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| BNETD - THE LAW BE DAMNED |  | Category: Tech
Friday, March 15th, 2002 @ 03:06 am
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Morons.
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Let me brief the uninitiated before I step into the shitstorm: The game company Blizzard, makers of such fine games as Diablo(I & II), Warcraft(I & II), and StarCraft, provide a service on the internet called "Battlenet" which provides owners of said games to congregate online play each other. Battlenet also provides "authentication checks" to make sure you're not trying to play a pirated (read: stolen) version of their game.
After a while a open source project begins, under the name Bnetd (pronounced "bee net dee" I believe), which emulates the "Battlenet" service so that people can play these games with each other without the need to go to Blizzard's horribly crappy service. The inevitable happens and Blizzard slaps a cease and desist letter at the Bnetd team saying they have cracked their "proprietary" copyrighted service and are allowing people to play their games while circumnavigating the copy protection scheme (the authenticity check).
This is a completely shit-brained attempt by Blizzard to cover their own hubris. Allow me to explain:
The popular game QuakeIII has piracy authentication when playing online (much the same as Blizzard's games do), BUT, it is completely independent in regards to the server you are connecting that coordinates the multiplayer game at hand. Why didn't Blizzard do this? Good question. To inadvertently destroy fair use of their software. Fair use is (in laymen's terms) basically defined as the ability to do whatever the fuck you want with something you bought. Period. Blizzard would rather control how, when, and on what terms you can and will use YOUR property. Not their intellectual property, but the software you bought. This is quite akin to the debate over whether or not region encoding of DVDs is legal(i.e. the inability to play an American DVD in Japan). Both retarded situations are quite akin to McDonalds saying you can only eat the cheeseburger you bought while in a row boat, wearing a tutu, and singing "God Save The Queen".
Enter Penny Arcade. Now from where I sit, it seems to me that they guys at penny arcade seem to be taking no stance on the issue, yet are posting the insane ramblings of one of their readers that happens to claim he's a lawyer. His entire spiel is that the Bnetd team "stole" Blizzards "proprietary code" and "eviscerated" their copy protection scheme. Fuck that. Allow me to indulge in what I refer to as "butt raping this ass clown's argument":
Bnetd ... want[s] to steal Blizzard's property and get away with it.
Utter horseshit. There was no "stealing". It is completely legal under fair use to reverse engineer a product you own. And seeming as the communications between the games and Battlenet aren't even encrypted, you can't even attack it with that shaky "breaking proprietary encryption" shit in the DMCA. They started this program from scratch by examining the packets transferred between the software and battlenet. THERE WAS NO STEALING. Perhaps listening to someone talking to me is illegal too under this logic?
[Battlenet] is a completely proprietary application for use with a completely private and proprietary piece of software by licensees of those completely private and proprietary products.
Yeah, Battlenet is a completely proprietary application. So? They never stole, altered, or in anyway even touched Blizzards Battlenet application. Oh the games are proprietary. Why yes they are, yet I don't recall the Bnetd team running it through a disassmbler and trying to steal the code. They were playing it, just like fair use allows. They saw what it was trying to connect to and plugged what they wanted there. Didn't take a dime out of Blizzard's pocket in the process either. You sure you're a lawyer?
To continue, its seems the farther he gets into it, the more he beleives there was "theft" involved:
You're just the goddamn thieves that stole their code, but you're completely ignorant of any foul play.
Ok, this is the last time I'm letting the "stealing" shit by. Let me explain to you what "theft" is (never thought I'd have to do this with a lawyer). What does Webster have to say about it: 1 a : to take or appropriate without right or leave and with intent to keep or make use of wrongfully b : to take away by force or unjust means. Seeming as all of these have to do with taking something, it doesn't apply here. And don't give me that copyright infringement is stealing shit. A) they never had the (copyrighted) Battlenet application, and B) As a lawyer you should now that time and time again, in court, that copyright infringement in no way equates theft anyway. So stick a sock in that stealing shit, please.
To round off how I feel about it all, I'll say this: A) I believe you should be able to play a game you bought legally, under any circumstances you choose. B) I believe Blizzard should not loose any money to piracy. C) Blizzard choose the most retard, greedy assed copy protect/multiplayer scheme know to man and now are using their power to keep people from what amounts to thinking bad thoughts.
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