
Uhm, haven't you heard of playing over the TCP/IP protocol? I have Diablo 2 but I think it has this ability. I KNOW that Diablo had this ability. I'm pretty sure that Starcraft had it and I think Warcraft and Warcraft 2 had it added or had it already. All you need to know is the IP address of the computer hosting the game. It was put in for LAN gaming.
I don't have a 4800X4000 res screen.
I realize it's a bug, but damn it has been
affecting slashdot for MONTHS now. Fix it!
Mod me down, but don't mod me as offtopic.
It's not offtopic because it's affecting
this story.
I love going down to the elementary school, watching all the kids jump and shout, but they dont know I'm using blanks.
When I replied to this, there were ZERO comments. Now, when I hit submit, maybe there were more (as you've so nicely pointed out).
/. to implement a locking system - so that when I view all the comments in a thread - nobody else can? .. They have to wait for me to get in, view, post, then get out?
See, this web site stuff is pretty cool - cuz you can have multiple users doing things on the same thread at once! It's AMAZING!
Do you want
www.kali.net allows IPX LAN games over the internet. It works. That's how my friends and I played WarCraft I and II. That's how we played StarCraft for a while after Blizzard's BattleNet server went to crap and before we discovered bnetd. There is no BattleNet authentication performed there. bnetd is NOT the only way for pirates to play, it is just an easier way. Just as it is an easier way for legitimate players to play.
Edward Burr
Having a smoking section in a restaurant is like having a peeing section in a swimming pool.
Seems like Blizzard does a lot of these. Such stories about them seem to appear quite a bit. I've personally had experience with them when they went after me with legal threats for my starcraft battle.net hacks site (everyone was using them, so i was distributing them, and they were forced to create updates every month.. when i gave up, they only updated once every 6 months, and people continued to cheat). Several web hosts dropped me instantly after blizzard threatened them with bullshit emails, and then I scared my parents when they received a thick legal document in the mail.
Don't forget Voldemort.
Go read Harry Potter if you haven't yet, it's a good book, really!
Suppose you have a software package, and the CD KEY is used to allow you to install the software. Presumably, it takes some encrypted form and mutates it into a useful version. Alternately, such a code might be used to alter program logic to affect software behavior -- whatever. The point here is that the CD KEY is a protection mechanism at the client end.
Like the rest of the /. majority, I too find the DCMA an example of knee-jerk legislation produced by the uninformed and easily lobbied. But in this, suppose you even agree with it...
According to Tim Jung's post the gripe expressed was that the bnetd.org server does not do CD KEY checking. My point -- it shouldn't have to.
It appears that the design of this product is such that invalid CD KEY prevents people from stealing battle.net server resources. Apparently, that is working; good for Blizzard.
As I understand it, people aren't forging false CD KEYs and inappropriately using battle.net server's resources -- doing so would make the case more plausible. Yet in this case, it would an individual service hijacking player who should be the focus of legal attention.
So what was designed and built by Blizzard is something that actually says "show me your receipt and I'll let you use our systems." Rather than forge CD KEYs to do something illegal like steal Blizzard's service, the user community has provided their own resources, built their own software, and opted not to check for a "receipt" to use those services. Technically, it's not duplicated Blizzard's server then either, since it's a subset.
True, this does let people try an approximation. However, it isn't the actual golden master -- by definition it's build with low confidence, and possibly broken with missing features. Blizzard wasn't passing out free copies of a production game, it passed out something else with the expectations of comments.
About the only real complaint Blizzard has is that they aren't getting as much beta feedback as they could had they expanded the beta base. However, if Blizzard's servers are locked out via a CD KEY except to only a few, then they weren't going after that data because they wouldn't be getting that data anyhow -- so there's no loss, other than potential they forgot to go after. That was a business mistake.
Blizzard's true error then is not designing the software to require something only their servers could provide.
However, I can tell you as a software consumer, if I purchase a product that depends on someone's website being up and around, I get jittery about them going out of business or no longer supporting it and wouldn't make the purchase.
I suspect if Blizzard kindly asked for it, anonymous beta testers would happily provide feedback. Feedback that would make the game much better, improving overall sales. Blizzard actually has a very positive opportunity here, if they can get past the shortsightedness.
This is his first time not a Blizzard beta-tester since WC2, but he loves his cracked version. I'm looking foward to it.
Alex
Look, I feel that Blizzard is being a bunch of heavy-handed jerks. However, when they are being heavy-handed jerks to a bunch of people that are inadvertantly helping assholes steal and pillage, I don't know where I stand.
Union strikes and corporate lock-outs normally make you feel for the underdogs. (Regardless of whether you are pro-labor or not, its easier to feel for them then the company).
However, when it is a baseball strike, it's hard to look at it as a labor dispute. When groups of millionaires fight, nobody is the underdog.
