Blizzard wins lawsuit on video game hacking

Cnet News ^ | September 2, 2005 | Declan McCullagh

[Panerai]

A federal appeals court has ruled that computer programmers do not have the right to reverse-engineer Blizzard Entertainment's video games to improve their playability.

The 8th Circuit Court of Appeals in St. Louis ruled Thursday that federal law--specifically, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act--disallows players from altering Blizzard games to link with servers other than the company's official Battle.net site.

Affected games published by Blizzard, a division of Vivendi Universal, include titles in its "Diablo," "Starcraft" and "Warcraft" lines.

In a 3-0 decision, the court upheld a trial judge's ruling from October, concluding the programmers' "circumvention in this case constitutes infringement."

The DMCA broadly restricts circumventing, or bypassing, antipiracy measures. Blizzard had included such measures to tie its games to the Battle.net site and detect pirated copies.

The defendants in the case, Ross Combs and Rob Crittenden, reverse-engineered the Blizzard protocol using tools like "tcpdump" to listen to the software's communications with a game server. Eventually, their "bnetd" project let Blizzard games connect with unofficial servers, yielding benefits like faster response times.

[SShultz460]

I play on Medvih :)

Horde Side all the way!

[NCLaw441]

You said: A contract is a binding agreement between two parties. It supersedes any law.
***
That is demonstrably false. A contract to buy and sell illegal drugs does not supersed the drug laws. A contract for a paid Lewinsky doesn't supersede laws against prostitution. A contract to kill someone's spouse for money doesn't supersede laws against murder or conspiracy.

[free_at_jsl.com]

You said: "That is demonstrably false. A contract to buy and sell illegal drugs does not supersed the drug laws. A contract for a paid Lewinsky doesn't supersede laws against prostitution. A contract to kill someone's spouse for money doesn't supersede laws against murder or conspiracy."

My statement was terse and I apologize if you misunderstood it. I am guilty of over generalization. Most contracts are drawn up by lawyers. Most lawyers understand that one cannot create a contract in violation of the law. You are apparently referring to contracts that are not created by lawyers. Entering into such contracts is never a good idea.

JSL