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How bnetd Developers Reverse Engineered Battle.net
battlebot writes: "O'Reilly's ONlamp.com is running an interview with the bnetd developers that goes into great detail about how exactly they reverse-engineered Battle.net. This is by the same guy who wrote the recent Salon article, though is far more technical. They talk a little bit about their legal troubles too, and even sheepishly admit that perhaps talking to a lawyer earlier in the process would have been a good idea. Has this project been successfully squashed?"
Thing is, anyone with any kind of reasonable knowledge of law, patents, and copyright knows that the Blizzard lawsuit is, to be blunt, bullshit.
Blizzard has no chance, or interest, in winning on the merits of their case. They know that open source developers have limited resources and are unlikely to mount a decent legal defense. So why not sue? It's not a legal decision so much as a strategic one: given the chance to squash potential future competitors for free, why not?
It's a smart move on Blizzard's part. American IP laws favor corporations to such an incredibly laughable degree, it's amazing that Disney isn't suing everyone who uses a wheel (Steamboat Willie, 1928, and anyone who claims to have invented it before then had better have a notaraized motion picture).
Bottom line: disgusting on the USPTO's part, dispicable on Blizzard's part, par for the course for the good old USA. Oh, wait, this is *good* for consumers. I must have missed that edict somehow.
-b
Unless it is specifically designated by congress, they don't own any "intellectual property". Just because some bastardized beauracratic bastion of unconstitutionality says they own it does not make it so. The constitution dictates the conditions one may obtain "intellectual property," those conditions have not been met so Blizzard owns nothing. If they try to shut bnet down then perhaps the bnet'rs should use one of their other rights, the one to bear arms, to defeat the tyrants that would seek to breach the contract that is the constitution. Live free or die.
If we assume for the moment that they had thought of consulting an attorney when they first embarked on this project, would it have made a difference? I mean, seeing as the DMCA didn't actually exist in '98, how could they have made some plan to defend themselves against prosecution under it. As for the straight up copyright issues, it's total hogwash, but at least they could have gotten the lawyerly advice of, "well they haven't got jack on you, but can you afford to fight it?"
I was thinking about this earlier, and the really frustrating thing is how much of computer related tinkering seems to need to be run by a lawyer. I mean if you have a hobby like building kit cars, or constructing furniture, you have no need for attorneys. But if you want to get deeply involved in tinkering with software, etc, you suddenly need a law degree. Companies talk a lot about the damage that piracy has on the software economy, but I have to wonder how much more damage has been caused by the chilling effect on independent developers by this legal morass we call intellectual property.
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What is easier to sue, a well defined group with names and a good site that explains what they are doing; or a group that works over irc, never uses their real names, might not even have distributed their data over their own computers, and have a website that says nothing of their work (and just distributes it).
I mean, its a hell of a lot easier suing something somewhat established, which is what bnetd was. WarForge isn't exactly well established, they got a group, but who really knows who they really are? I can bet that blizzard doesn't know, and why find out when you can set an example with the established group?
This entire thing was enough to scare the shit out of the several other groups working on warcraft3 support (warforge isn't the only one). This is the main reason why warcraft3 bnetd modified servers are not in distribution (binary or source). Just the client side crack for the exe is given out. (This also is the reason for the insanely low amount of bnetd war3 servers)
I fully support the bnetd ideal. That is, supplying a different server then the blizzard one. You would be a lot less likely to find n00bs so to speak there. However.... I get sick of paying for the thousands of warez users that download the iso or image, then burn to cd, then are able to play fully on bnetd.
Unfortunately, blizzard's key remains the copy protection stopping that, and bnetd weren't able to support that at all. So it's back to the beginning.
Maybe if blizz could implement a central cd key verification server ie Half-Life's WON servers, it would be more beneficial. But still, the whole situation sucks. Blizzard aren't that bad, its more likely vivendi or just a complete miscommunication hogwash.
Though i have heard, that blizzard must prosecute now, or they aren't able to prosecute pirates/cd-key removal later on. This true?
Think nothing is impossible? Try slamming a revolving door.
Yeah lets sue an IRC channel. That will work!
Seriously, the only thing that they can do is ask for the closure of war3pub.net. Though there on very shaky public support for that if that website is only distributing the beta. If anyone anywhere starts distributing the War 3 full game when its out, Blizzard/Vivendi WILL hunt them out and sue the living death out of them. Of this i have no doubt.
Think nothing is impossible? Try slamming a revolving door.
