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Bnetd Fights Back with Support of EFF |
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The Electronic Frontier Foundation has taken up the case of the bnetd project and has written a response to Vivendi's cease and desist letter. The response letter is up on EFF's site, you can read it HERE. Read the (Press Release). The short version: EFF doesn't think Blizzard has a case and unless Blizzard responds with more information the code goes back up in 10 days. Bnetd also has an updated petition page and a donations page. Infoworld has a good opinion piece explaining how Blizzard's action could negatively impact the entire software industry (Some games aren't fun).
UPDATE: C|Net News has picked up the story (Group backs ISP in online gaming dispute).
Finally, a short story ...
The WarBall Gaming Clubs, A Fable
Once there was a company by the name of Snowstorm that invented a new game called WarBall that was somewhat similar to tennis.
You could, for example, play the game alone against a mechanical opponent called "the computer," which is how Snowstorm referred to their tennis ball machine. Playing alone was fun but, as in tennis, players eventually wanted to play against other people. This was one of the reasons that WarBall became a great success. Because, unlike tennis, up to eight people could play WarBall simultaneously. However, in order to start a game of multiplayer WarBall you needed to have a tennis court at home or, as Snowstorm called it, a Local Area Net (LAN). Students could use the LANs at school and some companies had tennis courts for their employees, but not many people have tennis courts at home. For most people then, it was difficult to find opponents for WarBall. Desire being the mother of invention and inspired by the example of tennis clubs, an enterprising company named Doorga, after the Hindu goddess of death and destruction, created a place with plenty of tennis courts where players of WarBall could meet friends, talk, play the game and even have WarBall tournaments to determine the best players. These WarBall clubs, formerly known as tennis clubs, were a meeting place among the nets (an Internet meeting place) and a great boon that caused WarBall to rocket into popularity.
Seeing how successful the Doorga clubs were, Snowstorm soon built their own, which they called BattleClubs. Popular as these BattleClubs were, they did not meet the needs or expectations of every player. For example, BattleClubs were often overcrowded and people could not get in. Not infrequently the BattleClubs would simply be closed. Even if players could get into the BattleClub, other members of the club would be unruly, using inappropriate language or just being annoying. Some people, who lived behind walls of fire, could not reach the BattleClubs at all. So, enterprising players of WarBall started building their own private versions of BattleClubs where they could invite only their friends and make their own rules.
At first, Snowstorm did nothing with regard to these private clubs. But eventually, after several years, Snowstorm decided it did not like the competition, small as it was, and became determined to get the private clubs shut down. Unfortunately, Snowstorm did not have any rights in tennis courts or the concept of tennis clubs. Thus, normally, law would be of no help to them. However, because they had invented the game, Snowstorm had exclusive intellectual property rights in the unique racquets used to play WarBall. In years past, this would still not have helped Snowstorm. Traditionally, a game equipment maker had no control over how people used game equipment once it was sold. People could create game clubs, or hold tournaments using game equipment legitimately purchased without permission of the game equipment manufacturer.
But Snowstorm came up with a clever way to get around traditional law by using a new law, the DMCA, that seemed to overturn traditional laws. Thus, Snowstorm claimed that they weren't trying to close the clubs because they did not like competition, but because they needed to ensure that people only used legitimate Snowstorm racquets. It was piracy of their intellectual property in the racquets that was the concern claimed Snowstorm. In Snowstorm's BattleClubs, guards checked the racquets of everyone who entered to make sure they were legitimate. The private clubs had offered to work with Snowstorm to implement a similar service, but they were rebuffed.
Can Snowstorm use the DMCA to shut down competition? Are the digital equivalent of tennis clubs fair game?
To be continued ... as the legal battle is joined
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"User's Login" | Login/Create an Account | 40 comments |
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Re: Bnetd Fights Back with Support of EFF (Score: 0) by Anonymous (Name Withheld on Advice of Counsel) on Tuesday, March 12 @ 08:57:31 EST | can snowstorm use the DMCA to shut down competition?
Not if we have anything to say about it.
W*A*R*F*O*R*G*E*
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Re: Bnetd Fights Back with Support of EFF (Score: 0) by Anonymous (Name Withheld on Advice of Counsel) on Tuesday, March 12 @ 10:43:34 EST | God I wish the game pirates would stop pretending they really care. All they are interested in is their free pirate software. Stop messing with people's livelihoods. |
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Re: Bnetd Fights Back with Support of EFF (Score: 0) by Anonymous (Name Withheld on Advice of Counsel) on Tuesday, March 12 @ 11:01:09 EST | The problem started when bnetd was being used to pirate the WarCraft 3 beta. You guys seem to be oblivious to Blizzard's rights on the issue and care only about blindly marching behind the banner of open source.
Yeah, I'd like to see bnetd return. It's good to have more than one server to connect to. Blizzard is acting poorly when they said that they refuse to have an open key-server to which projects like bnetd could connect.
However, they are right in saying that bnetd is used to circumvent their copy control measures. Why aren't you guys screaming to have Blizzard create an open key-server (ala Quake 3, Half-Life, etc).
I happen to agree with Blizzard on this issue. Again, while I would like to see a fair compromise on the issue, I don't think either side is trying to be reasonable. |
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Re: Bnetd Fights Back with Support of EFF (Score: 0) by Anonymous (Name Withheld on Advice of Counsel) on Tuesday, March 12 @ 12:14:19 EST | So if I use a warcraft cd to keep my computer table to stop wobbling and blizzard hears about it; they'll use the dmca to stop ppl from using non-blizzard leg-chocks?
