The eyes of the file sharing mass media are firmly locked on the Supreme Court this morning in anticipation of a possible ruling in the Grokster case. However that is not the only important court case taking place today.
In St. Louis the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals is hearing a case that could have long reaching effects on the DMCA. In Blizzard v BNETD three software programmers are accused of violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and Blizzard Games’ end user license agreement (EULA). The rouge freedom hating programmers coded an open source software that allows users to play games like Warcraft on servers besides Blizzards official one.
They claim this was because the official servers where often riddled with problems, including cheaters, and frequent slow downs. So you may be asking why does Blizzard have their panties all up in a bunch? Well They claim BNETD uses portions of their code, infringes on the Battle.net trademark and facilitates piracy.
BNETD does not include a check to make sure the game is a purchased copy and not a downloaded one as Blizzards servers do. Those behind the open source project counter that “We simply monitored data activity while using the Battle.net service to gain a rough idea of how online play worked for the games.” Blizzard won the first round of this battle when U.S. District Judge Charles Shaw ruled that BNETD was in violation of the DMCA last September.