But what to I know, I should be put up against the wall and shot as a traitor to humanity. Try again when you stop living at your parent's house.
Alex
Actually, the linked article says they DID reverse engineer the protocol, and infact they have hacked one of the War3 Beta DLL's so that it does not wait for the encrypted response from Blizzard's Battle.net servers.
You just pegged the movement on my troll meter. Now I have to reset the blasted thing.
Bnetd is a circumvention device because it allows people to copy warcraft III and play it when they should not be able to. The wc3 beta will only work on battle.net so theoretically blizzard could keep people from distributing copies of the game to non beta testers. Since you can instead play on bnetd the copy protection is circumvented. Bnetd is not the source being copied, its the circumvention device, just as decss is not the actuall content to be copied, its the device used to circumvent copy protect.
er, at least I am assuming thats the case Blizzard is making.
- WeaselGod
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet turbines
Actually, even if this were true, it's not sufficient for the thing to be illegal under the DMCA. Assume that the only way to pirate warcraft 3 is to use bnetd. Okay...so what? The only way to pirate software is to use a computer, but they aren't illegal.
The criteria the DMCA specifies is that there be no significant legitimate use of the device used for circumvention. Bnetd does not meet that criteria, as it allows faster connections (for people living in, say, Mongolia), play without Internet access, play with a firewall, play without letting Blizzard build profiles of you, play without fear that Blizzard is sending personal information back to the server (as they have done in the past with some of their games on battle.net...and despite the backlash at the time, people keep buying the games). There are significant legitimate use of bnetd, so Blizzard is totally out of line in claiming the DMCA.
However, it doesn't matter. bnetd coders don't have the money or the desire to get involved in a lawsuit. The threat of a lawsuit will be enough to kill them.
It really sucks.
I wish it were easy to countersue for suing on totally idiotic grounds.
ok, let me just start this rant out by saying "damnit."
damnit.
damnit, damnit, damnit.
ok, now that we have that out of the way, let me explain those damnits. i worked VERY hard to be able to even SEE a copy of warcraft 3 beta. i convinced EVERY SINGLE ONE of my friends (ok, mabye that's not many, but shut up, i tried) to register for the warcraft beta. i, a linux enthusiest to what is an almost fanatical level, risked permanant taint on my soul just to reboot into my dustsy win98 partition in order to register MYSELF for the beta test.
did blizzard have any way to recognize this effort? no.
did they pick me for the beta test? no.
did they pick 5000 people, about 4940 of whom apparently took one look at the battle.net servers and ran screaming to the bnetd servers?
yes!
are some of those same beta testers, testers BLIZZARD hand-picked, responsible for the hacking of wc3, allowed by blizzards negligence, surely, that is now being blamed on the bnetd people?
yes. sorry people, i hate to point fingers, i know it's gonna get me modded down, but YES DAMNIT YES!
and now, ironicly (i'm sure i spelled that wrong) they're firing they're legal cannons at the only party involved who is NOT responsible for wc3 getting hacked and all the battle.net servers being unpopular.
blizzard, mabye you'd better start solving your own problems before you start blaming everyone else on them.
anyway, i had to let that one out. mod me how you will, but THINK about what's really going on here. someday i'd like to see a world where the justice system has the ability to keep large companies from preying on private persons however they please, simply because they have lots of money.
Kali had a license from Blizzard.
The answer to the question is simple: Because Blizzard
has more money than bnetd. As a result, in reference
to a popular www page, Blizzard gets to be the giver
and anybody they want gets to be the receiver.
I suggested that these results would follow from the assumption that the descriptive power of the base component is unspecified with respect to the system of base rules exclusive of the lexicon. This suggests that relational information may remedy and, at the same time, eliminate a corpus of utterance tokens upon which conformity has been defined by the paired utterance test. Presumably, this analysis of a formative as a pair of sets of features does not readily tolerate the extended c-command discussed in connection with (34). Analogously, the appearance of parasitic gaps in domains relatively inaccessible to ordinary extraction can be defined in such a way as to impose a descriptive fact. Thus the earlier discussion of deviance raises serious doubts about a general convention regarding the forms of the grammar. Nevertheless, the theory of syntactic features developed earlier is necessary to impose an interpretation on nondistinctness in the sense of distinctive feature theory. On the other hand, an important property of these three types of EC does not affect the structure of a stipulation to place the constructions into these various categories. So far, most of the methodological work in modern linguistics appears to correlate rather closely with the strong generative capacity of the theory. It may be, then, that this selectionally introduced contextual feature is rather different from irrelevant intervening contexts in selectional rules. From C1, it follows that the notion of level of grammaticalness is, apparently, determined by an important distinction in language use. It must be emphasized, once again, that the natural general principle that will subsume this case is not to be considered in determining the ultimate standard that determines the accuracy of any proposed grammar. A consequence of the approach just outlined is that a descriptively adequate grammar delimits problems of phonemic and morphological analysis. If the position of the trace in (99c) were only relatively inaccessible to movement, any associated supporting element is to be regarded as the traditional practice of grammarians. We have already seen that the speaker-hearer's linguistic intuition suffices to account for an abstract underlying order. To provide a constituent structure for T(Z,K), the systematic use of complex symbols cannot be arbitrary in the requirement that branching is not tolerated within the dominance scope of sllort's incredibly small penis.