All Blizzard owns the right to is the right to reskin their game 20 different ways. Like I'm going to fall for *that* again.
Screw you all for making 'peasants' that 'farm' in a 'strategy' game. You don't 'farm' in chess.
If Open Source were dominant in Commercial Software. Then when Warcraft were introduced, the users could have skinned & extended it themselves. Then Blizzard would actually have to take a whole 'nother concept and 'soft it up (groan). But you *wanted* to skin it a certain way only and didn't want to worry about competing with better ideas; and wanted to be the only one to b able to profit from this aspect too(not just indirect usage of product).
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Re: Bnetd Fights Back with Support of EFF (Score: 0) by Anonymous (Name Withheld on Advice of Counsel) on Tuesday, March 12 @ 12:50:48 EST | The thing is that bnetd doesn't actually do the circumvention involved in war3b. The circumvention is done by users. The method involves using a program to change one byte of a dll that comes with the game to ignore the need for a CD key reply. bnetd is just a fancy chat server, the games are hosted in a peer to peer fashion and don't make use of the bnetd central server except for establishing connections for games. Get the FAQs strait before saying it's illegal, because the server itself doesn't do anything wrong. (goto the bnetd faq and history, RTFFAQ before you post) |
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another realife example (Score: 0) by Anonymous (Name Withheld on Advice of Counsel) on Tuesday, March 12 @ 13:08:39 EST | could I then force companies that teach locksmiths because they have share knowledge that can circumvented the locks on my doors that I use to protect my intellectual property. When I have done that does it then allow me to go after the people who make baseball bats because baseball bats could be used to break my windows and so on, or should I just press charges on the person who broke into my house and stole my computer. |
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There are a lot of stupid comments here, and several apparent misunderstandings (Score: 0) by Anonymous (Name Withheld on Advice of Counsel) on Wednesday, March 13 @ 06:19:54 EST | First off, as has been repeated here numerous times, bnetd was NOT used to pirate Blizzard games. It was used to PLAY blizzard games over a TCP/IP network. Most blizzard games already allow play over an IPX network, but TCP/IP is only allowed over battlenet. This already invalidates much of the argument that bnetd is for piracy, since Blizzard allows netorked games. Bnetd just allows greater flexibility, and emulates the functionality of battlenet. Since networked play as well as solo play are both allowed, it is easily possible to completely circumvent the cd key simply by not playing on battlenet.
Second the Bnetd group neither pirated nor modifyed anything to create bnetd. They reverse engineered the battlenet servers by sniffing packets sent to or from their machines. This is akin to taping your own phone. It's legal. Even the DMCA allows for some reverse engineering, and this could easily fall into that category.
Third the warforge group that made the patches for bnetd had no intention of pirating warcraft 3. They wanted a functional patch to bnetd (remember untill then bnetd appeared to be ok with Blizzard) so they started implementing it from the beta. This was totally legal before the DMCA, and maybe legal under DMCA. Someone from the warforge group abused the software, and allowed people to start pirating Warcraft 3. This is the first place that there is a clear violation of the law.
Bnetd is legal since it alters nothing that Blizzard made. If Blizzard had supplied the bnetd team with the battlenet code, there might have been a problem, but bnetd does not alter any blizzard code. Even warforge patches only alter a single bit, and then the stated purpose was only to enable the developers to implement the necessary changes. If the warorge team is truthful as to their stated purpose, that may well fall under the interoperability clause of the DMCA, but maybe not.
Blizzard has shot itself in the foot. Before they had their little fit, I'd never heard of bnetd. I didn't care. They gave it advertising. Before Blizzard had their little fit, I was looking forward to buying warcraft 3, now I probably wont. To make matters worse, a huge number of technical and legal experts appear to feel that Blizzard will loose big on this. This is not a good business practice.
Piss off a large segment of your customer base, give a 'circumvention device' free advertising, and basically be a hardass about everything? How many people do you now figure will begin setting up bnetd servers, and pirating blizzard games? How many will (like myself) just tell Blizzard what they can go do with themselves, and find some other company to provide entertainment?
Blizzard, no doubt has a right to protect their intellectual property. Whether bnetd violated that right is debatable, but even assuming that it did, I would bet that the lost sales due to piracy will be smaller than the lost sales due to the "you pissed me off and I ain't buying your crap anymore" syndrome. Remember that a lost sale due to piracy, and a lost sale due to someone not buying the software are nearly equal. Software doesn't have a per unit minimum overhead like more materal items. It is just data. The other problem is the assumption that every single pirated copy of something is a lost sale. That isn't true either. Most software pirates wouldn't buy it anyway. This leaves the acutal cost (as opposed to what companies would have you believe) of piracy to be rather small. If that cost is less than the cost of loss of customer loyalty, you loose, no matter what the court decision.
I have every single blizzard game. I had intended to buy warcraft 3. They've lost me as a customer, and they have no right to do anyting to me because it is MY right to simply not buy their crap.
Then I have to comment on the idiot(s?) posting here repeatedly about how bnetd was piracy, and taking money out of the mouths of hungry blizzard programmers.
Are you an idiot? Or are you just a Blizzard lackey paid to spread the party line?
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