BnetD v. Blizzard Suit Moves Forward

Gamasutra has news that the ongoing legal battle between BnetD and Blizzard Entertainment will move to a new circus ring when the appeals court session begins today, Monday the 20th. From the article: "[The] EFF took the case to stand up for consumer choice in the marketplace. Reverse engineering is often the only way to craft a new product that works with older ones. Congress expressly recognized this when it created an exception to the DMCA for reverse engineering."

Comments

Re:Finding it hard to get upset

[mr_tenor]

but is this a case of the "good guys" picking the wrong battle to fight over digital rights?

This is THE right battle, and a very important one - the case sets a precedent for being able to say "you can't reverse engineer to make compatible products" in EULAs. The judge said previously that such a EULA is valid.

This is very bad. If people can do that, then proprietary software companies can eliminate the possiblity of competitors by denying interoperability. Currently it's possible but damn hard (eg. Microsoft's DOC format, Novell Connector). But if making your product compatible with the competition is made illegal thanks to a few words in the EULA, then you have no chance.

Re:Finding it hard to get upset

[egburr]

...the only practical purpose of the whole bnetd thing was to allow people to play pirated copies of Blizzard games online. Blizzard's own battle.net system has always seemed a good system to me; it's fast, it's free...

You're kidding, right? Actually, that may be true now, but it wasn't true a few years ago. A few friends and I regularly played Starcraft. We were connected on a voice chat program. We were all logged into Battle.Net. We were all using a specific private chat channel in Battle.Net. Although we could talk to each other over voice chat, it regularly took over an hour of fiddling around, logging off and back on, before we were all visible to each other in Battle.Net's chat. Trying to all get into the same game often took another hour as we took turns setting up the game as somebody (different each time) couldn't join the game or got booted immediately when the game started.

I finally stumbled onto bnetd and set it up on my linux box at home. After that, we had NO troubles jumping on and playing. Then the only time we had trouble was if someone had played on Battle.Net during the week and a patch had come out. Then I would spend about half an hour to download and install an updated bnetd, and we'd be playing again.

There was no piracy involved. We all had legitimate copies of the game. However, Battle.Net was horrible. The only way to overcome Blizzard's incompetence was to use bnetd.

Re:Finding it hard to get upset

[egburr]

No, NAT wasn't the problem. Some of us were NATted, others weren't. There seemed to be no correlation between problems and NAT users. The problem was system load on Battle.Net. From about 5pm Friday through Sunday afternoon, it was close to impossible for us to play together. If we all happened to have an evening free during the week, it was great. However, Friday nights were the best time for us to play, except that Battle.Net was unusuable then.

Bnetd made all the difference. Even though I was one of the ones behind NAT, and so was my bnetd server, none of us had trouble connecting or playing.

When Blizzard added zones to Battle.Net, that made a huge difference (as long as we all remembered to pick the same zone).

PvPGN

[blixel]

I hope bnetd wins, but in the mean time: PvPGN works great