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EFF Continues Fight On Blizzard Vs. Bnetd Case
Thanks to an anonymous reader for pointing to a Boing Boing post discussing the continuing conflict between Blizzard Software and the makers of bnetd, linking to the latest EFF-authored court documents (PDF) in a continuing legal battle over "the free bnetd software that emulates Blizzard's free Battle.net gaming service." Boing Boing argues of the EFF's new documents: "The prose here positively sings, and is as good a treatise on fair-use reverse engineering as you could hope to read", going on to quote their argument that "...the dissimilarity between the 'BATTLE.NET' and 'bnetd project' marks alone warrants summary judgment for the Defendants on Blizzard's Count III. Also weighing heavily in Defendants' favor is the fact that Blizzard has still failed to come forward with any admissible evidence of actual customer confusion." We've previously covered this long-running legal battle on several occasions. In related news, other readers point out a $1.2 million bequest to the EFF from the estate of Leonard Zubkoff "to establish the EFF Endowment Fund for Digital Civil Liberties."
Blizzard has also recently issues a cease and desists letter, backed by DMCA threat to gotwow.net. Read the forum post here
Well, today I received an email from Blizzard. You may read it below, long story short, all files and the spell db will be taken down and will not be hosted on this server anymore. Here is the content of the email
I really hate Dan Patrick.
Excuse me? We never fight the fight on the side that looks to lose?
My god, I wish that were true. Do you know nothing about the EFF? I guess I should be thrilled that our PR is so good that some people remember only our victories. Obviously we don't like to trumpet our losses, but I am still baffled by this charge. We spent near a million dollars -- an amount equivalent to our annual budget just a few years ago -- losing the 2600 DeCSS case, a very hard case which we took on because it had to be fought, and a case based on the same principles of defending reverse engineering that are deemed unimportant by the above "insightful" posting.
I will have to relay that "we always" win sentiment down to the lawyers in the trenches. It will cheer them up, at least until they stop laughing.
Plus don't get the idea that the EFF has anything remotely close to deep pockets. Quite the reverse. As you may have missed in the note, the donation was put into an ENDOWMENT. This means it will be invested, and the earnings from the investment can be used to fund our battles. The million dollar donation is extremely generous, and I hope that others might remember us in their wills (or even better, beforehand) in this way, but it is an endowment, not operating money to give us deep pockets.
Please, actually learn about the EFF and its history before making ludicrous claims like these.
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
Cory doesn't hide his position, but he's not a leader, he's our online outreach coordinator, a sort of technological evangelist and analyst who studies and writes and slogs around to do hard work representing the EFF in important places.
But he's also one of the most respected web journalists, and if he writes that he really likes a brief, I would wager that he really means it.
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
Taken from a Cease and Desist issued by them
Recently, we have received an increasing amount of feedback from our customers in regard to the probable copyright infringement of Diablo, Diablo II, Starcraft, Warcraft II: Battle.net Edition, Warcraft III and World of Warcraft products (each, a "Program") on the Internet. We here at Blizzard share the concerns that many gamers are voicing. In this regard, we have contacted one of your users in connection with the aforementioned site and the infringement of Blizzard intellectual property. Please note that all title, ownership, and intellectual property rights in and to each Program and any and all copies thereof (including, but not limited to, any titles, computer code, objects, characters, character names, stories, dialog, catch phrases, locations, artwork, animations, sounds, musical compositions, audio-visual effects, methods of operation
Seemingly Blizzard now claims the rights to the entire RTS genre
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and I'm pretty sure that some form of copy protection wasn't on their list of future features, either.
Wrong -- the actually contacted blizzard and asked how they could incorporate it into bnetd. They were first ignored, then later hit with cease and desist, and then DCMA and then here we are today. But they actually made the effort to make the CD Key check work
Okay, for starters - bnetd said they would implement the cd-key check system Blizzard uses on battle.net. Blizzard in fact agreed to it at one point, then retracted and filed suit.
The CD-Key check on battle.net is NOT Blizzard's primary form of anti-piracy. Hell, it's not even a good one. CD-Key gen's are available for every Blizzard title. EVERY title. (Well, all those that require a key anyway.)
All can be found with little effort, navigating the right hack sites. In fact, many people trade them off for items in games.
Another problem with calling Blizzard's CD-Key check their main anti-piracy protection is the fact that SP, LAN, and TCP/IP play do _NOT_ have any sort of CD-Key authentication.
In fact, the MAIN anti-piracy measure Blizzard has taken is unquestionably the initial CD-Key check required during the installation of the product.
The battle.net CD-Key check feature merely ensures more then one person isn't using the same key on the same service at the same time. Hardly a main piracy protection scheme. Though, it's a good and valuable one.
However, if it were so important that a product like bnetd would harm their business - it would suffice to say they would not have allowed TCP/IP, LAN, and SP without the same CD-Key check.
Now, take notice to what you are saying. According to you, a company [such as Blizzard], could effectively hold a monopoly over a service by merely adding a copyright protection feature to their own proprietary service - such as a CD-Key check.
The way they do it is simple. Make product, product can use online service. Make online service do a CD-Key check that ONLY producer can do.
BANG, no one can offer a competing service.
The thing that probably motivated Blizzard to take action on this wasn't the copyright violation per se...it was the fact that someone had leaked the beta of Warcraft III, and someone had forked the bnetd project to allow unauthorized folks (non-beta-testers) to play it over their version of bnetd. (And to a lesser extent, it would also allow use of pirated copies of already-released Battlenet games that would be serial-number-checked by Battlenet.)
