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The Courts Government News Entertainment Games

BnetD v. Blizzard Suit Moves Forward 114

Posted by Zonk from the i'm-not-your-friend dept.
Gamasutra has news that the ongoing legal battle between BnetD and Blizzard Entertainment will move to a new circus ring when the appeals court session begins today, Monday the 20th. From the article: "[The] EFF took the case to stand up for consumer choice in the marketplace. Reverse engineering is often the only way to craft a new product that works with older ones. Congress expressly recognized this when it created an exception to the DMCA for reverse engineering."
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BnetD v. Blizzard Suit Moves Forward More

BnetD v. Blizzard Suit Moves Forward

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  • By which I mean picketing or possibly a viewers gallery.
    Monday night is me and my friends 'game' night. Game can mean rpg (pen and paper) or video or whatever we decide, and it just seems apropriate this is getting started near where we game (anyone got the exact adress?).
    If there is any 'action' of any sort (other than lawyerees being tossed around) me and my friends might be able to stop by and give an account.

    Mycroft

  • Finding it hard to get upset (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 20, 2005 @04:51AM (#12861411)
    I know this isn't going to be a popular thing to say on slashdot, but I'm actually finding it difficult to get particularly upset about this whole case. I'm no Blizzard fanboy; Starcraft left me cold, I quite liked Warcraft 3 but didn't go mad over it and World of Warcraft hasn't impressed me in the slightest. However, I'm finding it hard to see them as particularly villainous here.

    I mean, yes, I know the DMCA is a "bad thing". However, it does seem to me that the only practical purpose of the whole bnetd thing was to allow people to play pirated copies of Blizzard games online. Blizzard's own battle.net system has always seemed a good system to me; it's fast, it's free (unless you include WoW) and I haven't noticed serious reliability problems since shortly after the Diablo 2 launch.

    Maybe I've just got the wrong end of the stick here (and I'd be happy to be corrected if I have), but is this a case of the "good guys" picking the wrong battle to fight over digital rights? I mean, it would be easier to fight the DMCA on terms that would make it easier to convince the educated (but non-techie) public, as well as lawmakers, if we weren't using a program whose main purpose in the wild is always going to be the circumvention of legitimate copy protection as the test-bed?

    • Re:Finding it hard to get upset (Score:4, Insightful)

      by bain ( 1910 ) on Monday June 20, 2005 @05:04AM (#12861448) Homepage Journal
      You're assumption that bnet was used only for pirate copies is wrong. There are countries around the world where we are not as connected to the internet as the rest of the first world. Connecting to battlenet is not an option.

      The only way we can have multiplayer is to use bnet.

      There are also still people that doesn't have internet access and use bnet to play multiplayer.

      The real use of bnet is to replace battlenet functionality when connecting to battlenet is not an option.

      Saying it's only use is piracy is the same as saying crowbars is only used for breaking open locks and should therefor be banned as well.
      • I'm pretty sure you don't need battle.net though. As in, to live, breath, and/or maintain your current standard of living. You are not being robbed of any personal liberty or freedom when you have to use Blizzard's servers to play Blizzard's games. Blizzard does have rights, and they should be able to control their own creation.
        • ...and they should be able to control their own creation.

          Actually , no, they don't. First Sale [eff.org] clearly says that they have no control over the product once thay sell it to me.

        • Sure, you won't die if you don't have bnetd. On the other hand, it's no big deal if you DO have it, either. The piracy claim is specious at best, and while for some reason gets away with shit in EULAs that other industries wouldn't dream of, usage restrictions like "you can only use this product with our other product" have been tossed before.

        • Re:Finding it hard to get upset (Score:5, Interesting)

          by bain ( 1910 ) on Monday June 20, 2005 @07:47AM (#12862157) Homepage Journal
          Of course we don't need battlenet, but in paying the full price of the licence to use the software in it's full capacity, not being able to reliably connect to battle net means I'm not getting the full benefit of the product.

          If I pay the full price as a consumer I should also have the full access to the capability of the software, in this case multiplayer.

          Demanding that blizzard to setup a battlenet server in Africa for us plebs with limited bandwidth comes back as "It's not financially viable"

          Yet they still reap the full benifit of us paying the full retail price for the licence.

          As such I belief as a consumer that bought the licence at full price blizzard has a obligation to provide us with a full service. If they cannot or choose not then I should have the right to do what I can to use their software to it's full ability. In this case that means playing on Bnet rather then battle.net

          This is see falls very much into the realm of my rights as a consumer of their product.

          I completely agree they should have rights in controlling their creation, but if they share their creation to the masse consumer at a price, but cannot provide a full service to all consumers, then I as a consumer, has payed the full price for the licence, but does not have full access to their product because of their decisions have the right to use an alternative.

