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Blizzard Suing Creators of StarCraft II Hacks
An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from Rock, Paper, Shotgun:
"Blizzard have taken the extremely peculiar decision to ban players from playing StarCraft II for using cheats in the single-player game. This meant that, despite cheating no one but themselves, they were locked out of playing the single-player game. Which is clearly bonkers. But it's not enough for the developer. Blizzard's lawyers are now setting out to sue those who create cheats. Gamespot reports that the megolithic company is chasing after three developers of hacks for 'destroying' their online game. It definitely will be in violation of the end user agreement, so there's a case. However, it's a certain element of their claim that stands out for attention. They're claiming using the hacks causes people to infringe copyright: 'When users of the Hacks download, install, and use the Hacks, they copy StarCraft II copyrighted content into their computer's RAM in excess of the scope of their limited license, as set forth in the EULA and ToU, and create derivative works of StarCraft II.'"
Blizzard used similar reasoning in their successful lawsuit against the creators of a World of Warcraft bot.
Who wants to buy that software when they could import the same style of graphics and sound into a Quake3 engine like what was done for Tremulous?
Seriously, people need to stop buying this crapware. There are no strategical improvements to the game, only new story of an old religion, and competition boils down to whomever has the lowest-latency to their host computer and peripheral hardware.
All recent software has done nothing useful but sell more Chinese and Japanese computers, and help American semi-conductors companies fund their outsourcing to other countries.
Don't reward any of these bastards, stay away from Netbooks, and go back to Homebrew computing.
This is slahdot, where anyone can, and should, do anything they want as long as they aren't actively and effectively forced not to and then they are entitled to whine and complain that their liberties are being taken away and everyone (else) should rise up against the man.
Where people that abuse free wifi are the people's hero. Take everything you can and give nothing back is the motto.
In other words, you've got a valid point but it will fall on willfully deaf ears here.
There is NO WAY you own a copy of SC2. You only own a license -- a number. The game phones home to verify it, meaning there is absolutely nothing you can do with the game by itself, should you say, lose internet connection.