Blizzard Rains on Bnetd Project 771
Sir Homer writes: "Blizzard Entertainment has shut down the bnetd project using the DMCA, as declared in their site. The bnetd project is a battle.net server emulator licenced under the GNU/GPL originally for Linux and also works on most Unix variants. Project details can be found on this freshmeat.net page." As I understood it, bnetd was a complete re-implementation of battle.net, so it isn't clear what copyright violation Blizzard alleges occurred. Note to bnetd: under the DMCA, you can file a counter-notice with the hosting provider asserting that Blizzard was wrong.
Boycott (Score:5, Insightful)
But on to the topic of Blizzard. They're soon to be releasing Warcraft III, and the Slashdot audience is going to be a major market for them. I think we should steer away from any of their products until they withdraw this complaint and compensate/apologize.
So: when you see Warcraft III on the shelves, don't buy it. Buy Castle Wolfenstein or whatever, just don't buy products from a company who is against our rights on the net.
Overseas! (Score:3, Insightful)
Blizzard just fell in my estimation (Score:2, Insightful)
It's obvious why Blizzard wishes this project didn't exist: they're trying to make money with Battle.net, and here these guys come along to potentially wipe out the market. So I might even have some degree of sympathy for them. But using the DMCA is just so obviously Wrong... it's practically immoral.
There's business, there's even "playing rough", and then there's just plain being assholes. Blizzard has crossed the line, and I don't think I'll ever think of them as highly again.
The only solution (Score:4, Insightful)
People bitch about the DMCA but if Blizzard comes out with a must have game, will you go out and buy it anyway ?
Time to show you intend to punish companies that wield the DMCA to clobber the little guys.
Boycott Blizzard.
I fail to understand the DMCA Jurisdiction (Score:5, Insightful)
BNETD: A program that emulates a battle.net server.
Notice how it says "server"? Blizzard doesn't sell their server software, and nor does BNETD allow people to play the Blizzard games. I've never heard of a company shutting down a utility on the grounds that it enables more people to use their product. That'd be like a bucket company suing a mop company for making mops designed to fit in their buckets.
DMCA all over again...
The real reason it was shut down... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Blizzard: it's been fun (Score:2, Insightful)
And the online games that are not played on b.net are (more) vulnerable to hacking (who wants to play with a whole bunch of Level 99 characters?). Hence the existance of battle.net strongly encourages gamers to actually purchase the game.
They may not actually make any money directly of b.net (yet...), but I'm sure that it's contributed to their sales...
I don't think it's Battle.net, its pirated games (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't know enough about bnetd, but I would bet that bnetd doesn't do serial number verification. This basically allows everybody to use the same warez copy of a particular game and enjoy the benefits of Battle.net. I'm sure this is the largest reason why Blizzard wants to shut them down. Blizzard doesn't make any money off its free Battle.net service, but it does enforce that people actually buy the game.
- d
Re:I fail to understand the DMCA Jurisdiction (Score:1, Insightful)
Warcraft III Anyone? (Score:2, Insightful)
Now with this bnetd, you can copy your Warcraft III Beta CD over and over again and simply play on your LAN or any bnetd server
With that in mind, Blizzard probably should have gone a different route then using the DMCA
Re:Blizzard just fell in my estimation (Score:3, Insightful)
1) The game could check for duped keys itself since it has to talk to the other clients. It does not.
2) The user could play over TCP/IP with Diablo II and older games allowed playing with IPX
3) The CDKEY check can not be implemented in third-party servers because it is encrypted! The number is different every time - even for the same key!
The bnetd project has been very careful to stay away from cracks, serial numbers, ISOs, etc. They were removing items like those from the message boards. It sure didn't seem to help them in the end!
Re:Blizzard: it's been fun (Score:5, Insightful)
Bye Blizzard. (Score:5, Insightful)
But consider something. bnetd costs you nothing. If anything, it saves you bandwidth costs. You still sell the games. Oh, sure, you might complain that there's no cd key verification in bnetd and people can play cracked copies online with others now. Is this your reason? Perhaps it makes sense. Perhaps it doesn't. Maybe this gives cheaters the upper hand, maybe it doesn't. Maybe nobody really cares anyways.
What have you accomplished? Did the DMCA stop the proliferation of decss? No, it just moved it underground. You've taken a legal product and forced them to become outlaws. Now they have NO desire to cooperate with you, nor should they. Here is a group of people, who for NO MONEY WHATSOEVER have taken it upon themselves to provide services in your honor, to promote your products. And how do you respond?
