p2pnet - rss feed: BnetD decision wrong: EFF
p2pnet.net News:- Fair use was dealt a harsh blow, yesterday, in a Federal Court decision which held programmers can’t create free software designed to work with commercial products, says the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation).
At issue was whether or not three software programmers who wrote the BnetD game server, which interoperates with Blizzard video games online, violated the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) and Blizzard Games’ end user license agreement (EULA).
BnetD is an open source program that lets gamers play popular Blizzard titles such as Warcraft with other gamers on servers that don’t belong to Blizzard’s Battle.net service, says the EFF in a statement, going on:
"Blizzard argued that the programmers who wrote BnetD violated the DMCA’s anti-circumvention provisions and that the programmers also violated several parts of Blizzard’s EULA, including a section on reverse-engineering.
"The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), co-counsel for the defendants, argued that programming and distributing BnetD was fair use. The programmers reverse-engineered Battle.net purely to make their free product work with it, not to violate copyright."
Said EFF staff attorney Jason Schultz, "Copyright law was meant to promote competition and creative alternatives, not suppress them.
"This ruling gives Blizzard the ability to force you to use their servers whether you want to or not."
EFF says it’ll appeal the ruling that creating alternative platforms for legitimately purchased content can be outlawed.
