bnetd appeals court decision
After several years, there has finally been a decision about the Bnetd “unofficial” Battle.net-like servers. This began during my tenure at Blizzard and I got called an awful lot of bad names at the time in my dealings with Blizzard fans.
For those who didn’t keep up on the situation, a group of hackers/Blizzard enthusiasts (depending on which side of the fence you were on) did some reverse engineering on Blizzard games, specifically Warcraft III, as I recall, but my memory could be playing tricks on me. This allowed them to cook up their own version of Battle.net, Blizzard’s free peer-to-peer multiplayer network, called bnetd.
If you were in favor of the project, you pointed out that this allowed players to connect to a network with far fewer players and thus faster connections and so on. If you were against the project, you pointed out that this allowed pirated copies of the games to be used in multiplayer games — not being able to play on Battle.net has historically been one of the big disincentives against using pirated versions of Blizzard software. Both of these were true, as was the fact that a lot of bnetd spoke to the hacker mania of “look at this cool thing I was able to do.”
The real motives of those behind the project will probably remain murky forever, due to the heated emotional climate surrounding the issue. (The religion of Open Source gets invoked almost immediately in that Slashdot thread, for instance, which is pretty much the end of substantive discussions in my experience. You either believe in Open Source, or you don’t. Neither side tends to want to talk to each other in any meaningful way, most of the time.)
The legal argument, of course, was that monkeying with Blizzard games like this violated federal law, in particular the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. (That link is a PDF file.) And that’s what the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with last week.
(It shouldn’t need to be said, but none of the above, to my knowledge, represents the opinions of Blizzard or their parent company, Vivendi-Universal. I haven’t discussed this issue with anyone there in years and have no idea what their lawyers were saying behind closed doors or even what employees thought other than “wow, this case sure is going on a long time,” which is sort of obvious.)
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