What could these people have done for you? Its these same dedicated individuals who spend countless hours creating maps, who create all the fan sites. Creating for years on end an almost insatiable market of gamers who drool in anticipation of your next quality release, so they can start all over again starting with a purchase that puts money in your pocket and funds your next game. They're your customers. They're people who have a vested entertainment interest in prolonging the life and creative talents of your fine establishment. Without these people, your games would have no community. They would be played for a few months then forgotten. Your sales would never reach the levels you're used to seeing. These people are the reason you exist as you do today.
And you've just gone and pissed them all off. Great job. I truely admire your lack of vision.
-Restil
Re:Blizzard: it's been fun (Score:2, Insightful)
Now my question: Why did they target bnetd and not FSGS [fsgs.net]. They have made 2x the progress on emulating bnet and have a fairly good service. They are, in fact, emulating several game servers.
I think Blizzard better pull out of it because of the bad PR. I've already decided not to buy their products til they make a Linux port (which wont be soon, i imagine). They are just harming their image more. Occasionally I have used bnetd at lan parties where there was no net access because its so much easier then using IPX (for starcraft).
Re:Blizzard: it's been fun (Score:2, Insightful)
Two words: Embrace and extend. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:The only solution (Score:5, Insightful)
I hate to burst the
Let's think about this: Slashdot has about a quarter million users. Of these, about 1/3 are zealots who don't run windows, not even for the little pleasures. Of the remaining, i would suspect fewer than 1/5 of them *EVER* buy software because they feel damnit it should be free (beer). And after that, I would say that 10% of the remaining windows users who don't pirate software actually play blizard games but would be still willing to participate in a boycot. The rest will go on buying the game anyway because it's going to be a good game.
So we're left with 3000 people that will take part in a boycot against the DCMA and Blizzard simultaneously. Oh Ouch. How many copies of diablo II have sold? [blizzard.com]
Well here's a guess. 2.75 Million copies. And again, [blizzard.com]
how about the expansion? Another million copies. Boycotting them will do no good.
Now, I was trying to figure out why they did this, and I was thinking "oh this is easy, there's a charge for playing on battle.net, that's their revenue model. But on battle.net [battle.net] i found this:
Battle.net provides an arena for Blizzard customers to chat, challenge opponents and initiate multiplayer games, at no cost to the user. There is no hourly or monthly fee to use Battle.net, and there is no startup charge. To play a supported game over the Internet with other players worldwide, simply select the Battle.net option from within the game.
So what gives, blizard? How is this helping you? Are there ads in battle.net? Do you use it for free market research somehow? Do you simply want to track ALL of the online blizard games going on? Throw me a bone here.
But let's be serious: I'm not going to boycott blizzard. They've only released 5 games in their history, yet they've ALL been fantastic smash hits that i've loved. So I'm just going to go do the exact same thing that every other casual windows user on slashdot is going to do. I'm going to wait for a copy of it to hit kopykatz or morpheus and download it.
Boo fucking hoo, boycot.
~z
Are these people on acid? (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm going to stick to the moral high ground, and never play another Blizzard game again unless it's a pirated version.
Sounds like bullshit (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm no lawyer, but this sounds like pure bullshit to me.
It's common practice for corporate lawyers to send vague threatening (but totally unfounded) e-mails to people when they don't like what they're doing, even if they have no intention to fight a losing legal battle.
Here's why I think this is stupid:
- The anti-circumvention clause deals with access to a copyrighted work. There doesn't appear to be a copyrighted work in question here.
- There is an explicit exception for reverse engineering for the purpose of interoperability, with a sentence like, "... to achieve interoperability of an independently created computer program with other programs." Which seems to be almost precisely what they are doing.
FYI, the text of the DMCA is here: http://www.loc.gov/copyright/title17/92chap12.html [loc.gov] .
Even if you can't afford a lawsuit, please guys, make it expensive (in some sense) for corporations to make these kinds of threats. That can mean fighting back a little and racking up legal fees, that can mean spreading the word on fansites and such and causing an *increase* in popularity (when what they want to do of course is to stifle the project). It can mean starting up your own similar project and making them have to track you down and threaten you, too.
Personally, I've had a couple of these run-ins myself. For the first one, I got help from the FSF and the lawyers finally backed off. Most recently, I had a run in with some type foundries over my program "embed" ( http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/~twm/embed/ [cmu.edu] ); simply letting the lawyer know that I wasn't willing to back down without a fight convinced them to give up.