          • Demanding that blizzard to setup a battlenet server in Africa for us plebs with limited bandwidth comes back as "It's not financially viable"

            Then Blizzard should have region-coded the game to run only on those versions of Windows sold in countries that have decent connections to the battle.net servers.

        • and what about the rights of the customers?

          blizzard's rights end where my money meets the salesperson's hand.

          EULA = pointless garbage and hostile towards decency and users.

          basically, they can suck our collective roosters.
      • "You're assumption that bnet was used only for pirate copies is wrong. There are countries around the world where we are not as connected to the internet as the rest of the first world. Connecting to battlenet is not an option."

        I appreciate that, but I agree with the GPP that it's still hard to get worked up into boycott mode over this. The BNetd guys should have known that they were playing with fire here when they made something bypassing their protection scheme. It's really silly to assume that Blizz
        • I've gone beyond boycott.

          I will never buy blizzrd products again. If this is how they treat their clients. I'd rather not support them.
        • the real problem is with the apathy of "consumers" like yourself.

          on the other hand, us CUSTOMERS are very angry about shit such as this.

          that they can demand what people do with products they buy , is ludicrous and extremely obscene.

          battle.net is a piece of junk. if we weren't forced to use it, very few people would still be playing there now. choice is always a good thing in cases like this.

          but clearly, you are not intelligent enough to understand the importance of this case. this has very important ram
          • "the real problem is with the apathy of "consumers" like yourself."

            Apathy? If a sign says "Beware of Dog", and somebody pets dog, and that somebody gets bit, should I feel sorry for them? Call it apathy if you like. They picked a bad fight.

            "but clearly, you are not intelligent enough to understand the importance of this case. this has very important ramifications for the entire industry."

            Uh huh. I'm not turning into a drama queen over it, so I'm not intelligent. Never mind that these guys picked a

      • To add to this (Score:4, Insightful)

        by phorm ( 591458 ) on Monday June 20, 2005 @10:27AM (#12863575) Journal
        As a longterm battle.net user, I'd say that often enough bnet isn't all that reliable. More often than not a lengthy game of warcraft III will end up with an ally being dropped by the bnet servers, or something similar. A project like this allows not only for cloned functionality, but to create a better, more tolerant (and private) environment than the offical servers.

      • Well..If you do not have an internet connection, play something less rather than using softwares that have legal issues.

        Otherwise, it's the same as saying "Hey I don't have enough money, so I'll make my own (to use at home of course *cough cough*".

        Having said that, you CANNOT say BNetD was not use for piracy. This software took off and became more public when Blizzard started doing Warcraft III beta testing and the whole world wanted to play it. It was obvious that BNetD was not build around running le

        • you CANNOT say BNetD was not use for piracy.

          You're right. As far as I could determine, bnetd was started because battle.net was designed or administered by incompetent people, and the authors of bnetd wanted a usable way to play the game they purchased.

          I was using bnetd long before Warcraft III beta existed. I started using it because my friends and I got tired of spending hours trying to all get in the same game to play together. With bnetd, that changed to about 5 minutes.

          There are two reasons why

        • you CANNOT say BNetD was not use for piracy.

          And you CANNOT say BNetD doesn't have significant, non-infringing uses, which SHOULD make the DMCA irrelevant in this case.

          As for the rest of your post:

          People were using it for tournaments and LAN parties, where the whole point is to have a game shared only among people in a single location, not the entire internet. Additionally, even if there was internet access, there almost certainly wasn't the bandwidth to support several players at once, and even if it di

    • Re:Finding it hard to get upset (Score:5, Informative)

      by mr_tenor ( 310787 ) on Monday June 20, 2005 @05:21AM (#12861495)

      but is this a case of the "good guys" picking the wrong battle to fight over digital rights?


      This is THE right battle, and a very important one - the case sets a precedent for being able to say "you can't reverse engineer to make compatible products" in EULAs. The judge said previously that such a EULA is valid.



      This is very bad. If people can do that, then proprietary software companies can eliminate the possiblity of competitors by denying interoperability. Currently it's possible but damn hard (eg. Microsoft's DOC format, Novell Connector). But if making your product compatible with the competition is made illegal thanks to a few words in the EULA, then you have no chance.

    • bnetd is also used to play the games when battle.net is down, especially during betas (the lawsuit started during the WC3 beta I believe)

      it is also used at LAN parties, where battle.net is not available.
      • it is also used at LAN parties, where battle.net is not available.

        What? Who runs a LAN party without providing internet access?

