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

My move is still

[eddy]

to not buy Blizzard products (yes, this includes WoW), but that's just me.

Re:My move is still

[PhiberOptix]

Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it.

Mahatma Gandhi

Corporations win again

[dotslashdot]

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.

Boycott is the greatest power

[PhatKat]

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.

Re:The case

[ScrewMaster]

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

Absolutely, and if the legitimacy of those things had been properly struck down in previous cases this case would probably never have made it to court.

Lets take a moment to consider

[jsmoonrider]

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?

Ghandi was talking to the goat herders

[typical]

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.