By Hiawatha Bray | September 5, 2005
It's all fun and games, till somebody loses a lawsuit. That's what has happened to the creators of a piece of gaming software called BnetD, and their defeat suggests hard times ahead for well-meaning technology innovators who go too far.
But Blizzard is different. The company runs its own private network, called Battle.net, with strict rules against cheating and vulgar behavior. Above all, there's an absolute ban on the use of illegally copied Blizzard games. The Battle.net system can spot a pirated copy of Diablo II a thousand miles away, and lock it out.
Seems reasonable -- but not to a handful of gamers who want to run their own game networks, just as they could with other titles. These guys bought some Blizzard games, 'reverse-engineered' them to master their secrets, and wrote their own compatible server code, called BnetD. They weren't out to make a fast buck; BnetD was given away so that anybody could set up a private server for playing Blizzard games.
Good clean fun? Blizzard didn't think so. BnetD servers work just fine with pirated copies of their games. BnetD's creators didn't intend to encourage software piracy; they even offered to include Blizzard's antipiracy code, if the company would hand it over. Fat chance, said Blizzard's chief operating officer, Paul Sams. "We would not, under any circumstances, provide something that is so critical to our business to anyone outside of the company," he said.
Instead, Blizzard went after the BnetD programmers in federal court, demanding they stop distributing their product. The company argued that the license inside every Blizzard game forbids the customer from reverse-engineering the code. Blizzard also cited the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a controversial federal law designed to stamp out piracy. They said BnetD violated the act by deliberately enabling crooks to play illegal copies of Blizzard games.