S/W Pirates + EFF vs. Blizzard: Blizzard Wins Lawsuit!

[Killer-Kris]

nope and the only way i can tell they are craptasic is to try them , thus downloading them.

You could always use word of mouth on message boards. I value this as a means of determining whether or not I'll like a game far more than published reviews these days.

Problem is that's far from an accurate means of telling whether or not you'll like a game since people have so many different tastes.

For example way back in the day if I followed comments from most forums I would have bought StarCraft instead of Total Annihilation and would have really regretted it. Same goes for fairly recently as well, I probably would have bought PainKiller instead of Deus Ex Invisible War. Thankfully for my sake they released a demo before releasing it.

Word of mouth is great, but very far from perfect since it depends greatly on the forums you visit. If I visit a Joint Ops forum I'll be told it kicks Battlefields butt, if I visit a Battlefield forum I'll be told the opposite. Or if I visit a CS forum I could concievably be convinced to not spend any money on either of the other two and just play CS. Only to find out many years down the road I missed out on a style of game play I like very much (much more so than CS).

Then again maybe I'm just the oddball who has "strange" taste in games and as such can't rely very much on either reviews or word of mouth. (By the way I don't pirate games, I wait for the demo or I just won't buy it.)

 

[Guden Oden]

1. Blizzard isn't making any money from running battlenet so no alternate network isn't going to cost them sales.

It is if your alternate network doesn't have the proper CD-key checks in place, which it by definition can't.

2. Their is has nothing to do with the bundle content and you know it

Huh?

3. VPN which are used by thousands of companies around the world can also allowed pirates to play LAN games over the internet

Not comparable. LAN games in D2 only allows up to 8 people TOTAL. A b.net-compatible server could service dozens, maybe hundreds of players in multiple games simultaneously.

according to the DMCA VPNs should be illegal as it is disabling the copyright mechanism the same as bnetd.

It's not the circumvention of the CD key that is the critical issue here, but the duplication of b.net functionality in conjunction with lack of proper CD key checks. Please try to see the big picture here, alright?

Truely this should have really never been a violation of the end user lisence agreement as the developers never reverse engineered the client which they got the lisence for they reverse engineered the protocol and the server so their rights shouldn't have been waivered which ment the fair use should still apply.

The protocol is of course part of the game, which they most definitely reverse-engineered. So yes, it WOULD apply, and according to the decision of the court, DOES apply.

 

[Killer-Kris]

Truely this should have really never been a violation of the end user lisence agreement as the developers never reverse engineered the client which they got the lisence for they reverse engineered the protocol and the server so their rights shouldn't have been waivered which ment the fair use should still apply.

The protocol is of course part of the game, which they most definitely reverse-engineered. So yes, it WOULD apply, and according to the decision of the court, DOES apply.

Just a minor nitpick but a protocol is not part of a piece of software, it can be implemented by software but is not software, ever. It is merely a set of specifications that describe how two systems should communicate. And as such are perfectly legal to reverse engineer, at least for now.

 

[InkSpot]

Damnit i enjoy playing multiplayer d2 mods over non-blizzard realms with my legal copy...

 

[bloodbob]

1. Blizzard isn't making any money from running battlenet so no alternate network isn't going to cost them sales.

It is if your alternate network doesn't have the proper CD-key checks in place, which it by definition can't.

3. VPN which are used by thousands of companies around the world can also allowed pirates to play LAN games over the internet

Not comparable. LAN games in D2 only allows up to 8 people TOTAL. A b.net-compatible server could service dozens, maybe hundreds of players in multiple games simultaneously.

according to the DMCA VPNs should be illegal as it is disabling the copyright mechanism the same as bnetd.

It's not the circumvention of the CD key that is the critical issue here, but the duplication of b.net functionality in conjunction with lack of proper CD key checks. Please try to see the big picture here, alright?

Truely this should have really never been a violation of the end user lisence agreement as the developers never reverse engineered the client which they got the lisence for they reverse engineered the protocol and the server so their rights shouldn't have been waivered which ment the fair use should still apply.

The protocol is of course part of the game, which they most definitely reverse-engineered. So yes, it WOULD apply, and according to the decision of the court, DOES apply.

Actually the circumvention of the CD key was the critical issue here not the reverse engineering. You can play hundreds of multiplayer game simultanous multiplayers games over a lan or you could have 100s of VPN Lans it doesn't matter which. I don't a lisence to listen to the traffic on my network when my mate is playing a game on the network so reverse engineering it is fine. Does it really matter if I make software that can break encryption on only one protected movie simultanously at a time?

The exactly same thing was done with samba in respect to the reverse engineering so I can see no reason why samba is legal in the us.