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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."
to not buy Blizzard products (yes, this includes WoW), but that's just me.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
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?
I really do wonder how the US legal system works; do they ever find someone technically knowledgable to assist in this sort of case? Or do they just defer to whichever side provides the most fluent jargon?
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
Surprise surprise. The DMCA was written by big corporations to protect them from competition (especially open source.) Now, if you write a program that works with another commercial program, good luck, especially if that program threatens a coveted corporate market with competition.
Our side may have already lost because it is unlikely that the Supreme Court will take this case under reconsideration. The next step of this battle would be to change the laws themselves at the Congressional level. It will be a long and hard battle, but one that we must fight.
You can play private games and have private chats for free on battle.net
Well, I haven't been on bnet much in the last month, but frankly about 1 in 3 or more games (warcraft III) tend to have at least one player time out because of bnet lag or server issues. It's wonderful that blizzard supplies bnet for free in most games, but given the lack of stability sometimes an alternative solution would be better.
When this conflict first came up I emailed blizzard to tell them I would never buy one of their products again and I've kept my word. I suggest if you care about this issue that you do the same. Oh, and tell your friends.
If this were the case, then one of the major reasons for starting your own 'theatre' would be because the main theatre is full of whiney, disruptive assholes, is ill-maintained, and is not always available.
Despite the proliferation of other uses, bnetd was beloved by many because it was convenient, private, and oftimes more reliable than the public servers. Certain other games allow for private servers that authenticate to the primary... why can't Blizzard just make this a requirement to keep out the hacked CD-keys but allow private hosts?
Think about it this way - you bought something (a copy of a Blizzard game) and you want to use it in a different way than they want you to. Specifically, you want to connect to a private server instead of theirs [Battlenet]. As other people in this thread have commented, you might want to do it so you can change server settings (such as item spawning in Diablo) or you don't want to deal with politiking and/or the unpleasant people who do use battlenet.
In most cases, the maker of a product has no right to prohibit you from using it in a different way than intended. If I buy a book and use it as a doorstop instead of reading it, for example, the book's publisher has no recourse to stop me from doing just that.
However, Blizzard is using an ill-concieved law (the DMCA) to do just that, at the expense of our civil liberties (the right to use products we have purchased as we please). And, as if to add insult to injury, the DMCA explicitely does not apply to programs for the sake of interoprability, which is quite clearly the case here.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
"Since it is free to play on battle.net with a LEGAL copy, it's highly skeptical that it had another purpose, no matter the 'disclaimer' that may be attached."
But that's not relevant. We live in a free society, which means that you don't need any "purpose" to do anything. You say yourself that it's "fine to make your OWN software free," and that's exactly what the Bnetd developers did. They had an application in mind that they wanted to create, and they did it. This is not illegal, and it would be wrong for it to be illegal.
Anyone who uses Bnetd to play an illegal copy of a Bliizard game has broken the law. That does not put the Bnetd developers at fault however. They are within their rights to develop any software they want, whether or not Blizzard agrees that the software has a purpose. The Bnetd authors are only in the wrong if they are promoting it for illegal uses (this would be incitement).
Because we all have fun using technology in ways that the inventor didn't invision.
Xbox's running custom media centre applications.
Using game ROM's in emulators
Overclocking and tweaking
Gateways that use NAT for TCP/IP
They're effectively hacks. We enjoy using them.
Many of us here don't see computers as pre-assembled things which can do only specific tasks. We code, we hack, we play, we tinker. Screw anyone who tries to tell me this mindset is wrong.
Anyone who's ever played a Blizzard game online knows how easy it is to congregate in a private channel and create a private, password-protected game. No one else will even know it exists, let alone the password required to join it, unless you explicitly tell them.
Valid complaints against the ruling exist; yours is not one of them, troll.
The fact that you zerg rush says a lot about you, methinks!
Since it is free to play on battle.net with a LEGAL copy, it's highly skeptical that it had another purpose, no matter the "disclaimer" that may be attached.
No matter your skepticism people really do just want to have private LAN parties, without connecting to the Internet at all even, and without "stealing" anybody's software to do it.
Please also note that it is Blizzard who will not allow the bnetd people to use their authentication process to prevent the use of illegal copies.
KFG
Let's look at the ramifications of this ruling to some of the most popular OSS. OpenOffice: Interoperability with Microsoft product by... reverse engineering GAIM: interoperability with Microsoft/Yahoo/AOL product by... reverse engineering Two huge players that could never be produced if this ruling is upheld. Anyone else scared?
Continue developing it anyway and release it over p2p networks.
Problem solved.
We have secretly replaced these Slashdot mods' sense of humor with a rusty nail. Let's see if they notice!!
bnetd's ability to "circumvent" Blizzard's authentication is a SIDE-EFFECT.
I loved starcraft, but why the crap should I connect to somebody else's server to play? I liked Jedi Knight, where I could connect to "The Zone" if I wanted to find someone I didnt know, but if I just wanted to set up a quick game, I'd tell someone on IRC and he'd connect to me directly. Because it's convenient, and it makes more sense.
I dont know anything about World of Warcraft, but if bnetd supports it, and it's the only way to set up a private world, then hell yeah it's a good reason for bnetd.
I can't comprehend the ability to not see a strong legitimate use. If bnetd really support world of warcraft, I may just buy world of warcraft- because there's no way I'm buying a game I can only play by paying to connect to a particular server.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Ok... it's is open source and we are in slashdot. But I don't see why that should allow them not to follow rules. Does it suck to be unable to create a private server? Yes it does... but that is not enough reason to anyone to start breaking laws... even if it is open source.
