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

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.)

 

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.

 

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

 

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.