If bnetd did not exist, then the hacked copies of WC3b would not be playable - bottom line
--online that is. And if RW-CD burners didn't exist, then WC3b couldn't be burned to them and passed around. And if phones didn't exist, people couldn't call up their friends and tell them how to get the w3cb...
bnetd wasn't created to hack wc3b, and that's not it's primary purpose or use, so your point is moot.
When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand.
boycott their games. promote... free distribution. universal is EVIL.
Remember, the point of the CD Key here is to phone home to their servers. You might call this spyware. And, oh lookie:
http://www.blizzard.com/privacy.shtml
Yes, they fail to disclose that the CD Key is transmitted and collected. Perhaps someone could have a chat with the FTC about this. You might call this fraud.
there has never been one copy of everquest warezed... in order to play you need to make an account using the cd-key on your CD.. sure the accounts get traded/stolen/given away, but never a copy.. every account has an associated cd purchased at some point... doesnt this solve the problem?
I think you have to use your imagination here to figure out how the DMCA could cover WC3.
I'm probably a bigger Bliz fan than most here, and I'm sure that's saying a lot. But I'm also a proponent of individual rights and identify the need for fewer, not more, copyright protections.
With that out of the way, it would be easy to interpret the "multiplayer version" of WC3 as your copy of the game plus Battle.net. If you consider them together as a system, then you are essentially replacing a part of the system with your own part of the system and thereby circumventing the copy protection.
If you assume that multiplayer WC3 does NOT work without Battle.net, then you can assume that the multiplayer version of the game was not intended to work without copy protection, since that was built into Battle.net. Replacing Battle.net removes copy protection.
I hate it, and I too am not a lawyer, but I think this argument can be sold to any judge.
mega
You are incorrect. The DMCA has a very specific definition of "circumvention device". Whether it meets your definition is irrelevant from a legal standpoint. For example, a computer is needed to pirate software (and would fall under your definition of a circumvention device), but its primary purpose is not circumvention, so it does not meet the DMCA definition of "circumvention device".
Blizzard is claiming a DMCA violation, so they must follow the DMCA circumvention device definition, which is given in the article. Bnetd, as pointed out by the article, does not meet the DMCA circumvention device defintion. It isn't even borderline.
So what Blizzard did is completely bogus from a legal standpoint. Even if every single developer used warforge to play warcraft 3 and personally advocated piracy, it still wouldn't matter. The DMCA is not violated, and what the bnetd people are doing is, under current laws, quite legal.
Seriously, this is a point that 75% of the people posting here seem to miss. The Warcraft3 hack & the modified bnetd that allows WC3 connections was not accomplished, condoned, or advertised by the bnetd group. In that sense it's like going after a fertilizer manufacturer for Timothy McVeigh's attack on Oaklahoma City. He took a legal product and used it for his own illegal purposes.
If the facts do not support you, pound the LAW. If the LAW does not support you, pound the Facts. If neither supports you, pound the table. If you pound the table hard enough, they put your opponent out of business.
All the talk about DMCA and fair use and everything else is a very good thing but i think missing a very important point, what happened to old fashioned right and wrong ?
I mean beacuse the bnetd developers developed an open source product and then someone els modified it then they and the owner of the copyright product they are using to circumvent it is in the wrong and the poor guys from bnetd are in the right.
The fact is blizzard spent the money, many millions of dollars in fact, to develop a product and they have a right to ensure their intellectual property, copyrights and investment are protected. They own the intellectual property to the product and thus they can and will take action to protect it.
The information on this case thus far presented doesnt seem to be asking for anything exceptional, and i dont see them going after the bnetd guys for every cent they have, so why the outcry?
This is a pitfall of open source, that a product you develop MAY be modified in a way that you did not intend and then used for a reason you did not forsee. This is fine and in most cases a good thing BUT like everything we do in life it has consequences and crying about it is not going to solve the issue - sitting down like proffesionals and talking to blizzard would be a good first step (one i suspect they are in the process of doing)
And my final comment is this - all of you out there riding the white horse of Anti DMCA and Anti Big Company - Tell me
is it right to take someone elses property and use it without paying ?
is it right to ignore licenses and other agreements because you 'dont care for them' ?
