Blizzard Entertainment

Blizzard Entertainment is the name of a highly successful PC video game company famous for making the following games:

• Blackthorne - Platform game, fantasy game
• Warcraft - real time strategy, fantasy game
• Warcraft II - real time strategy, fantasy game
• Diablo - action-oriented RPG
• StarCraft and StarCraft: Brood War (expansion pack) - real time strategy, science fiction game
• Diablo II and Diablo II: Lord of Destruction (expansion pack) - action-oriented RPG
• Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos real time strategy, fantasy game

Upcoming games

• World of Warcraft[?]
• StarCraft: Ghost[?]

Table of contents 1 Bnetd 2 FreeCraft 3 External Links 4 The Bnetd case

Bnetd

In February of 2002, lawyers retained by Blizzard threatened legal action under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act against the developers of bnetd. Blizzard games are designed to operate online exclusively with a set of Blizzard-controlled servers collectively known as "battle.net". Battle.net servers include a CD key[?] check as a means of preventing software piracy.

Unfortunately, battle.net servers not infrequently are inaccessible or disconnect players during games. A group of gamers became tired of being disconnected from their games, reverse engineered the network protocol used by battle.net and Blizzard games, and released a free, GPL'ed battle.net emulation package called bnetd. With bnetd, a gamer is not required to use the official battle.net site to play Blizzard games.

Despite offers from the bnetd developers to integrate Blizzard's CD key checking system into bnetd, Blizzard claims that the public availability of any such software package facilitates piracy, and moved to have the bnetd project shut down under provisions of the DMCA. As this case is one of the first major test cases for the DMCA, the Electronic Frontier Foundation became involved, and as of June 2002, negotiations were ongoing to resolve the case without a trial.

FreeCraft

On June 20, 2003, Blizzard ordered an open source clone of the Warcraft engine, FreeCraft[?]. This hobby project had the same gameplay and characters as Warcraft II, but came with different graphics and music. It was written from scratch and no Blizzard code was used.

As well as a similar name, FreeCraft enabled gamers to use Warcraft II graphics, provided they had the Warcraft II cd. The programmers of the clone shut down their site without challenge.

The Bnetd case

• http://www.bnetd.org/ - The bnetd homepage
• http://www.battle.net/support/emulationfaq.shtml - Blizzard's official statement on battle.net emulators
• http://www.visi.com/~tneu/blizzard.html - A rebuttal to Blizzard's official emulation statement
• Yale LawMeme's analysis of the case (http://research.yale.edu/lawmeme/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=149)