Gaming Blizzard wins lawsuit on video game hacking

[The Helper]

A federal appeals court has ruled that computer programmers do not have the right to reverse-engineer Blizzard Entertainment's video games to improve their playability.

The 8th Circuit Court of Appeals in St. Louis ruled Thursday that federal law--specifically, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act--disallows players from altering Blizzard games to link with servers other than the company's official Battle.net site.

Affected games published by Blizzard, a division of Vivendi Universal, include titles in its "Diablo," "Starcraft" and "Warcraft" lines.

In a 3-0 decision, the court upheld a trial judge's ruling from October, concluding the programmers' "circumvention in this case constitutes infringement."

Blizzard wins lawsuit on video game hacking

Players do not have the right to reverse-engineer the company's games to improve their playability, a court rules.

www.cnet.com

 

[team.ism]

ha!

 

[Sud]

An interesting attempt but of course those projects just get moved to whatever european or asian country that doesn't enforce these copyrights and it's business as usual.

 

[SD_Ryoko]

For those who don't follow the shady path much

I'm pretty sure this was Blizz Hackers

Yes, they were working on a WOW server emulator.

I think the letter on their front page has changed to different legal documents 5 times over the last couple months.

IN FACT - due to court order, the new front pages were placed there by blizzard via IP override or some other technique.

They renamed themselves 'the edge of nowhere' instead of blizzhackers, but the host they were on even gave them the boot.

 

[Sud]

Don't know if it's a Canada thing, but I can see the statement one of their members made on the front page.

Interesting to see how that one turns out.

 

[XXXconanXXX]

I thought Canada was mostly Eskimos?

Isn't that because days and nights last like months at a time?

 

[SD_Ryoko]

LOL 56k = Eskimo.

Ummmm Summer solstice longest day of the year innnn.... Alaska I think.

2 am sun is still shining and bars not closed - LOL.

 

[Sargon]

I was in Alaska around the summer solstice once. the sun never really set. It got sorta twilighty for about 2 hours around 3 am, but that was it. No real night.

 

[XXXconanXXX]

Oh, I keep getting Canada and Alaska mixed up.

I always imagined Canadians to be the big jacket wearing fishing guys who are fishing in one of the holes in a frozen river, and Alaskins to be the ones riding horses with the big red old-style army suits.

 

[Im_On_56k]

...canada>all

 

[Wargasm]

i know blizzhackers since they started ..

and even tho alot of hacks re blizzard where published it was the server emulation that got them in trouble ..

the bots and exploits had little effect on WoW.
tho (putting things into perspective) a few hacks and exploits got rampant but blizzard acted real quick on that wich resulted in alot of mass bans ..

i think and this is just my 2 cents that they where afraid that there wouldbe WoW servers around reversed engineered ..

from blizzard's point of view very understandable that they fought it out in court


one might argue .. but hell there not many players there .. how they gonna do the end game stuff ..

modified items is the answer here and higher levels

btw that msg re edgeofnowhere was there since blizzhackers went down

 

[DM Cross]

...canada>all

Canada<Canadian ego's

Had to be said (Again)