Blizzard Amends Complaint ... Again

Patersmith writes "From bnetd.org: Blizzard has amended their compliant again, adding what looks like possible DMCA claims, and adding Rob Crittenden, Wi Yang, and others as defendants. Originally it was thought that the courts would refuse to allow them to add anymore people to the lawsuit since Blizzard/Vivendi missed one of their serving deadlines, but the courts allowed them an exception to add additional defendants. Click here for the full scoop."

Comments

Very Important Lawsuit

[bwt]

Folks this is a very important lawsuit. Bnetd is challenging BOTH the enforcability of "no reverse engineering" clauses AND the constitutionality of the DMCA on First Amendment grounds. Moreover, this lawsuit is happening in Missouri District Court, which is in the 8th Circuit, rather than the 2nd, which is known for its pro-copyright holder judicial activism (as we saw).

I hope that this case will get the attention it deserves here on slashdot.

Re:Very Important Lawsuit

[John Hasler]

It might get more attention if the Slashdot story provided a link to a summary of the case. Odd as it may seem, there _are_ Slashdot readers who don't know who Blizzard and Bnetd are or why the are in court.

Re:Very Important Lawsuit

[bwt]

Here is the EFF's blurb about the background of the case.

Here is the full document archive. In particular the counterclaims document there is very interesting (skip over all the item-by-item responses -- the juicy stuff is at the end).

Re:Very Important Lawsuit

[Alsee]

I know Blizzard is a game company. Who's BNETD?

The parent poser was an idiot, that is a perfectly reasonable question. The only reason I ever heard of BNETD was for reading one or two stories here on slashdot.

In a nutshell BNETD is creating a program that works just like the Battlenet servers. There are several perfectly good and legal uses for their program. If anyone doubts that I'm sure the BNETD site can give more and better justifacations then I can.

Creating a program to be compatile with another program has a long and important history, and has been upheld as perfectly legal. If BNETD loses it could cause tremendous damage to software development. For one thing it could entrench the Microsoft monopoly much further.

One of the reasons Blizzard is trying to shutdown BNETD is that Battlenet verifies the CD key copyprotection, so some people could play unlicenced copies of games using BNETD. The thing is that Blizzard has aready shot themselves in the foot on this issue. The people making BNETD LIKE Blizzard games, and therefore they like Blizzard-the-company. They wanted to design BNETD to enforce the CD key protection to block illegal copies of games, but Blizzard blocked them.

-

stalling tactics

[Shymon]

maybe if they confuse people enough they'll think they are guilty of something....even if they don't exactly know what

This case could have a huge impact.

[Alsee]

IANAL

Defense's response.

If defendants win the 5th Affirmative Defence then Blizzard would lose it's relevant copyrights. Sounds like this would effectively put some of their stuff into the public domain.

It looks like winning on the 14th Affirmative Defence would strike down part of the DMCA as unconstitutional. This is also counterclaim 3.

Winning counterclaim 4 would declare EULA's worthless.

On the other hand if if Blizzard wins it is a major threat to reverse engineering, emulation, interoperability, and fair-use.

-