Anti-circumvention technology (Score:2, Insightful)
Just a point of clarification. Obviously bnetd is not copyright violation since it is reverse engineered. But this isn't why they are getting shut down...
The aforementioned site either hosts or distributes software which illegally
modifies and/or alters Blizzard Entertainment copyrighted software or
bypasses anti-circumvention technology
The reason Blizzard is panicked about bnetd is that it bypasses their "anti-circumvention technology". In other words, Blizzard will claim that the BattleNet servers are their method of ensuring that people don't illegally copy their games. It is the only time that they check to make sure that you aren't using somebody else's licence. At least in the past, Blizzard game installations have not checked with centralized servers to make sure you don't install on multiple machines. The only thing that you couldn't do if you installed on multiple machines with the same licence was play on BattleNet. Now that has been taken away from them and there is nothing that a copied version of a Blizzard game lacks.
It seems like there are few solutions to this (other than legal ones which are costly and only piss people off):
Anyways, I hate to see big companies picking on fan-made tools, but I guess I understand why Blizzard feels threatened. I hope they can come to a mutually satisfying agreement that will let us all have more fun with Blizzard games but still lets Blizzard make money since they work long and hard to make quality games (far better games than any free-software group has ever made IMHO).
Re:piracy??? (Score:5, Insightful)
Not true at all. "Doing nothing to prevent piracy" is not the same thing as "facilitating piracy". Facilitating piracy implies an intentional act (e.g. offering warez'd binaries for download). Simply failing to do key checking is not.
Shall we make ftp illegal now because it does no checking to make sure that the files you transfer aren't copy protected? Most of the Internet would be a violation of the DMCA under your criteria. (hell, maybe it is... in which case either the DMCA goes or the Internet goes... they can't co-exist)
Re:Are these people on acid? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Blizzard: it's been fun (Score:3, Insightful)
If anyone sold you a book and said you could only use official [publisher] bookmarks in it, since reverse-engineering their patented bookmark technology is illegal, you'd laugh your head off. How about a sack of potatoes which you are not allowed to make into waffle fries like Chick-Fil-A's, or a box of pens with which you are not allowed to write anything about the manufacture of writing utencils, past present or future. Absolutely nobody would think these to be even remotely reasonable restrictions on usage of something I purchased. Why then is the DMCA seen as good and proper by anyone at all?
If you want to talk about knee-jerk reactions, look at the guys who thought up the DMCA. You know, the ones who think that Congress is only there to guarantee their continued income. "Oh no, new technology threatens our revenues. Our lawyers tell us that the only solution is to make it illegal to do anything we do not explicitly permit." Gee, what a great idea.
Re:Boycott (Score:3, Insightful)
If you buy a product from me on the condition that you only use it while wearing your grandmother's dress and masturbating into a jar of peanut butter, and you can't abide by those conditions, then don't buy the product.
Now, if Blizzard doesn't have any legalese in their purchase agreement restricting services such as bnetd, then Blizzard can fuck themselves and you can do whatever you want with your game.
Note that I care not one iota for the legal aspects of anything. The moral and the ethical aspects are my only concerns, and those are sometimes at odds with the legal framework. I won't live long enough even if I reach extreme old age to change unjust laws in the courts, but i do honor any and all contracts that I have assented to, and if Blizzard wants me in grannie's nightdress with peanut butter on my cock and I want to play Warcraft III bad enough, move over granny and hello, Jif.
You can't get any simpler than that.
Yes, I know that Blizzard are trying to prevent ther use/programming of a server product, but the same idea applies. Presuumably the programmers of bnetd had to obtain a legal copy in order to program their server. Therefore, if such a restriction exists in the Blizzard EULA, then I feel that the bnetd people are morally obligated to honor it. If not, well, as I said before, Blizzard can fuck thmselves.
Does the restriction exist or not?
Re:This is nothing new. (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, IIRC, the DMCA has statutes/statements in it about how the law isn't retroactive (IOW: if someone started circumventing an access control method prior to the law taking effect, the DMCA couldn't be used against them). If your friend indeed started working on this prior to the enactment of the DMCA, I don't think the BNetD guys have anything to worry about.
It might be worth looking into, sure, it's a backwards way to avoid the DMCA affecting their work, but it sure beats folding like they have.