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And Then... A Bad DMCA Decision

Legal Issues

from the all-in-balance... dept

Fri, Oct 1st 2004 12:31am — Mike Masnick
Well, if you were happy about the news of a good DMCA decision in the Diebold case a few hours ago, it's time to get upset again. Another court has made a very questionable DMCA ruling in the BNETD case, where some developers reverse engineered a gaming server, so they could play an online game without having to go through an official server, and, in some ways, improving on the game's performance. However, the ruling found that this violated the DMCA because, apparently, the "actions constitute a circumvention of copyright." As Ernest Miller asks, what exactly is a "circumvention of copyright?" The ruling seems to ignore the recent ruling about the DMCA and garage door openers, which could apply here. It's likely that the case will be appealed, and hopefully whoever gets it will actually understand copyrights.
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  1. identicon
    thecaptain, 2 Oct 2004 @ 7:07am

    close but not exactly

    The main beef of in this case was that BNETD did not include any or rather completely circumvented the copy-protection/CD-Keys included in the actual games such as Starcraft, Diablo and such.
    Basically, when logging on to Battlenet servers, those servers check your CD key and such, keeping out pirated/cracked games. BNetD does not, allowing pirated games multiplayer online access.
    As such, they used the DMCA in court since BNETD circumvents copy protection measures in a product.
    Mind you I think they overreacted since tons of pirated/hacked games are already ON battlenet anyway...

    [ link to this | view in thread ]


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