Is it right to damage a companies profits and endanger jobs for people ? people with families to feed ?
Is it right to defend anyone who comes along and finds a way around 'iritating things' like security?
If you answer yes to these then i thing you have bigger problems that you can ever imagine - youre abetting criminals and its hard to morally accept one form of it and reject another.
i was disgusted with open source over Skylarov and now i dont know what to think - it seems that the concept or right and wrong no longer means anything to so many of you.
I refuse to argue with Anonymous Cowards - if you want a discussion get an account....
Whilst its true that Free Speech is the most popular for Pro bono there is NO way in hell you could ever cast this as a free speech case, its not. The question will hinge on whether the software infringes blizzard copyrights or circumvents legal anti copying or access control measures to facilitate use of a hacked or copied version of the software. Getting around copy protection is not the spirit or the letter of free speech - its violation of copyright or theft of intellectual property (whatever your politcal beliefs the law is the law) if getting around
Theres no free speech angle in it - Blizzard spent the money to develop a product with a reasonable expectation of security, they provide the servers and bandwith for the BattleNet system and they have an expectation that people using this system will have paid for the software. To attempt to prevent piracy (albeit not very succesfully if Diablo and Starcraft are any example) they use a CD key system.
The BNETD developers designed software that circumventes this by 'ignoring' the cd key and thus it breaks the protection. (note it did this for older blizzard releases - thus blizzard could possibly prove they have a case WITHOUT WC3)
Whether the person who modified the system or not is reponsible the unfortunate fact if that bnetd as the original developer of the product will be the first ones toe get sued as their software allowed modification (a good lawyer can argue that it encouraged it) to circumvent the copy protection system and allow illegal use of the clients IP.
In short i wouldnt waste a cent of my money in a lawsuit if i was bnetd - i would find a way to modify my software to block blizzard products and pray that my software doesnt allow any circumvention of other companies copy protection (i bet it does).
I like bnetd, its interesting software, but it can and has been used to get around the protection on blizzards software and it is very easy to prove, ultimately Blizzard will win and wasting piles of money defending what many will see as the indefensible is plain insane.
PS i read tim's letter on this and i would point out that anyone here who gets worked up about the talk about lawyers being agressive and yelling has never dealt with lawyers before - this is what they get paid for.
Open source does not mean break any and all copyrights - and the downside of collective development is that when something like this happens the courts are going to go after the most identifiable person they can get their hands on - and in most cases that will be the original developer.
Want to avoid this happening to you ? get a lwayer or IP expert to review your license agreement to ensure you are covered. Sure it costs money but then again so does getting sued.
I refuse to argue with Anonymous Cowards - if you want a discussion get an account....
If blizzard has nothing else against it, why can't they just reach an agreement to not allow beta software to be supported on bnetd?
-DrkShadow
The war3b only includes online play
check your facts.
Warcraft III will have single player mode. Look at the faq. Now it's possible (I don't have the beta) that single player mode was crippled to only test online play -- do you have the beta?
Kinda obviates your whole rant, no?
But the rant was wrong to start with, if you'd read my post. Just because something can be used to aid unauthorized copying doesn't mean it's illegal. That's why, if you'd bothered to read any of the bnetd maling lists, you'd know that the Blizzard people never once mentioned wc3b. That's because they know this is not a valid reason for shutting down the sight.
So the "bottom line" for you is something that lawyers at blizzard must have forgotten to bring up, eh?
Could it be that they understand the legal issues a bit better than you do? That my previous post was right?
Why don't you learn about the issue at hand before spouting your irrelevent and misinformed two cents.. oh right, this is slashdot.
heh.
When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand.
Has anyone considered asking bnetd to add CD Key checking to their server? Unless they specifically want to let people play who don't have legit keys (and thus open themselves up to lawsuit), they shouldn't have much of a problem adding key check code to their source. Of course, it's open source so people can just remove CheckCDKey(); from the code before compiling :)
Just a thought, I would bet that most people using bnetd are using illegal copies though, and that's why there's so much bitching going on...
I think the real problem here is Vivendi/Blizzard's knee-jerk reaction to threaten to sue the bnetd folks into oblivion. Why not just pick up the phone and call them? Maybe talk it out, rather then fight it in the courts? This situation reminds me of the old saying, that if all you have is a hammer than every problem starts to look like a nail. Maybe if you have too many lawyers then every situation starts to look like a legal problem... If Vivendi/Blizzard had done even a little thinking beforehand, instead of whipping out the lawyers as their first salvo, they might have avoided the unfortunate publicity this controversy is generating. They might have reached an amicable solution for everyone. Now, that's a remote possibility at best.