        And if you answer that one, how do you set up a LAN party such that the LAN option in the games doesn't work?
        • What, your kidding right?!

          Don't you remember how man LAN games only used IPX/SPX ... there were quite a few. And today's game's might all use IP, and thats great, but lets not forget about the games of yesterday...
          • While there may have been many LAN games that used IPX/SPX, I don't believe bnetd supported much more than Starcraft. Starcraft DID start life as having IPX (and on the Mac, AppleTalk) methods for a LAN game; however, by the time WC3 and the bnetd issue came around, StarCraft not only had a Mac OS X port, but UDP was the only LAN method supported (Mac-side, anyway).

            I do believe Blizzard was upset with bnetd mainly because of how it was used to play pirated copies of the WC3 beta, and by that time, I don't
        • the lan option may or may not work, but the big feature of bnetd is that it provides the chat rooms to arrange games in. when theres 1000+ people at a lan party thats important
        • Ever heard the word "Intranet"?

    • Re:Finding it hard to get upset (Score:4, Interesting)

      by 10101001 10101001 ( 732688 ) on Monday June 20, 2005 @06:26AM (#12861712) Journal
      I mean, yes, I know the DMCA is a "bad thing". However, it does seem to me that the only practical purpose of the whole bnetd thing was to allow people to play pirated copies of Blizzard games online.

      And VCRs are only used for piracy. And P2P is only used for piracy. And how dare you buy a Gameboy Advance flash cart since that's totally for piracy too.

      Blizzard's own battle.net system has always seemed a good system to me; it's fast, it's free (unless you include WoW) and I haven't noticed serious reliability problems since shortly after the Diablo 2 launch.

      Woopie. It's fast and free. So?

      Maybe I've just got the wrong end of the stick here (and I'd be happy to be corrected if I have), but is this a case of the "good guys" picking the wrong battle to fight over digital rights? I mean, it would be easier to fight the DMCA on terms that would make it easier to convince the educated (but non-techie) public, as well as lawmakers, if we weren't using a program whose main purpose in the wild is always going to be the circumvention of legitimate copy protection as the test-bed?

      Ah, of course. Let's only fight a few battles that are really wrong. Hell, the whole legal system should work like that. Why go after thieves when there are rapists? And hell, why go after rapists when there are child murderers? Yes, let's do that.

      Okay, I've trolled enough. I think going back to the VCR example might very well be a prime reason of what the problem is. When the VCR came out, there was already a laserdisc-like system setup for the movie industry to sell movies. It worked. It wasn't free (though you could claim it was reasonably priced). And certainly this knew VCR invention would allow rampant piracy.

      Now, I should stop at this point to point out how you seem be following the logic of judges of the time (and ironically how judges use the same logic now for p2p). You see, the judges of the time didn't go "Hey, a VCR is technology, just like a gun or a knife. Sure, they can be misused, but the law is here to stop misusings, not tools of such." Instead, they tried to normalize what effect it would have on society to justify why VCRs should be okay.

      But don't you see, that this is the same logic that allowed for Prohibition (well, and a large temporary support for it). Prohibition, though, didn't solve social ills. It just made elements of it more hidden and more violent. So, while certainly those who supported Prohibition had a somewhat noble goal--getting drunk daily isn't good for you--they decided to go about it by forcing their will on others instead of trying to convince others to follow their way. Of course, they probably did this knowing that it'd take the force of law (ie, cops) to get a lot of people to comply.

      The US is founded on the idea of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. So long as enough people hold on to these ideals, society will survive without needing Draconian laws to stop the latest "social ill". And if enough people don't hold on to these ideals, we're fucked already. Turning the country into a totalitarian regime which tries to control society or think for society only creates a totalitarian regime.

      So, in closing, the reason you should be upset about the whole case is that a company has decided that they don't like what someone else is writing. And it looks like the government might step in and stop them. It doesn't matter how dubious, obscene, or likely to incite societal decay those writings are, no matter how much there exists another free or "better" alternative. People are free to make tools that can harm. And people can choose to harm themselves or others and be held responsible when they truly infringe the life, liberty, or pursuit of happiness--that last one is vague, but, oh well--over the others infringing of their own life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness (ie, my liberty outweighs your pursuit of happiness). This holds true as much for cloning the IBM bios to cloning the Unix OS to cloning a lowly game protocol.

    • Re:Finding it hard to get upset (Score:5, Informative)

      by egburr ( 141740 ) on Monday June 20, 2005 @07:34AM (#12862069) Homepage
      ...the only practical purpose of the whole bnetd thing was to allow people to play pirated copies of Blizzard games online. Blizzard's own battle.net system has always seemed a good system to me; it's fast, it's free...

