Blizzard wins hacking lawsuit – PC News at GameSpot

I remember several years ago, this case helped crystalize in my mind the evil and overbroad nature of the DMCA. This case has nothing at all to do with piracy. It’s little more than an excuse for Vivendi/Universal to crush the consumer.

The sad thing is that most people don’t even remember what the case was about. They’re going about their lives playing World of Warcraft oblivious to what’s going on. Even the article doesn’t get into it.

Basically, there were problems with Battle.net. It was slow and unreliable. Also as the games aged it was obvious that the network was being neglected. Some fans of the game reverse engineered the network protocol for Battle.net and created a free server call bnetd. This allowed anyone to setup a Warcraft server that was as fast and reliable as they wanted it to be. This angered the game’s creator and they sued.