Some people wrote an emulator for the server that Blizzard uses to match up internet games for their products. Much like P2P, this program has been used for some legitimate purposes, but mostly just so people can play their pirated copies of the game online.
Blizzard, of course, doesn't like this and sues. Slashdot readers yell as if they didn't know that it was mostly being used for piracy, and try to pretend that the majority of people only use it legitimately. Meanwhile Blizzard's lawsuit, while probably only intended to protect their games against piracy, cause a degradation of our fair use rights.
I blame both Blizzard and the vast majority of users of bnetd (who use it for piracy, please don't pretend that they don't) for this fiasco.
What if somebody rehosts BNET.d on a non-US server? There are plenty of non US develpers who wouldn't mind sharpening their skills while having fun working on this. Perhaps it is just time for the original development team to pass the torch.
My rights don't need management.
Bullshit. He bought exactly what Blizzard stated they were selling on the front of the box - a copy of the copyrighted work (WoW). That copy is his private property to do with as he pleases within the bounds of copyright law. The statements in the EULA are irrelevant. You do not need to agree to them to legally acquire a copy of the game.
People are free to "modify or add components to" their personal property whenever they damn well please.
of apple forbidding people buying osx and using it on anything other than what hardware they choose.
/. is a losing proposition but if some people don't, others will think it's ok if companies do things like this and even believe it's for their own good.
even though no one expects support for unofficial configurations, they go out of their way, and soon with osx86, using the DMCA to prevent bought copies of it being used.
funny though, you don't hear a lot of calls for boycotts.
arguing for property rights on
stand up for all the rights of customers, not just when it's your pet company or if it doesn't involve you at this moment. i guarantee it WILL involve you sooner or later.
i had a lot more hope for the geek community to prevent abuses... but i've been disappointed.
we're no longer the x or y generation, we're the DRM and DMCA gen (P.A.T.R.I.O.T comes to mind). hope you guys like the world we're building.
Science : Proprietary , Knowledge : Open Source
There is an understood proviso there, that Ghandi's statement applies to the masses. He wasn't talking to a group of smart, dedicated, but ultimately limited-in-population geeks.
The OSS/geek world is powerful because it has the ability to release disruptive technologies (and has consistently done so, sending waves through the tech community, especially in the past few years). Its buying power may not be tiny, but it is still insignificant compared to that of the Joe Sixpack market.
And Blizzard has busily sealed off the main way that the OSS world can bring in disruptive technologies -- write software compatible with Blizzard software, and you get sued.
The only real remaining way would be to sit down and write a better version of whatever Blizzard produces, but Blizzard (unlike, say, Microsoft) produces products that have relatively little code and lots of content (audio, artwork, etc). The OSS world is rich in coders, and exceedingly poor in skilled people willing to donate talent on audio and graphics. So, yes, I can design and implement an WCIII-type RTS engine -- it still won't impact Blizzard's bottom line, because they have masses of artists and sound engineers that I *can't* get. Sure, there are open-source people busily producing RTS code, but as long as their audio and graphics aren't comparable to Blizzard's, Blizzard can easily shrug them off.
And as long as the DMCA sits around, as long as there are restrictions on reverse-engineering and producing interoperable software, the open source world is hamstrung in many ways.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
I consider my self very liberal, but I stand behind the gun nuts 100%. Do you have any idea what a bitch it would be to try and stage a revolution where the other guy has thousands of military grade arms and you can't produce a single hand gun? Not going to end well for the good guys. Free flow of arms is essential to preventing tyrany.
A Free Market requires informed intelligent consumers, such people are rare, we're in trouble.
It's happened before. Nothing came of it, really. The retailer, quite legitimately, tells you to piss off because it's not a party to the EULA and can't be forced to accept returns. The publisher tells you to piss off because they didn't sell it to you, they sold it to the retailer, and they aren't a party to that. You'd need to go to court to enforce the return clause and nobodys been willing to spend the money on that yet.
Really, Steam isn't a problem, at least for people who bought the game via steam and weren't crippled by the outdated CD locking junk Vivendi required in the retail version.
Realities just a bunch of bits.
It's not reasonable to suggest that bnetd being legal would in any way threaten Blizzard's copyright. It should be legal to write software to speak any over the wire protocol I want. If I want replace a proprietary server with my own that I wrote, that should be legal. If it's legal for SAMBA, why isn't it legal for bnetd?
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Yes, imagine such an insane world were you might walk into your local Best Buy, pick up a CD full of music, a PS2 videogame, a movie, and a copy of Windows for Dummies, pay for them, take them home, then use them as you like without having to agree to some contract.
Oh, wait, I guess I can do that today and the world hasn't ended.
If a company wants to sell me software under contract, feel free to do so. Businesses do so all the time. You sign the contract, you pay for the license, then you get the actual software. But if I walk into a store and buy a music CD, a book, a PS2 video game, and a PC video game, I would suggest that I own those particular items and am free to use them as I wish. But you're claiming that I get home, open my purchases, and I can read the book without an agreement, I can play the music without an agreement, I can use the software on the PS2 without an agreement, but I need to agree to some new thing for my PC video game, that's just insane.
Now if only there was some sort of law that could stop people from maing copies. Perhaps by granting a monopoly right to copy to the original author/publisher. Perhaps we should call it copyright. That seems like a good idea to me.
Thet LEGISLATIVE limitation you seem so worried about already exists. It works fine for books, music, console video games, movies, television programs, plays, maps, essays, articles, magazines, paintings, photographs, and more. Perhaps most importantly, it covers computer software.
You are right about one thing, the legal ignorance here is disturbing. Perhaps you're seeing your reflection in your monitor?
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