Video Game Law Blog — Blizzard Wins Video Game Hacking Lawsuit Against BNetD

Blizzard Wins Video Game Hacking Lawsuit Against BNetD

September 2, 2005 at 5:40 pm - by Dale Dietrich

Text of Blizzard v. BNetD Decision
Audio of Oral Arguments before the Eight Circuit Court of Appeals [MP3 from EFF]

In making a more stable and feature-rich, multi-player online video game server available for free to Blizzard’s video game customers, in competition to Blizzard’s own proprietary Battle.net server, the 8th circuit CA held, among other things, that the appellants’ (i) reverse engineering and circumventing of Blizzard’s CD key validation process; (ii) distribution of the resultant circumvention software; violated the anti-circumvention and anti-trafficking provisions of the DMCA.

Dale’s Comment: It seems to me that this is yet another unintended consequence of of the DMCA. The DMCA’s primary purpose is to protect copyright, not to protect Blizzard’s business model. So long as players are using properly purchased/licensed versions of the game, end users should not be liable if they create a competitive online means of playing that game.