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EFF Takes Bnetd Case
An anonymous reader sent in: "As reported three previous times, Blizzard is attempting to squash the Battle.net emulator and open source bnetd project. The EFF has taken the case. Read the press release. LawMeme also has a satiric fable."
Incorrect.
As a paying customer, I demand value and satisfaction from my Blizzard software like Warcraft and Diablo2.
Since the Blizzard server is:
- SLOOOOW
- Unreliable
- Hacked all to hell
- VERY buggy
I choose to have the ability to play my ALREADY PURCHASED SOFTWARE on a server of my choice. Just because Blizzard would prefer I didnt doesnt mean jack.
Your argument that Bnetd is punishing Blizzard for creating value is totally incorrect.
It punishes Blizzard for NOT creating value on the server side.
I rewarded them for their client side software. What I choose to connect to is *MY CHOICE*.
And its entirely legal too..
GPL'd web-based tradewars themed space game
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Oh, please. Do you people NOT understand that reverse engineering is legal, and completely allowed. Do you also not understand that a free capitalist society WITHOUT the ability to reverse engineer would be a complete disaster? You wouldn't have two chipmakers competing in the x86 market, you wouldn't have any open source software whatsoever, not to mention that many scientific projects would be down the drain as well!
Blizzard sells games - people BUY games. Bnetd is not challenging the sale of those games - it's allowing people to play the games as they were intended - on a Battle.net server. Blizzard cannot, should not, and absolutely will not ever be able to say "oh, and you can only play these games on OUR server at Battle.net, and if you try to play them anywhere else, that's illegal."
bnetd is creating a free alternative to a necessary extra piece of 'hardware' to use the game to its full value. This is IDENTICAL to the Bleem/Connectix case. Completely identical. In that case, they created a free implementation of a Sony PlayStation on a computer, and the courts agreed "well, yes, if people BUY the games, they can attempt to PLAY them on whatever they want." If you try to say that bnetd is wrong, then by extension WINE is wrong, Bleem is wrong, hell, VMware is wrong. But they're not. Why? Because reverse engineering is legal, and critical, for any healthy economy.
Blizzard makes money off of games. In fact, Battle.net earns them no value, no reward in your own terminology. God. Blizzard, and everyone else, are just plain stupid here - let bnetd run, and Blizzard makes MORE money, for crying out loud. How the heck can it be bad to offer people MORE ways to play a game you're selling?!?
The point of this whole thing is that legally the bnetd project has the right to reverse engineer Battle.net. It says so in the DMCA. The fact their code does not check CD keys is trivial to this matter because bnetd itself was not created to bypass copy protection. Its a piece of standalone software. Its not a crack/hack file that patches anything in the client and allows it to bypass Battle.net key checking.
Even if you agree with Blizzards point that the bnetd project does in some way promote piracy, unless you are a complete fool, you should not agree that the DMCA applies to this case. Blizzard is grasping at best.
Its everyone's right as a consumer to fight this even if you agree with Blizzard. This is everyone's chace to stop complaining about the DMCA and actually do something. This will determine if software companies have the right to not only tell you how, when, and where you will utilize their products after your purchase them but also gives them the right to prosecute you if you don't. If Blizzards case holds up, it will open the door for many many more useful emulation projects to be shut down.