As soon as you start by threatening with attorney's there's only two possible outcomes; you scare off your opposition and they concede or you guarantee that the only solution to the problem will come months or years later and that it will come from a judge's bench. In a way, using lawyers is like starting a war with atomic weapons: Great if you can win immediately, not so good if you can't. And purposeless if you could have gotten what you wanted with a few phone calls instead. The corporate world is increasingly using this tactic of threatening first and talking later and I can't help but believe that it will ultimately generate nothing but animosity and ill-will in the for them. When will someone wake up?
Truthfully, if you look at the issue impartially, I think that Vivendi/Blizzard do have some real concerns. They've invested several years and millions of dollars in developing their products and frankly, I doubt they really know what effect bnetd will have on the Blizzard franchise or their ability to make a profit from it. Let's face it, they're scared and rightfully so. Wouldn't you be in their place? It's hard to know what to do with an unknown and easy to desire to rollback the clock so you don't have to deal with yet another unknown variable. Instead of condemning Vivendi/Blizzard, we should convince them to sit down with the community and figure out together what to do with the emulation projects. Hell, there might even be some profit opportunities! Who knows? I can't say much for Vivendi but Blizzard has a reputation of working with their customers (anyone that was around for the WarCraft II days and Kali support will remember) and it's certainly a better approach then a protracted legal battle.
I can't help but think how ironic it is that Vivendi/Blizzard and their customers are about to enter a legal battle over this 'Battle.net' situation. Maybe we should all stop acting like the characters in the games and start acting like reasonable human beings.
Zug zug! And that's all I'm saying on the issue.
I think it is simply ludicrus to say that it should be taken down because it could be used for illegal purposes (like playing the warez game online). I COULD use a fork to kill someone, so should we go and remove all forks everywhere? No.
Maybe they are copyright infringers instead :) Anyway they are not being sued for breach of contract, so its a moot issue.
Blizzard really should have known this was coming. All of their games have huge buzz (as opposed to hype) surrounding them, and always with good reason. They knew there was a server out there that emulated their existing server, and they knew people would try to crack the wc3 beta to distribute it.
so.. why the hell did they not do anything about this technically? They could have easily changed part of the protocol, had wc3 use a version two of battle.net. Work _with_ bnetd to make sure it is not emulated within days. Perhaps use public key cryptography to distribute the key to unlock code present on the disk (or even perhaps code itself - they could have sent a single floppy per user as an unlock key if this is not feasable for size restrictions).
Even if they do not use such copy protections in the release, its still the old rule - if you do not allow consumers a way to get something they desire, they will find a way anyways. Being that they don't want this to happen (as it is a beta and not a release, they are testing instead of selling) - they should have taken extra precautions.
Amount of money the Bnetd volunteers have to fight this case: $0
If legal merit was more important than money to pay lawyers, then OJ would be in jail right now, wouldn't he?
If i downloaded a tetris clone, and in the EULA (required for installation) it claimed that by installing this software I:
A. Must driver no faster then 10mph, except in school zones, where i must drive at least 60mph.
B. Must name my first child 'Tim', even if its a girl
B. Can not use the software for more then 30 seconds, and if i find a bug in the software within those 30 seconds i must strip off all my clothes and run around the street five times yelling 'my pants are missing!'
These of course are unreasonable, and illegal in some cases, so i doubt a judge would find this EULA legal.
I think (not sure, IANAL) that EULA will be upheld if they are within reason, do not break other laws and relate to the software's fair use.
-Jon
this is my sig.
Read the guy's post for Christ's sake! You point that bnetd is illegal because it permits people to use a pirated copy of the beta is wrong. If the sole purpose of bnetd was to circumvent copyright protections, then it would be illegal under the DMCA. Since bnetd has significant non-infringing uses, it is not illegal under the DMCA. Just because the Warforge source fork (note: not bnetd) permitted people to play War3b, does not mean that bnetd, or even Warforge, was illegal. If you take nothing from this post, remember this: if a technology has significant non-infringing uses, then it is not illegal, even if it permits copyright infringement. Case in point: VCR's, personal computers, photocopy machines, the printing press, the internet, ftp, peer to peer file sharing (Napster's single-mindedness about music sharing did it in on this point), email, scanners, etc., etc., etc. BlackGriffen
DMCA "think! It ain't illegal yet!" (p-funk)
I am going to write to Blizzard and tell them that the DMCA is a bad law and people who use it are bad people.
Regarding property rights: no one has the right to block the curious mind from observing any part of material reality and sharing the results. No law prevents me from doing that, except for national secrets, insider trading information, and private property.
If I purchase a DVD player or an e-book, and I have that in my living room can it possibly be considered to be someone else's private property? Possession is 9/10ths of the law. It isn't a national secret, and it doesn't defraud anyone if I explore it and I share the results.