And so they bring out the copyright guns to shut it down...
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
Umm. But Cory does identify that the brief was written by his co-worker, it's very clear. Slashdot has a duty to tell you when they write about their own company, and Cory has one too. What Slashdot does is link to the actual source, where the connections are clearly laid out. Nothing untoward happened here.
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
The silly Flash cartoon game that shows users how to fileswap without breaking copyright law is the least important.
I believe that that game was meant to help produce an example that could be pulled out when judges seeking to censor games claim that games cannot contain significant political expression, and thus do not merit First Amendment protection. (This happenend some time ago when someone-or-other was suing someone-or-other over a game.)
May we never see th
The community run game server did not work with the myth community. The person who opperated playmyth also took over the operation of mythdev (guys who did patches and stuff) and placed an encryption file into the next version of myth II which prevented any new servers from using the 1.4 version of myth II. The two existing servers (playmyth.net and mariusnet) could use 1.4 however when mariusnet changed their DNS they had to backwards engineer the encryption file which resulted in mythdev threatening to sue them for violating the DMCA. You can probably read more about this if you search the news archives at www.mariusnet.com
Incidentally during all this mess support for the linux version fell by the wayside and now there are no servers that support the linux version of myth. If there are linux programming type people out there you might be able to find information about how to help at www.projectmagma.net but I'm not sure.
A more interesting tidbit.
Did you know that most authors, including Zahn, Clarke and Sawyer, earn probably 5-8% royalties on sales of their books?
Unless they sell a great number (for SF books, this is usually into the six figures, and most SF books, except for franchises like Star Trek and Star Wars, sell between 20,000 and 50,000), that number stays low on paperbacks.
So that $8 paperback you bought only earns the author, who did nearly all the work on that book, about $.50. Talk about a travesty!
Or, frankly, that's just how the industry works. Artist/author makes a creative work, sends to the label/publisher, who has a team design the jewel case & liner notes/jacket or covers, before marketing the work if they do at all, then selling in volume to big distributors, who sell to smaller distributors or major chains, who have to ship them to the individual stores, who have to put them on the shelves or online for the consumer to purchase.
Each one of those steps needs to make its profit, the last of the chain needing to be the biggest cut (between 40-60% off retail). In the end, the cuts trickle back to very little leftover for the artist or the author.
And that's how it's always been. CDs can be bought online and the record labels circumvented. However, most authors still enjoy being in print, so eBooks aren't going to change that industry yet.
Human nature is the same everywhere; the modes only are different. -- Earl of Chesterfield
bnetd is still available from the CVS on the SourceForge Project page. Funny that Blizzard has either missed them or never seen the need to send CoD letters there. But anyway:
:pserver:anonymous@cvs.bnetd.sourceforge.net:/cvsr oot/bnetd
(no space between cvsr and oot. IE. cvsroot)
You're looking for module bnetd.
Note that I'm not a Blizzard customer (don't even have a Windows machine around), and have never used Battle.Net, so I'm not sure of their policies, but I'd guess that Blizzard will probably ban someone that they feel is cheating at games. They *may* have bans for what they consider to be inappropriate behavior via chat -- not sure. I remember some people griping on Slashdot about getting banned for something they did in Diablo that they thought they shouldn't have been banned for -- those folks can still use the game they bought. That way, Battle.Net is a useful service (a monitored, relable network for use), but it's not an attempt to require that people not be able to play their copy if Blizzard feels that they shouldn't.
Diablo alone provides a whole mess of potential things to ban people for, just because it provides long-term characters in a competitive environment. That sort of thing is ripe for nasty behavior.
May we never see th
some "good opensource guys" made a clone of battle.net,
Almost - they legally made a clone of battle.net.
(which provides good anti piracy method via CD key auth.)
No, it doesn't. If it was good, bnetd wouldn't have worked without it.
removed that mechanism than Blizzard sued them?
No, they didn't 'remove' anything. They never had it, and when Blizzard contacted them, they said "we'll add it if you want us to", to which Blizzard said "NO"
Blizzard then went and filed an obviously bogus court case, claiming that they used actual battle.net source code, because both programs behave similarly (never mind that Blizzard doesn't disclose the source code for battle.net, and bnetd is open source, so Blizzard could easily just look to see if there really was copyright infringement.)
I support a company respect to my platform instead
Rationalize it however you like, the fact remains that they are evil.
They were shut down by Blizzard.
Well, they are the only game developer I know of that has an enforcement policy...
And they do ban cheaters' CD-keys. The more cheats there are, the more complicated the enforcement work gets.
Every single MORG that I know of has a cheating policy. Tons of gaming companies have clearly defined rules and consequences concerning cheating.
Instead of chasing your own tail trying to find and ban all the cheaters why not fix the cheats and reduce your workload? Blizzard long ignored rampant cheating going on in Battlenet and all of a sudden they want to act like they care? Yeah, ok.
This is really obvious to anyone who tried to sign up for the beta test. They have to shut down any free versions of battle.net because they're planning on making money off of world of warcraft monthly fees.
You know that 200000+ people hitting a server and constantly refreshing is rough right? I mean the forums were flooded with "When are beta signups" and when someone posts that it's up, everyone looked. 400000+ total applications and a bunch of 'em being spammed isn't nice.
Battle.net service is NOT being shut down. WoW business model is an MMORPG. Yes they charge monthly fee. That's NORMAL. Battle.net will remain up and free.
-Dat ^_^
ex-MVP