Its getting to the point where the open source movement will move further and further underground. All the benefits of the open source would still remain if the lead developers remained anonymous (except maybe for ego purposes). Nobody ever has, and probably won't challenge the majority of open source software, but why risk it anymore. Let the software companies and the movie industry waste a large sum of money trying to silence the small insignificant factions. If those factions ever do rise to power and the power bases lose their market as a result, then in time, most of this won't even matter.
Take Microsoft and the northwest schools. It is not just ONE school district talking about mass migration here. If they do it, and pull it off, other districts will notice. They'll see that it actually CAN be done. They'll see that there really IS support available, and they'll see that it IS saving a lot of money, and they can safely tell the BSA to fuck off. They'll switch too. One at a time, one after another. Microsoft will lose them all. Now you have a whole bunch of high school students, ALL of them trained on linux or whatever open source suite appealed to the districts. They go off to college. You will now see the same movement there. And once that wave is done sweeping through, the corporate world is next. It really COULD start with one school district, and in 10 years, Microsoft will have completely lost their grip on the market, never to regain it.
The point is, after a few years of this, everyone will be using open source software to some degree. People will EXPECT software to be free. And when Blizzard, or the movie industry or anyone comes along and sends out letters saying "you can't use that software" a whole lot of regular non-geek people will turn around and say "up yours!" to the respective finger pointer and tell them where they can shove it and take their money elsewhere.
The music industry is already learning the hard way on this. They had their chance. They could have completely cornered the online market for years had they put in place a simple, inexpensive, non-intrusive music distribution system YEARS ago when they had the chance. But no, they were so concerned about rampant piracy and how it might affect their bottom line, they instead played stupid legal games to attempt to stifle the music trading. And for all the court cases, and all the laws that passed, trading has increased to massive proportions. They sue napster into the ground, 10 others pop up to take its place, only non-centralized and no way to easily shut them down. Who do you go after now? the programmers??
Well, you can't if you don't know who they are.
So undergound all this even potentially murky legal stuff. Wait a few years. All those who would threaten you will be overcome by the wave, and afterwards, they wouldn't dare.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
Since it isn't mentioned in the article, the reason the BNETD team don't have CD-KEY checking is because they don't have the algorithim that is used by Blizzard... If they did then everyone could see the source code to make perfect Blizzard CD-Keys and anyone could play on Battle-Net without buying the game.
It's not the fault of Blizzard or of the BNETD team that they don't have CD-Key checking. It a no win situation either way.
Normal people worry me!
That was my first reaction too. But after giving it some additional thought, I have come up with a reason the Blizzard/Vivendi legal team might be acting with more insight than it appears to at first blush.
There are several theories as to why Blizzard is taking action now. Possible movement of battle.net to a subscription service. Blizzard's announced future offering of World of Warcraft, certainly to be a subscription service. And the new release Warcraft III which is supported by the bnetd fork called Warforge. And there's the key. Warforge is a fork. A spinoff. Further development of a project that has been an annoyance to Blizzard since 1998.
If Blizzard managed to kill Warforge, what is to stop another group from retracing those footsteps and modifying bnetd again? What about fans who decide they don't wish to continue paying a subscription to World of Warcraft and use bnetd as a basis for a new, freely available alternative? What if battle.net goes pay-to-play and private and public bnetd servers offer a much more attractive alternative?
The fact is that bnetd makes a very sensible target to head off all these possible forks. And once the legal groundwork is laid in killing bnetd, it would be trivial to send out cease-and-desist letters to those whose work is based on bnetd.
Sure. It will be almost impossible to wipe bnetd off the face of the net. But development is going to slow down considerably if bnetd source code is just as illegal as a warez copy of Warcraft III.
To implement checking, they need blizzard's cd-key system. And a company giving their cd-key algorithm to an open-source project is laughable, to say the least.
Think nothing is impossible? Try slamming a revolving door.
Don't try to take control from Blizzard by letting people use their client with your server. Blizzard sees it necessary for keeping their business to have that control exclusive to them, and you may not like it, or agree with it, but you need to respect it. Especially if you decide to play their games. This isn't an operating system we're talking about. Where an operating system is just a middleman, something to build upon, there is (usually) nothing more to a game than itself. You take it as it is, or not at all. Some game developers choose to give the user further liberties through game editors and programming interfaces, and that's great, but those liberties should be given, not taken by force.
I'm sure this is going to be a very unpopular opinion with many of you, all I'm asking for is if you disagree with me, explain why instead of flaming, so that I can take your opinion seriously.
Thanks, Nir
-- Classism is the new racism