Blizzard wins lawsuit on video game hacking

[Bapes]

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.

The 8th Circuit also cited a contractual agreement that Combs and Crittenden OK'd when installing Blizzard software. That agreement prohibits reverse-engineering.

Source:ZDNet

 

[Zerglite]

gg'ed by blizz.

 

[masonx31]

THATS SOUNDS CRApy Blizzard needs to get the servers new and going for bigger bandwith mega BIG... cause its getting slow over the years now and IT SUCKS

 

[Emperor Pan I]

Thier making alot of money off WOW, which may spill elsewhere

 

[th4t1dud3]

I'm sorry, but does that mean, in short?

 

[Ntrik_]

So what exactly does this have to do with SC hacking section?

 

[Lwek]

Does that mean... no more Staredit utilities?

 

[Jakor]

Looks like servers like pgtour are gona get screwed over... HAHA GG PWNED BY BLIZZARD! NOW YOU ****ERS WANTING TO GET AWAY FROM US 1337 HAX()RZ R GONA B FORCED 2 PLAY WIT US 4EVER!11!!

seriously... blizzard may be protecting their software, but they are aiming in the wrong direction...

 

[th4t1dud3]

haha, Jakor makes it sound funny. Which it probably is.

 

[Attilitus]

I can understand WOW but I wish they hadn't extended that ruling into the realms of SC and Diablo. Now I have to live in constant fear that my favorite D2 Mod (that runs on it's own server) will go down because of pure unbridled Blizzard jealousy.