3 ms·
> It's pretty rare for Blizzard to go after these companies in court Blizzard is actually the company that set the precedent of going after these companies in
by debacle 11y ago
> It's pretty rare for Blizzard to go after these companies in court
Blizzard is actually the company that set the precedent of going after these companies in court (bnetd [1]), and I can't think of a single company that has gone after these types of projects (private servers) more than Blizzard.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bnetd https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bnetd
- djsumdog 11y agoI was thinking of bnetd when I saw the title. Bnetd set a horrible prescient IMO. You have the court saying reverse engineering a protocol and creating a clone of it was essentially illegal. The software which, was both free and open source, was now infringing if it was published (even though it was a totally original work). You can sill find the bnetd source code around here and there for people who made copies. I've been at LAN parties where we cranked one up and ran old copies of Blizzard games. I was thinking of publishing a legal paper on this a few years back; started some preliminary work with a friend who was a lawyer in NZ, but it kinda all fell through the cracks. Interestingly, I wonder what would have happened had this project been based in NZ instead. Software patents are illegal there .. but, they did illegally spy on Kim dotcom (then change the laws so it wasn't illegal anymore), impounded his servers on behalf of the US (coughmovieindustrycough) government. He lost his extradition trial, so he now faces extradition...for copyright infringement. They are extraditing a man, for a non-criminal, civil violation. (Don't get me wrong, he's kinda a dick and his CD was terrible, but the whole case is bullshit...plus he's fucking hilarious).