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."

Comments

More imporant: The Trademark Act

[tyroneking]

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...

Re:The case

[sangreal66]

Is it the case that the non-violation of the DMCA through interoperability was so blindingly obvious here that the court simply had to get it wrong?

The court didn't say their actions weren't covered by the interoperability exemption. The court ruled that appelants waived the exemption when they agreed to Blizzard's EULA.

Appellants contractually accepted restrictions on their ability to reverse engineer by their agreement to the terms of the TOU and EULA. "[P]rivate parties are free to contractually forego the limited ability to reverse engineer a software product under the exemptions of the Copyright Act[,]" Bowers v. Baystate Techs, Inc., 320 F.3d 1317, 1325-26 (Fed. Cir. 2003), and "a state can permit parties to contract away a fair use defense or to agree not to engage in uses of copyrighted material that are permitted by the copyright law if the contract is freely negotiated."

Of course, I wouldn't call a EULA "freely negotiated."

Mod Parent down - Troll

[SoloFlyer2]

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!

Re:The scary part:

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:What's the big deal?

[kiddygrinder]

It's still being developed anyway under a different name. http://pvpgn.berlios.de/