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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."
Who cares?
This is probably the least important thing the EFF could be doing with donation money. Scratch that. The silly Flash cartoon game that shows users how to fileswap without breaking copyright law is the least important. But this is the least important fight they needed to take up.
I also find this indicative of the types of cases that the EFF takes up. If you look over the cases that they've litigated over the past several years, all the cases are essentially prima facie decideable on the side that the EFF takes up. They never fight the fight on the side that looks to lose. There are hundreds of people getting squeezed by the RIAA for filesharing and the EFF all of a sudden has short arms to match their deep pockets.
I wish I could believe that the EFF was fighting for electronic rights, but they are nothing more than tag-a-long lawyers ready to jump into a winning battle than dedicated visionaries ready to fight the good fight.
I have been pwned because my
To Slashdot, it's a "culture movement" because artists don't deserve to be paid for the work they put in to renting a studio, spending a month recording something, pressing CDs, and marketing it with their label.
There's an organization called the RIAA that happens to represent their label, so suddenly it's okay to pirate the artists' music. The legality issue is completely ignored.
Blizzard's utter joke of an enforcement policy doesn't help, I doubt preventing cheats was their main motive in this case
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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.
I will certainly agree that it wasn't the main motive, however.
Doing superficial good to placate the masses while doing real evil that will screw the masses long after they've forgotten about the folks responsible, does not make one half-evil, it makes one a politician (in other words, pure evil).
Seriously though, Blizzard is above even Adobe on the list of companies I will never ever buy products from, no matter how good or useful they may be, or how much I may want them. Adobe being in the black books for having a foreign citizen arrested the second he stepped on American soil for the crime of figuring out how to change a bit in one of their files.
Random and weird software I've written.
Blizzard can get angry all they want, but the fact is that bnetd is none of their buisness. It is simply a matter of people using their private property (the bnetd code, and the copy of the game that Blizzard sold them) however they like. Once again, the DMCA gives anyone with a lot of money the right to tell other people what they can do with their own property by assuming them guilty.
It is possible that people use bnetd in conjunction with illegally obtained copies of blizzard games, but that has nothing at all to do with bnetd. Those people should be prosecuted for copyright infringement. No need to use the DMCA to prosecute people who did not commit a crime.
I believe that you're factually incorrect on your second point, and I just plain disagree with you on the first.
At UC Berkeley, you can make your own majors. Maybe if games are so important to you, you can go there and become a network gaming major.
I mean really, what are you at college for? Is this a survival issue
And yet, college students look for entertainment. Some go to bars, some watch TV, some hunt girls, some learn to cook strange foods, some do dope, some hit movie theaters, clubs, go paintballing, etc, etc, etc.
The point is that gaming is a perfectly legitimate form of entertainment. You hvae many friends nearby on a fast network, and most of you just got a computer in the last few years for college. Why not? Do you really never play games?
I don't know if the bnetd project is right or wrong, but it should be argued on its own merits rather than whether or not the guy from I Phelta Thi can play WCIII against his tri-Lamda counterpart.
One of the clauses in the DMCA in determining whether a device is an illegal circumvention devices is whether the primary purpose of the device is for copyright infringement. Blizzard is representing bnetd as a device designed to facilitate software piracy. When people chime in and talk about all the legitimate reasons they use bnetd, it helps undermine Blizzard's arguments on that clause.
May we never see th
The day Games Workshop pull that off is the day the day they need to start looking over their shoulder for the Tolkien estate.
-- Nick "Hallo this is Beel Gates, und I pronounce weendows as
Unfortunately, that doesn't work at all in practice, even in a server-based model.
The major method of cheating in a WarCraft III game is via a map hack.
The server-side solution to this is to only send what the player can see to the player.
Problems arise with lag, when the player can't see units as soon as he should. It also means for a significant number of extra fun computations on the server, which is probably pretty busy as it is, and that will likely just add to the first problem.
This is all irrelevant, though. War3 doesn't use a server-based model. A game over bNet runs just like a game over a LAN. For the player to only recieve data on units he can see, then the opposing machine must know where he has units! It can't work.
Unlike Kazzaa-lite or the IM clones bnetd is not attempting to use Bizard network resources...for a matter of fact it's the opposite! They're attempting to REPLACE Blizard's locked-in service to provide playing of the game on their own terms...it's not like they're trying to hack or take over or interfere with Blizard's offical channels here...mearly offer another alternative for those not willing or able to use the "offical" channels. It's fundamentally about connecting two copies of something you already paid for...you shouldn't need "permission" to do that.