If someone pirates a DVD or an e-book, then they have committed a crime. If they used my discoveries to commit this crime, that is not my fault.
My idea is that buying and selling used software is a great way of punishing DMCA users.
Instead of renting or buying new videos and CDs, I will buy them used. It's a great deal. I watched someone walk out of Goodwill with 5 tapes full of X-Files episodes for cheap. Garage sales, e-bay, and used software stores and CD stores have what you want. The bad guys starve, the artist gets your fandom, and you get the goods.
I hope that the DMCA will be unmade or fixed soon, and I know they are working on it but until then these corporations are overstepping their bounds.
After reading the arguments, I firmly believe that this whole fiasco will come down to who owns the TCP/UDP packets coming out of one's computer. There was no real reverse engineering of a program here (decompiling, assembly dumps, etc). Just the communication of a client/server relationship over a network.
You merely bought the media, the actual content is licenced (buying a piece of paper with a copyrighted work printed on it doesn't mean you've bought the rights to that work)
But buying a piece of paper with a copyrighted work printed on it does grant you fair use rights and first sale rights in your copy of the work, and for computer software, such rights include the right to copy the software into RAM and to make backups. However, if a contract presented before the sale specifies that instead of buying a copy, you are perpetually renting one, then you are not "the owner of a copy," and none of this applies. Also, none of this applies outside the United States.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Because its their software..No one should have the right to try and emulate something without the express written (noterized) legal consent the party?
Um, that developers DO have that very right. And its not only in the software field. Imagine if auto parts makers couldn't legally reverse engineer a car battery for example. You'd have one brand of battery for your car, supplied only by the oem. They aren't violating copyrights b/c they haven't taken any graphics, text, code, etc from blizzard. It works remarkably similar to battle net, but its not the same, and probably does function differently under the hood.
Thats legal too. Take romance books for instance. They all have basically the same plot, only a few minor details are different. Thats perfectly legal, b/c copyright doesn't prevent it. Its the same way with software (think MS Money and Quicken).
Send the EFF a five dollar donation and an email stating that you wish it to be used in this case.
If sites can be slashdoted because of articles here can you imagine the financial power we can generate?
Five bucks is less than the cost of a movie and having the bnetd servers around provide me with a whole lot more entertainment.
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
Why was the parent modded-up? /. needs a feedback system where everyone can participate. A few jerk-offs modded that up. The masses of readers, who don't post, could mod it down if it was allowed. Instead, he and his friends cause trouble.
It does no good for Blizzard to have people playing on other servers when the reasons for the beta test are: A) To modify in game advantages/disadvantages between races and weed out bugs. B) To determine how to optimize the game so that it doesn't end up like Tribes 2 where you need a 1.4GHz Tbird w/ GeForce3ti500 to play it. C) To observe how much of a hit the game is going to administer to their already busy Battlenet servers, monitor traffic and decide if they need to increase/upgrade the amount of servers. D) To be able to close the beta test when they're finished. The whole point of the beta test is that they are trying to pinpoint and modify these problems in as close to a normal gaming environment as possible. If the game is run on outside servers where support is slim and no one is monitoring anything what good does it do Blizzard to have people testing the game at all? Any gamer will tell you that Blizzard is known for their finely tuned balancing of game play and units. They're asking for help from the outside community to help in doing so. They could be like 95% of the rest of the gaming community and just do it all in house but they are giving us a chance to take hand in the game that many of us have waited years for and perhaps help make the finished product better. These other servers allow unauthorized people to play multiplayer games online and while that's not what their intended for it's what it will be used for. In a way these rouge servers represent the Napster threat to Blizzard. How many of you - myself included - think that downloading a whole CD is wrong but still have quite a collection of burned CD's at home? It's kind of the same thing. It's giving people a way to circumvent their CD-Key detection and people will use that. I think that Bnetd handled this wrong. This whole thing might have been different if Bnetd had come up to Blizzard from the beginning and outlined why they wanted to setup their own servers and that it was indeed in Blizzard's own interests. Perhaps then an agreement might have been reached more easily. As it is, the game's progress is probably going to get lost in the midst of a legal battle that shouldn't need to happen.
That's all fine and well but what does it have to do with bnetd?
1) bnetd didn't support warcraft III
2) it's nice you care for Blizzard so much but what _legal_ basis do you have to support their actions?
3) bnetd didn't "wet up their own servers". it's a project that has been going since 1998 and waaaay predates warcraft III. besides, why should the developers have to get permission to do something that is perfectly legal? do you call blizzard up everytime you want to play starcraft just to make sure they are happy about it today?
And finally, Blizzard was not in the mood to cooperate. They sent a C&D notice without first contacting the developers because they didn't want to "work out a deal". They just wanted to silence the bnetd project and it seems they were sucessful!