      You're kidding, right? Actually, that may be true now, but it wasn't true a few years ago. A few friends and I regularly played Starcraft. We were connected on a voice chat program. We were all logged into Battle.Net. We were all using a specific private chat channel in Battle.Net. Although we could talk to each other over voice chat, it regularly took over an hour of fiddling around, logging off and back on, before we were all visible to each other in Battle.Net's chat. Trying to all get into the same game often took another hour as we took turns setting up the game as somebody (different each time) couldn't join the game or got booted immediately when the game started.

      I finally stumbled onto bnetd and set it up on my linux box at home. After that, we had NO troubles jumping on and playing. Then the only time we had trouble was if someone had played on Battle.Net during the week and a patch had come out. Then I would spend about half an hour to download and install an updated bnetd, and we'd be playing again.

      There was no piracy involved. We all had legitimate copies of the game. However, Battle.Net was horrible. The only way to overcome Blizzard's incompetence was to use bnetd.

      • Your troubles weren't because StarCraft was never really set up to use NAT properly, were they? StarCraft kind of assumed you'd be on a modem, not behind a firewall with 4 other people sharing cable.

        I've heard of people having trouble on battle.net, and frankly, I have to wonder what they were doing; it always worked fine for me.

        • Re:Finding it hard to get upset (Score:4, Informative)

          by egburr ( 141740 ) on Monday June 20, 2005 @10:36AM (#12863655) Homepage
          No, NAT wasn't the problem. Some of us were NATted, others weren't. There seemed to be no correlation between problems and NAT users. The problem was system load on Battle.Net. From about 5pm Friday through Sunday afternoon, it was close to impossible for us to play together. If we all happened to have an evening free during the week, it was great. However, Friday nights were the best time for us to play, except that Battle.Net was unusuable then.

          Bnetd made all the difference. Even though I was one of the ones behind NAT, and so was my bnetd server, none of us had trouble connecting or playing.

          When Blizzard added zones to Battle.Net, that made a huge difference (as long as we all remembered to pick the same zone).

      • Last time I checked (probably a while ago) Starcraft and Diablo II already had LAN support. Although you needed to have one computer have an active internet connection for D2 for some odd reason. Honestly though I think most people like bnetd so you can play pirated copies of games and thats what its going to come down to.
    • The thing you're missing is that they're not being nailed for their reverse engineering--they're being nailed for a minor procedural flaw! They failed to use proper Chinese firewalls in their reverse engineering process. If they HAD done it "properly", there would be no question whatsoever that bnetd was fully legal. Reverse engineering with Chinese firewalls has been upheld by the courts time and time again! So any questions about Blizzard's "rights" to control their "property" are completely off-base
      • Would you mind posting a link to explain what you're talking about? Everything I've read has pointed to this having to do with the DMCA, I haven't seen any mention of 'chinese firewalls'.
        • Er, just "chinese wall", sorry, my mistake. Here's a link [wikipedia.org]. See the bottom entry, under "Computer Science". If they'd properly used Chinese walls, there'd be no question of EULA violations, since the guys writing the code wouldn't be the guys who agreed to the EULA.

          My understanding is that the DMCA is involved in this case mainly because of its provisions that specifically allow reverse engineering. But now that I see that Groklaw is also covering this (at least in passing), you can probably get more an
          • It wouldn't help.

            The dmca is not involved in this case because of the EULA.

            The EULA prevents reverse engineering. The court agreed with this.

            Secondarily, the DMCA prohibits bypassing copyright protections methods which bnet did.

            Whether bnetd folks agreed to the EULA or not they would still be liable under the DMCA.
            • If it were that simple, the EFF wouldn't have bothered getting involved. The DMCA has exceptions specifically allowing reverse engineering! So I think your last statement ("Whether bnetd folks agreed to the EULA or not they would still be liable under the DMCA") is highly debatable, and apparently so does the EFF.

              The EFF's page on this case can be found here [eff.org]. The important part is this: "As it stands, the lower court's decision makes it unlawful in most cases to reverse engineer any commercial softwa
          • Thanks, much clearer now.
    • However, I'm finding it hard to see them as particularly villainous here.
      You are correct. First, Blizzard tolerated bnetd until people starting using it to play WC3 betas. Second, the name "bnetd" is an obvious copyright infringement and Blizzard pretty much has to go after them. Third, Blizzard has always included LAN support, and there is plenty of generic tunneling software for this (e.g. Kali). Blizzard simply isn't a compelling villian.
      • "bnetd" sounds just as cryptic as any UNIX shell command. "bnet" is not a Blizzard trademark, according to the USPTO the only "bnet" trademark that's still alive is owned by "Charles River Analytics, Inc. CORPORATION MASSACHUSETTS". There's also "bnetsoftware" which is a company name. Just because users abbreviate Battle.Net to bnet does not mean Blizzard owns the bnet trademark. In fact it's probably their duty to make people call it "Battle.Net" just as Adobe tries to make people say "manipulated with Ado
    • This is ABSOLUTELY the wrong battle, because the BnetD developers have clearly *not* operated in good faith. They have not exerted even *minimal* effort to preserve the anti-piracy measures of Blizzard's games.

