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Blizzard/Vivendi Files Suit Against Bnetd Project

Posted by michael on from the no-good-deed-unpunished dept.

Blizzard's crack legal team, who has earlier tried to rush Bnetd's base, is now busy raining down ice shards on it. Blizzard has filed a lawsuit against Bnetd, listing a variety of causes of action, but read on because the important thing here is that Blizzard is not alleging a DMCA violation, only "traditional" copyright and trademark law violations.

Brief history: Blizzard makes a DMCA complaint against Bnetd, resulting in the temporary downing of the Bnetd website and the Bnetd server code no longer being available for download. EFF decides to represent Bnetd, and they exchange a few letters back and forth. On Friday, Blizzard files suit.

The most interesting thing about the legal claim is that they make no claims under the DMCA. You should recall the distinction between regular copyright law (which prohibits making copies of original works of authorship) and the DMCA (which prohibits making, using or distributing devices intended to circumvent anti-copying protection measures on copyrighted works). Even though Blizzard claimed in their letters that the fact that the Bnetd server doesn't implement CD-checking (which is impossible for them, since it's a secret algorithm known only to Blizzard) makes it a DMCA-violating circumvention device, they didn't raise the claim in the complaint they filed with the court.

Blizzard claims:

  • that Bnetd copied code from Blizzard and incorporated it into Bnetd (how this was accomplished isn't stated; since Blizzard does not make their source code available, presumably the Bnetd people would have to break into Blizzard headquarters).
  • that Bnetd posted screenshots of Blizzard games to their website (this should be deemed fair use by the courts).
  • that Bnetd is engaging in an unauthorized "public performance" of Blizzard's copyrighted material by running a Bnetd server. At least, that's how I parse paragraph 28. Perhaps they're instead making a claim about something that was posted on the Bnetd website, but paras. 28 and 30 read together imply that Blizzard is arguing that anyone who makes software to interoperate with other software over the internet is making a public performance. This would allow Microsoft to shut down anyone who made .NET software, for example, because it will invariably involve a lot of transmission of information that Microsoft can claim is copyrighted.
  • that Bnetd infringes on Blizzard's trademark (an identifier for goods or services that are sold) for "BATTLE.NET" by calling their software "Bnetd", because, after all, "Bnetd" is essentially identical to "BATTLE.NET" (coming next: the makers of the elm email client sue the makers of pine, emacs sues eine [who sues zwei], Unix sues GNU... chaos). That is, people who use Bnetd may be confused because the name is so similar to Battle.net that they think they are actually using a Blizzard product.

People who are offended at Blizzard attacking its fans and customers may want to consider Warlords Battlecry 1 and 2 instead of Warcraft 3. The original Battlecry is selling for $10 these days and is quite good.

3 of 505 comments (clear)

  1. Hey kids by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Flamebait

    Please ignore this article! Slashdot wholly endorses Blizzard and Vivendi/DMCA. Move along, nothing to see here.

    Note to blizzard: time to send more free shit to Slashdot to keep the good reviews up!

  2. Howsabout an objective news post,? by jerkychew · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    Regardless of your opinion of Blizzard and their actions, I really don't appreciate the negative, biased tone of this article. Not only do you slam every one of Blizzard's claims, but you go on to suggest purchasing different (non-Win2K compliant) software because of Bungie's behavoir.

    A commentary is one thing. A news article is quite another. I think a much better practice would have been to post the news article in a non-biased form first, and then follow up with your opinions in the comments section. At least that way, myself and the rest of the unwashed masses would be able to form our own opinions first, rather than having it shoved down our throats.

    Posting in the manner that you did only takes away from Slashdot's credibility as a news source, and makes it look like every other "big-companies-is-bad!" website out there.

  3. Re:Well. . . . by daoine · · Score: 3, Flamebait
    IF A LOT OF KIDDIES DID NOT USE IT TO PLAY THEIR PIRATED VERSIONS OF BLIZZARD GAMES

    Thank you.

    I'm not particularly thrilled that Blizzard is attacking bnetd with the cadre of ninja attack lawyers, but what are their other options? They have found a 'single source' which happens to contain an enormous number users who pirated games. They have every right to go after those who did pirate software.

    And, like Metallica did through Napster, they're going for the one thing that all said pirates have in common. Thousands of people doing the same wrong thing doesn't make it necessarily right. It should make people re-examine the definition of wrong and right, but it doesn't make it right by default.

    I'm not so angry at Blizzard as I am the people who are encouraging them to do this. If Blizzard believed that 95% of all players on bnetd actually owned a legit copy, do you think they'd be going after them? Doubtful -- it would destroy their customer base. The people they are going after aren't their customers to begin with...