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Blizzard/Vivendi 2, bnetd 0
wiggles writes "It appears that the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals has sided with Blizzard/Vivendi (pdf link) in the ongoing bnetd case. According to the PDF of the opinion posted today, 'Appellants failed to establish a genuine issue of material fact as to the applicability of the interoperability exception [of the DMCA]. The district court properly granted summary judgement in favor of Blizzard and Vivendi on the operability exception. Summary judgement in favor of Blizzard and Vivendi is affirmed.' No word yet on the EFF's website as to what their next move will be."
Check out the eff site to lobby your senator against something more important than the case in this story (http://action.eff.org/site/Advocacy?id=113). Boy, if all the /.'ers in the US did this it might actually make an impact...
There are many many uses for bnetd
Blizzard dont have any servers in Austrlia! and ping times below 500 when using broadband are rare, therefore there are many people like ISP's using bnetd so that their customers can play battlenet games on the internet with other people in australia and have respectable ping times.
This is a big deal, and could set a very dangerous precedent!
"I reject your reality, and substitute my own" - Adam Savage
The GPL is not an EULA. An EULA is by defenition a contract because there is an agreement made, the GPL on the other hand is a pure license where no agreement is made between two parties. This simple distinction means that there are different laws at work protecting a product by the GPL than by an EULA.
Note: the part about the GPL being a pure license is somewhat debatable.
If you want more info about the differences between regular EULAs and the GPL and how the GPL works you should look for articles written by Eben Moglen. You should also look at the definitions of a contract and a license.
Back in the days of Starcraft, I played hundreds of games with my friends who I knew had good internet connections and wouldn't drop out of a game or do anything fishy. In those games only a couple of them had a problem that was due to bnet.
However, when I'd play with random people I know I'd encounter a lot of dial up folks and low and behold they timed out because for whatever reason they were disconnected which we know isn't an uncommon thing for many dial up services.
-- Reality is for people who lack imagination.
They could have based their ruling simply on the DMCA and still schilled out an adequate though bought decision to their corporate masters without damaging individual liberty. I want to know where my part in negotiating a eula is "active". I don't get to change the terms, I don't get to talk with anyone in the company regarding it, I don't get to remove any of the add-on software they often push with their crap. And don't give me that "you choose no" garbage, I can't play realplayer files on my computer because "i choose no" simply because I don't want the baggage that goes with realplayer. The player is FREE, but i'm still screwed by a eula. I think I know of some judges who have earned themselves a special place in hell for their biased rulings today.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
where's the part where the customer can sign to show that they will legally abide by the terms of the "contract"?
hmmm?
where's the underlined area where the signature goes?
guy selling fruit by the road: by buying my oranges you agree to let me sell your childrens organs. (text of which appears in 1pt font under a shady tree near the ground).
tell me if that's what you think of when you think of contracts.
Science : Proprietary , Knowledge : Open Source
It's still being developed anyway under a different name. http://pvpgn.berlios.de/
This is a joke. I am joking. Joke joke joke.
EULA violations are a civil matter, and havn't been tested in court. This is about the DMCA. There could have been no EULA and they'd still be able to take them to court under the anti-copyprotection stuff.
Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive. Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx
But the GPL still has to explicitely tell the user they may use the software however they choose, they just don't go into great length to limit its use.
No it does not. The GPL mentions as an FYI that you can use the software for whatever purpose you like- that's because there is no legal grounds by which they could demand otherwise.
Once software is in your hands, the author (or other copyright holder) can't make any demands about what you do with it.
However, distribution is still use EULAs and the GPL both set restriction son distribution.
Wrong again. Repeatly lying about the contents of globally available documents makes you look not only dishonest, but stupid as well.
The GPL makes no restriction on distribution. Distribution is already restricted by copyright law, so if there were no license file at all, it would still be entirely illegal for you to redistribute a program. The GPL removes pre-existing restrictions in certain cases.
half of you all will log onto WoW tonight anyway.
The legal ignorance here is just disturbing.
Years before computers existed, there was a rule called the "mailbox rule", which basically stated that if someone sent you a contract form that said "All that is required is your signature", it was viewed as fully accepted when the recipient put the signed form in the mailbox. The idea was that the person who signed the contract (i.e. the 2nd party) has done all the parts required to accept and so they should both receive the benefits and responsibilities of that acceptance.
The reason EULA agreements were RIGHTFULLY enforced in the ProCD case is exactly the same: the software creator has given you a contract that says "all you need to do to accept is click yes/open the shrink wrap". Once you've fulfilled that requirement - clicking yes or opening it - you should incur the benefits (using the software) and responsibilities (the restrictions in the contract).
Think about the opposite, where you'd be allowed to benefit from the contract (i.e. use the software) but not incur the responsibilities (i.e. the limitations). How could such an asymmetry be reasonable, much less desireable?
Most contracts are signed without any negotiation other than the 2nd party consenting to a prepared contract from the 1st party. Typical examples: rentals, lease agreements, fed-ex/ups shipping, etc. Just try to 'negotiate' the contract in your local FedEx-Kinkos. There's no problem with the remoteness of the contract-writer, so long as they're content to let the 2nd party sign remotely.
You people who are so against Blizzard here need to ask yourselves what the situation would be if users were free to disregard the EULA. It would mean that either (a) the software content producers would have to accept anything you did with it or (b) there would have to be LEGISLATIVE limitations on your use that applied to all software content. I'm positive you don't want (b), and I don't think you'd reasonably want (a) either since it's entirely inhibitive of content creation. If you cannot control perfectly reproducable content (i.e. software) and thus cannot profit from your work, a significant number of people will be dissuaded from producing.
This whole argument has been hashed out before, and I find it just disheartening how many rapid anti-Blizzard people there are here who have yet to provide actual arguments for their side...
"Stumble before you crawl"