Quote:
Originally Posted by Jozrael
@SecretMethod: I've always loved Blizzard as a company; hardcore fanboy here. Private BNET servers -is- piracy. It's getting around the whole 'need a unique cd key to play' rule. Which is there...to stop piracy. What reason is there to not play on bnet when you are legally playing it? I think they have a fantastic reputation as a company for releasing quality games and -supporting them even a decade later-.
This isn't 'DRM', EA's stupid-tarded method of combating piracy. They said they intend to introduce LAN-like functionality into BNet 2.0.
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The EFF site on the case of
Blizzard vs BnetD sums up the issue. Obviously, I agree with the EFF here and that the court ruling was incorrect. The Cornell Law Review has a relatively short description of the
negative impact of the case as well.
I remember what Bnet was like during the days of BnetD. I played (more accurately, tried to play) Diablo on Bnet and it was a terrible experience: cheaters, lag, disconnects. I don't doubt that it's better now, with more ubiquitous high speed internet, and what I understand to be Blizzard's increasingly tight grip on the service, but that doesn't make up for their actions. BnetD wasn't created as a tool for piracy, it was created as an alternative for people who purchased a Blizzard game to play online if they did not like the experience connecting to blizzard's Battle.net servers. Attacking BnetD because it also makes it easier for pirates is like attacking the entire bittorrent protocol because most of its use is for piracy. That bittorrent is primarily used by pirates has nothing to do with whether or not it is a valid, useful, and legal protocol, and the fact that BnetD allowed pirates to play online is irrelevant to whether or not individuals are legally allowed to make free programs that inter-operate with commercial programs.
And if that's not enough, the BnetD developers offered to work with Blizzard to add CD key checking into BnetD, but Blizzard refused. It wasn't merely that they wanted to fight piracy, they wanted to remove competition in serving online Blizzard games.
I said Blizzard is nowhere near as evil as EA, and I'll say it again: EA is in a whole other galaxy when it comes to bad corporate practices. Blizzard is simply on the level of most major technology companies out there right now... abusing the law to fight independent development and fair use while they try to figure out new business models in the changing technological landscape.