[Ecommerce] Ruling on contract, DMCA claims and issues of reverse engineering and interoperability.

[Manon Ress]

http://www.eff.org/news/archives/2004_09.php#001962

September 30, 2004
Dangerous Ruling Menaces Rights of Free Software Programmers

Contract and Copyright Trump Fair Use and Competition in BnetD Case

St. Louis - Fair use was dealt a harsh blow today in a Federal Court
decision that held that programmers are not allowed to create free
software designed to work with commercial products. At issue in the case
was whether three software programmers who created the BnetD game server
-- which interoperates with Blizzard video games online -- were in
violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and Blizzard
Games' end user license agreement (EULA).

BnetD is an open source program that lets gamers play popular Blizzard
titles like Warcraft with other gamers on servers that don't belong to
Blizzard's Battle.net service. Blizzard argued that the programmers who
wrote BnetD violated the DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions and that
the programmers also violated several parts of Blizzard's EULA,
including a section on reverse engineering.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), co-counsel for the defendants,
argued that programming and distributing BnetD was fair use. The
programmers reverse-engineered Battle.net purely to make their free
product work with it, not to violate copyright.

EFF Staff Attorney Jason Schultz said, "Consumers have a right to choose
where and when they want to use the products they buy. This ruling gives
Blizzard the ability to force you to use their servers whether you want
to or not. Copyright law was meant to promote competition and creative
alternatives, not suppress them."

EFF will appeal the case, challenging the court's ruling that creating
alternative platforms for legitimately purchased content can be outlawed.

Contact:

Jason Schultz
Staff Attorney
Electronic Frontier Foundation
jason@eff.org
Posted at 06:12 PM


--
Manon Anne Ress
Consumer Project on Technology
www.cptech.org
PO Box 19367, Washington, DC 20036
manon.ress@cptech.org, voice: 1.202.387.8030, fax: 1.202.234.5176