[CLUE-Talk] DMCA vs. bnetd.

[Dave Anselmi]

Grant Johnson wrote:

> I fail to see how this is a copyright issue.  I may be nuts, but wasn't
> the DMCA supposed to be extra copyright protection for digital media?
>  If anything, this could be trademark infringement, but I see no
> copyright issues here at all.  Nothing was copied.

The scary part is that what has happened is this.  Blizzard sent a letter to bnetd's
ISP stating Blizzard had a good faith belief that bnetd was violating the DMCA.
That was sufficient for the ISP to cut bnetd off.  If they hadn't, it appears that
they become complicit in the copyright violation.

There is nothing specific in the letter that says what bnetd did to violate or
circumvent Blizzard's copyright.  Speculation is that the Blizzard licenses may
state that only the battlenet site is allowed for multi-player games, or that
Blizzard uses battlenet to check CD keys (more likely in my opinion).

In the latter case, building a server that allows multi-player games using copied
CDs would seem to be facilitating copy protection circumvention.  It has also been
said that perhaps the bnetd developers didn't do this, but someone added code (since
bnetd is GPL'd) that did.  There isn't any sort of "take this code out or else"
dialog - it will have to go through court, it seems.

The whole thing stinks on several levels.  I'm glad I don't own any Blizzard games.

On going discussion that I've paraphrased can be found here:

http://lists.alt.org/pipermail/fsl-discuss/2002-February/thread.html

Dave