The also send the WINS hostname of your computer and your Windows login name and the name that you entered when you registered the game. They even used to allow the server to ask for the value of any registry entry but they don't do that anymore.
Whoever modded this as offtopic is on crack.
"...crappy laws should be disobeyed."
This as of itself is a clever rule. Crappy laws SHOULD be disobeyed, that's why I smoke marijuana.
However, this only applies to sensible people, really. Think if every Tom, Dick and Harry started disobeying laws he didn't like? We'd have complete anarchy.
Hey, it don't make sense that I'm not allowed to take that guy's car! He's got truckloads of money and I'm broke!
Heh, see what I mean?
The bnetd project does NOT modify clients. I have repeated this a hundred times but people just don't seem to listen.
It is a "server". These are programs that run on a thing called a computer and listen for things called clients.
It has no access to modify the client!
In fact the client you speak of (Warcraft III beta) refuses to connect to bnetd and bnetd doesn't understand some of the packets that it sends.
It just won't work!
The people that made it work by patching bnetd to ignore passwords and paching the client to not expect a server validation response were the Warforge team. They have NOTHING to do with the bnetd team except that they used their code as a starting point.
It has everything to do with bnetd when they're allowing people to circumvent their CD-Key detection thereby letting pirated copies of their game be played illegally. While they may not be intending for that to happen they are doing nothing to insure that it does not.
They should not go after bnetd... after all, many of the people who use bnetd are people who bought the software. They should go after the people who pirate the software instead. I mean, its not bnetd's fault is it? It just gives extra functionality. They should go to the root of the problem, instead of finding ways to degrade the end product for their customers. - why do laws allow them to prosecute something that improves the functionality of the software for their customers, instead of making them go after the real culprits?
"Kudos to whoever figured that one byte out..."
:-)
Ummm, this has been going on since the days of the Apple ][ when I, along with a zillion others, boottraced code to find out what was going on.
People do this to get around dongles too...
Just trace the code, find out where it performs the check and replace the "If (code XYZ) or (code = bad)) then die with "PIRATE SCUM!" with a "jmp valid code received"...
Well, that's it in pseudocode anyway... insert your favorite assembler language there... Assembler rocks!
Disassemblers, decompilers, they're all your friends...
And remember: so long as the computer can execute the code, copy protection CAN'T work.
Uh, no. Sorry sir, but you are a hypocrite.
Please find out where I said bnetd was illegal.
Please find me saying that bnetds purpose was to circumvent copyright protections.
You are a troll, bad at it, and really should follow your own advice on reading peoples posts. I'm not ignorant, I'm informed. Sad you didn't see the difference. You guys are just pissed because I'm saying their is a logical reason for Blizzard's actions -- while not condoning them.
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
Yeah, I can see why everyone would hate that evil Blizzard. They spend mega $$$ on developing new software and everyone wants to play the beta for free on a GPL server. Can't you fools see that every time you STEAL (yes STEAL) something from someone and claim it is your right to have it you just strengthen position of those who want to be able to own everything. Why the hell should Blizzard develop new software if 75% of the people using it don't pay. This communist "give it to the people" attitude doesn't work since the people you don't want to have power end up with everything anyways.
step 1)
Ditch battle.net as a long term strategic pay per play style online forum
step 2)
release a server (possibly based on bnetd?) with the WC3 beta so that you dont *have* to use battle.net as a server for your online games. however the server will use authentication services on battle.net for any non lan (different ip subnet?) games.
this removes the following problems
1 - having to use battle.net to play wc3.
2 - people complaning about the quality of battle.net
3 - people using hacked bnetd servers to steal cd keys
4 - bnetd servers possibly breaking the DMCA
5 - hacked wc3 clients using servers that dont authenticate with battle.net
it all comes down to whether vivendi are planning on using battle.net as a strategic money making platform in the future.
Matt D
This is complete insanity. If Blizzard was really so concerned that their beta on their official server is under-used, making real testing too difficult, they should do what other companies like Microsoft do. Sell the beta openly, for a nominal fee! Make it expire after a certain amount of time, so people still end up having to buy the full version of the game after a few months if they want to keep playing it.
If anyone can order the beta online, for a few bucks to cover postage and handling (and maybe a token amount of profit like $1.00), plenty of people will do so and use it with whatever network it defaults to running on.
I'm going to take the 50 bucks or so I would have spent on Warcraft 3, and donate it to EFF specifically for fighting Blizzard.
I also find it really depressing that Blizzard have been unable to find a group of 5000 people to test, whom they have trusted with their beta versions and who have no doubt signed all sorts of non-disclosure agreements, but who are willing to abide by that and not release the games to warez sites.
