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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
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