While the supporting of "pirate" copies may be a problem to blizzard, the bnetd project really doesn't have any business worrying about authentication! There's no constraint on their part to require the game to follow the "rules" that's the whole point of developing their own servers!! More than that, this would also set precedent in cases that would replace say, XBoxLive. That product is all about vendor lock-in...but the console and games themselves should be allowed a similar hack simply because it's your fair use to connect your products...especially if you are using unmodified original product...Part of this is about companies requiring you to use "specific" company-approved portals...and requiring so in the EULA! To take it to an extreme, what would the reaction be if MS forbade you from using, say, Samba on YOUR OWN networks to connect YOUR OWN PCs because they dediced to require windows license verification in AD/W2K3 server connection!! That's exactly the same issue being set forth even though it seems silly to say so. Cause remember, much of MS stratagy has been to "hide" their lock-in schemes behind the veil of "security" or "authentication" schemes. Imagine the "free-for-all" if companies can simply tag a serial number or phone home to every network connection and sue you if you don't follow it! That's totally nuts!
Blizzard spends a lot of time and money keeping people with illegetamate CD Keys off their network. Perhaps that's a secondary consideration to some, but preventing people with stolen/passed-around keys from having an alternative Network to play over prevents a certain amount of software piracy.
I know that when we wanted to do some two-player games here at home (My wife is a much bigger Diablo II fiend than I am) I went out and bought a second copy. I'm sure I could have dicked around on the 'net and found ways to do it without spending the twenty bucks, but it just wasn't worth it.
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What I'm saying is that that is not legally significant -- that it is financially beneficial to Blizzard for something to happen is not enough to have the courts rule in their favor. Even crime reduction is not enough to force someone to do something -- if packaged food were eliminated, it's likely that people would litter much less. However, food packers do not need to get rid of packaged food.
I am quite sure that there are many people out there that have used bnetd to avoid paying for a copy of a Blizzard game. I am also sure that plenty of illegal content is swapped in IRC channels. Neither is a reason for shutting down a group of people that produce a tool that *may* be used to facilitate pirating a game.
I've never used bnetd, but here are a number of reasons I could see someone legitimately using it:
* Blizzard kicks a player off Battle.Net, for whatever reason. They can still play their game, just not using Blizzard's servers.
* The player and his friends have limited or nonexistant network access. If I work in village in many countries, I probably have lousy network access, but a fair number of folks that would like to play a game locally all in one place (especially an older game like Warcraft II that works on older computers).
* Pure interest in reverse engineering and writing a server. It's *fun* to do something like this, and you feel good when you can sit back and look at the finished product. I remember when folks reverse engineered the Hotline protocol (a vaguely BBS-like server that was quite popular on the Mac at one point). It was very neat to have something like this done.
* Ensuring that the game continues working. Blizzard may give "lifetime access to Battle.Net", whatever that means, but at some point, Blizzard will go out of business, just as all companies do eventually. Blizzard is very likely to continue sinking money into the service forever. If there is an open-soruce implementation of the protocol, people can continue playing as long as they'd like, just as with Quake.
Any of these are good reasons, and if any of these were the primary purpose of bnetd, rather than bypassing copy protection mechanisms, then the bnetd people are in the clear relative to the DMCA.
May we never see th
But some Corporation's ability to make a buck off of me shouldn't be more important than my freedom to do whatever the heck I want to with my own property.
The U.S. has to stop treating corporations - tools designed to deflect liability and dodge taxes - as living entities. A Corporation's goals do not benefit mankind - they benefit the stockholders.
When you give a non-human entity greater rights and priveleges than you do actual people, it enslaves us.
BNetDguys: Hey, we've managed to emulate your servers so that we dont need you anymore. Now, if you could just give us your CD-Key scripts so we can make sure these guys arent cheating...
What Blizzard Hears:
Hey guys, we just disabled your ONLY way of fighting piracy. Now, if you could just give us your CD-Key scripts, we can make it so you never sell another blizzard game again!
Posting Anon, because you hate to hear the fucking truth.
You would be hard pressed to find a company that displays more naked contempt for their community than Blizzard routinely does, however.
Blizzard representatives openly mock posters on the public forums. Granted these posters often ask inane or redundant questions, but there is an astonishing lack of professionalism displayed. Questions like "what can you tell me about feature X" are often answered "when you find out, tell me, I'd love to know!" There's no need for that kind of reply. Even Microsoft doesn't actually resort to taunting its users.
Posters who ask difficult questions -- like "what happened to the clan ladder that was advertised on the box of Frozen Throne?" -- have their posts deleted. Repeat "offenders" are summarily banned.
On the other hand I know they have a lot of extremely bright and talented people working there, and some are about the nicest people you'd ever hope to interact with. Knowing the long hours and the limitless passion and energy they put into creating and refining each game, it's hard to harbor any ill will towards the company. After all, these guys are the ones that really make Blizzard great.
It seems to me such a waste to let their berserk legal department and bizarre PR attitudes overshadow that.