Do you have any idea what you're asking??? The US Government spends weeks (it used to be months) and $10-100K per person doing background checks on people to establish that a person can be trusted with confidential information, and after all that we still have people giving secrets away! So you're suggesting that Blizzard spend $10K * 5000 screening the volunteers to ensure that they aren't part of a warez ring? Oh, wait, that doesn't count the rejection rate, make that $10K * (5K + $unknown_number_of_disqualified_applicants). Let's not even talk about the delay in time-to-market that they would take while doing the background checks.
Yes, it's sad, but unless Blizzard is willing to take active steps to ensure that the volunteers are trustworthy they have to accept the fact that a certain number of copies of every Beta release will go directly to the crackers and show up on warez sites in less than a day. I'm sure that Blizzard is aware of this, and has made the right financial decision - let the crackers have it and save the money for more important things.
Travel the Galaxy! Meet fascinating life forms...
The industrial world has a thing called patents, where the inventor of a device is entitled a royalty for a period of time from any manufacturer who uses his invention in a product. That way the inventor is compensated for putting in years of research and development of an idea, and has incentive to keep coming up with new ones.
... emulate or redirect the communication protocols used by Blizzard in the network feature of the Program, through protocol emulation, ... for any purpose including, but not limited to network play over the Internet". There's also a question of whether they are even bound by the agreement, and if they are in violation, whether they are liable for anything other than their right to use the Program. I certainly don't think they're in violation of any copyright or patent.
Copyright doesn't prevent you from copying a general idea, but from copying the exact text, artwork, or sound of a copyrighted material. That way, a writer/artist/musicial can properly be compensated for his or her creative work.
Software tends to fall a little into both realms. The images (of sufficient detail) and storyline text (of sufficient length) definitely fall into the copyright category. The algorithms used to drive a game (if original and innovative) fall into the patent category. Elements of the game that are in general use everywhere or can be derived from common knowledge shouldn't fall into either category (i.e., "OK"/"Cancel" buttons).
How does any of this relate to software emulation? It doesn't. An emulator is generally written as a program that performs the same job as another program, producing identical output or response to a given input, but the means by which is does that job is developed independently. If the emulator copied any code or data from the original program, then it would be a clear violation of any patent or copyright, which is why developers of emulators must take care never to look at the code for the program they're emulating.
I think the main concern in bnet's case is whether they are violating Blizzard's EULA, paragraph 3.C.iii., which states (in part): "you are not entitled to
Besides' I prefer to be moderated by those who care (as on kuro5hin.org), not by random "lottery winners". And I prefer to moderate when I want to. If only they had fewer stories about jews and arabs, I would leave slashdot.
First of all, I've been very vocal about the bnetd issues in Blizzard's Warcraft 3 beta forum. Unfotunatly anything said in support of bnetd or against Blizzard was promptly deleted. Last night I was permenently banned from the forum.
Anyway, the comment I have is that Blizzard public betas are going to have to end. At the moment I type this there are 8004 users in 3255 games on 28 public servers on bnetd. And that's just public servers. Now I intend to buy Warcraft 3 when it comes out, but a lot of people are saying that they won't, because they can just get it for free. Someone posted a good comment in the Warcraft 3 forum last night (promply deleted of course), "If Blizzard dosn't want people pirating Warcraft 3, why do they release the game to 5000 random people, 4 months before its going to come out and then proceed to release public patches?" This is a good point and it brings me to mine, Blizzard will have to end its public betas. It is very hard for most people to resist a nearly complete version of a game they have wanted for years 4 months early and free. A lot of people are going to be pirating this game (check out #warcraft 3 on IRC), and it will get worse with each successive game they release. I have supported public betas in the past, they are great for balance issues and bug finding, but I believe that if they continue, it could really start to hurt profits. Now I'm sure some of you are saying, "Well then people will just pirate the game when it comes out", and they will, but when its a beta they have no choice, they can't buy it if they want to, and this may push a lot of casual computer users over the edge, into the world of piracy. I'm sorry Blizzard but this is the future and you can't stop it, taking down bnetd was fine, but its still be distributed quite a lot over peer to peer programs and mirrors, you are going to have to do more internal testing and end the public betas.
Somehow i doubt the terms of the EULA are enforcable. Reverse engeneering of the protocol would be allowed. I don't think that just b/c its in the agreement that means it is legal.
And if they are, then perhas they have lost the ability to use the program (i imagine only the beta, since i don't think that you can say not only this item, but any similar ones you buy from us).
If Blizzard does not change its position, I will also get a pirated copy of WC3 since I love Blizzard games and take my 50$ and give it to EFF. I am 100% in favor of bnetd and I don't think it is the pivot of game pirating. If people are to get a pirated copy anyways and that you can play the game in peer-to-peer, it won't change anything if bnetd is there or not.
Don't feed the trolls! It just encourages them.