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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."
I mean, yes, I know the DMCA is a "bad thing". However, it does seem to me that the only practical purpose of the whole bnetd thing was to allow people to play pirated copies of Blizzard games online.
And VCRs are only used for piracy. And P2P is only used for piracy. And how dare you buy a Gameboy Advance flash cart since that's totally for piracy too.
Blizzard's own battle.net system has always seemed a good system to me; it's fast, it's free (unless you include WoW) and I haven't noticed serious reliability problems since shortly after the Diablo 2 launch.
Woopie. It's fast and free. So?
Maybe I've just got the wrong end of the stick here (and I'd be happy to be corrected if I have), but is this a case of the "good guys" picking the wrong battle to fight over digital rights? I mean, it would be easier to fight the DMCA on terms that would make it easier to convince the educated (but non-techie) public, as well as lawmakers, if we weren't using a program whose main purpose in the wild is always going to be the circumvention of legitimate copy protection as the test-bed?
Ah, of course. Let's only fight a few battles that are really wrong. Hell, the whole legal system should work like that. Why go after thieves when there are rapists? And hell, why go after rapists when there are child murderers? Yes, let's do that.
Okay, I've trolled enough. I think going back to the VCR example might very well be a prime reason of what the problem is. When the VCR came out, there was already a laserdisc-like system setup for the movie industry to sell movies. It worked. It wasn't free (though you could claim it was reasonably priced). And certainly this knew VCR invention would allow rampant piracy.
Now, I should stop at this point to point out how you seem be following the logic of judges of the time (and ironically how judges use the same logic now for p2p). You see, the judges of the time didn't go "Hey, a VCR is technology, just like a gun or a knife. Sure, they can be misused, but the law is here to stop misusings, not tools of such." Instead, they tried to normalize what effect it would have on society to justify why VCRs should be okay.
But don't you see, that this is the same logic that allowed for Prohibition (well, and a large temporary support for it). Prohibition, though, didn't solve social ills. It just made elements of it more hidden and more violent. So, while certainly those who supported Prohibition had a somewhat noble goal--getting drunk daily isn't good for you--they decided to go about it by forcing their will on others instead of trying to convince others to follow their way. Of course, they probably did this knowing that it'd take the force of law (ie, cops) to get a lot of people to comply.
The US is founded on the idea of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. So long as enough people hold on to these ideals, society will survive without needing Draconian laws to stop the latest "social ill". And if enough people don't hold on to these ideals, we're fucked already. Turning the country into a totalitarian regime which tries to control society or think for society only creates a totalitarian regime.
So, in closing, the reason you should be upset about the whole case is that a company has decided that they don't like what someone else is writing. And it looks like the government might step in and stop them. It doesn't matter how dubious, obscene, or likely to incite societal decay those writings are, no matter how much there exists another free or "better" alternative. People are free to make tools that can harm. And people can choose to harm themselves or others and be held responsible when they truly infringe the life, liberty, or pursuit of happiness--that last one is vague, but, oh well--over the others infringing of their own life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness (ie, my liberty outweighs your pursuit of happiness). This holds true as much for cloning the IBM bios to cloning the Unix OS to cloning a lowly game protocol.
Eurohacker European paranoia, gun rights, and h
Of course we don't need battlenet, but in paying the full price of the licence to use the software in it's full capacity, not being able to reliably connect to battle net means I'm not getting the full benefit of the product.
If I pay the full price as a consumer I should also have the full access to the capability of the software, in this case multiplayer.
Demanding that blizzard to setup a battlenet server in Africa for us plebs with limited bandwidth comes back as "It's not financially viable"
Yet they still reap the full benifit of us paying the full retail price for the licence.
As such I belief as a consumer that bought the licence at full price blizzard has a obligation to provide us with a full service. If they cannot or choose not then I should have the right to do what I can to use their software to it's full ability. In this case that means playing on Bnet rather then battle.net
This is see falls very much into the realm of my rights as a consumer of their product.
I completely agree they should have rights in controlling their creation, but if they share their creation to the masse consumer at a price, but cannot provide a full service to all consumers, then I as a consumer, has payed the full price for the licence, but does not have full access to their product because of their decisions have the right to use an alternative.
Sanity is a majority vote.
Your troubles weren't because StarCraft was never really set up to use NAT properly, were they? StarCraft kind of assumed you'd be on a modem, not behind a firewall with 4 other people sharing cable.
I've heard of people having trouble on battle.net, and frankly, I have to wonder what they were doing; it always worked fine for me.