Friday, May 16, 2008
Is an open-source version of Blizzard Entertainment's online gaming service an illegal copyright violation, or just a good example of how the Internet works?
Apr 18, 2002 | Build a better mouse trap, catch more mice. Build a better online gaming server, get yourself sued. That is what's happening to the developers of bnetd, a software program for Web servers that duplicates the functionality of Battle.net, Blizzard Entertainment's hugely popular online gaming service.
Ross Combs and Rob Crittenden, two of the lead developers on bnetd, say all they ever wanted to do was create a place to play best-selling Blizzard games like Starcraft and Diablo in a friendly online atmosphere free of the technical bugs that plague Battle.net.
Anyone who has ventured on to Battle.net to wage war against aliens or to hack and slash through dungeons is likely to appreciate the sentiment. Battle.net's popularity has been one of its great drawbacks. Frequent crashes and slow response times due to a huge crush of players -- especially right after the release of a new game -- can often make Battle.net an unpleasant experience. The technical problems are exacerbated by social malfunctions: the malicious killing of some gamers by other players and the proliferation of hacks that give some players unfair advantages.
It all added up, recalls Combs, into making Battle.net a scene that "just wasn't a fun place to be." So, in classic geek fashion, coders like Combs wrote their own, free software version of Battle.net. With bnetd's code anyone could set up their own server for playing Blizzard games, and since the code was open to the general public, they could even modify it themselves if they so pleased.
For Blizzard, fun isn't the issue. The problems are copyright infringement and the promotion of piracy. And with a highly anticipated new game, Warcraft III, poised for launch this summer, the company is playing hardball. On Feb. 19, Blizzard sent a cease-and-desist e-mail to Internet Gateway, the ISP that hosts the Web site for bnetd. In language that is fast becoming the scourge of the Internet, the letter declared that "pursuant to the provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act" (DMCA), the bnetd code was "circumvention technology" which permitted the violation of Blizzard's copyrights.
Specifically, Blizzard charges that bnetd allows the use of pirated copies of its games to be played on servers running bnetd. (In comparison, pirated Blizzard games won't work with Battle.net.)
In response, the bnetd team, unable to face the legal costs of contesting Blizzard in court, removed the bnetd code from the bnetd.org Web site. But this did not satisfy Blizzard. On April 5, Blizzard filed suit against Internet Gateway and bnetd.org's system administrator, Tim Jung. (Other defendants, perhaps those who contributed to bnetd's code, may be added later.) This time around, Blizzard did not cite the DMCA. Instead, Blizzard now says that bnetd serves as a way to allow unauthorized public performances of Blizzard's copyrighted work (its games).
It is unclear exactly what the reasoning was behind the change in legal tack. Blizzard's legal team may have decided that the charge that the bnetd code itself was a copyright violation would not stick -- the code "emulates" the functionality of Battle.net, but it does not actually copy any of Battle.net's code. It's also possible that the new legal language was a pre-emptive attempt to protect a new, subscription-based version of Battle.net that will debut for the upcoming World of Warcraft.
In a statement sent by e-mail to Salon, Michael Morhaime, Blizzard Entertainment's president and co-founder said, "We always have been and will continue to be diligent in protecting our trademarks and copyrighted materials. We are convinced that certain members of the bnetd project illegally copied parts of our code and bypassed the game's CD-Key authentication process. We further believe that emulators damage our efforts to prevent piracy, and they create safe havens for players using illegal copies of our products."
Whatever the case, to some observers, the new charges are even worse than the original.
To say that bnetd allows unauthorized public performances implies that it is a copyright violation just to create software that "interoperates," or is otherwise compatible, with Blizzard. Interoperability -- which enables software to work with other software -- is a core principle of how the Internet, or any computer network, works.
The stakes are high enough that the Electronic Frontier Foundation has joined the fight, agreeing to provide legal representation for the bnetd team. Bnetd thus joins the fast-growing list of other software causes célèbres -- Dmitry Sklyarov, 2600 Magazine, Napster -- that have emerged in the hotly contested war over intellectual property and the Internet. How the Net works in the future could be decided in skirmishes like these.
"It is unfortunate that the state of U.S. law has fallen to such a low as to affect programmers in this way," says Crittenden, 34, who lives in Lithicum, Md. If the bnetd team happens to lose its case, he speculates, "Any company could create their own mini-monopoly on network communications. It could bring down the interoperability of the Internet."
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