      The technicality they have introduced -- that they don't know how to validate a CD signature to ensure it is a true Blizzard CD key -- would hold water IF they had done what they *knew* how to do: verify that the serial LOOKS valid, and is not already in use on the network. Their failure to do even t
    • However, it does seem to me that the only practical purpose of the whole bnetd thing was to allow people to play pirated copies of Blizzard games online.

      Whether or not that is true, it is inconsequential. The point here is that if you want play your game, should you be able to play it on any server you choose. The rights of those who which to use bnetd instead of battle.net, for whatever reason, trump the "right" of Blizzard to maximum profit.
    • However, it does seem to me that the only practical purpose of the whole bnetd thing was to allow people to play pirated copies of Blizzard games online.

      The people who play on the server I've run in the past all shelld out their $50 ($500 total) for the games... There's no piracy. The point is to have an environment where you control the rules and trust the other players you're playing with. The PvPGN faq says it well too... Having your own server is good for "people who want to play on a LAN but with Bat
    • I don't know about Starcraft or Warcraft, I never played much of them, but Diablo2 is the most heavily modded non-FPS that I am aware of ( link [it-point.com]), and you can't play mods on standard battle.net. Bnetd would allow custom servers to be set up for popular mods (link [it-point.com]), which would really help the community flourish. As it is, if you want to play a mod in anything other than single player, you have to schedule a play date with a particular other player, and pickup games or a large real-time player chat are virtu
  • How many lawsuits over the DMCA must arise before we let our blood boil to the point of not tolerating this junk legislation?

    Anger aside, let me justify my remark.

    People with bombs in their shoes boarding planes spend less time in jail than DMCA violators. Why is this? Why does a company which spends so much time making their games cross-platform and well-coded try so hard to make the online options for their users so centrally controlled? Why do so many companies in general use the DMCA to bash the he
    • Why do so many companies in general use the DMCA to bash the heads of unsuspecting coders who mean no harm to company or society?

      These coders honestly didn't suspect that reverse engineering Blizzard's technology might encourage their wrath?
    • I believe Blizzard considers BATTLE.NET (USPTO says it's allcaps so I write that allcaps) a sales point for getting a legitimate version over a pirated one. It seems to work, many people buy Blizzard games (and other games that offer free internet play to legitimate versions) in order to access BATTLE.NET, even if they usually pirate every game.
    • The court found that they were contractually bound by the EULA to not reverse-engineer.

      Additionally the court found they were guilty of violating the DMCA by bypassing the anti-piracy cd-check.

      So its not as simple as people shouting 'DMCA REVERSE-ENGINEERING BAD BLIZZARD BAD'

      • I understand this. That is not what I said.

        What I did say was that this should not be necessary in a free society. The defendants made the means, and other people used them. Again, why do these gys get harsher penalties than those who sell guns?
        • I expect their primary reason was wanting to retain control of their unreleased project WC3 and secondarily from a desire to reduce piracy of their other products which used battlenet. Perhaps it was the other way around.
        • Because your right to bear arms is protected in the constitution. Your right to get the experience you paid for in a product you purchased isn't.

          I agree with your general point, but this is a stupid arguement.

          • "Your right to get the experience you paid for in a product you purchased isn't."

            Your right to free speech, free assembly, and free press is protected under the constitution. Please define the difference between code and speech in this context.
            • Code is only recognized as speech by those who understand it. Even by those who do it's obvious that programming languages arehighly specialized and, at best, secondary languages. Code simply doesn't have the same status as human language. That might change if an AI is ever legally recognized as a "person", or it might not.

    • People with bombs in their shoes boarding planes spend less time in jail than DMCA violators

      Nice tag line. Now how about showing us some proof?

  • PvPGN (Score:3, Informative)

    by blixel ( 158224 ) on Monday June 20, 2005 @11:50AM (#12864361)
    I hope bnetd wins, but in the mean time: PvPGN works great [berlios.de]
  • Why not sue MS for making windows, which in fact runs all pirated software. Without windows pirated software/audio/video would reduce immensly.

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