Blizzard Wins Bnetd Case in Appeals Court

After a trial lasting a little over two months, the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals in St. Louis, MO has awarded victory to Blizzard in the case of Blizzard vs. Bnetd. The case had to do with the legality of Bnetd's servers, which bypassed Blizzard's Battle.net verification check to play games online by hosting unofficial servers. The judges upheld the earlier ruling in Blizzard's favor by 3-0, saying that Bnetd's reverse-engineering of the Blizzard network code was prohibited under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act because it involved circumventing copyright protection mechanisms of the Battle.net system. The Bnetd engineers' efforts also went against the Blizzard EULA, agreed upon by both engineers when installing the game, which prohibits reverse-engineering. The defendants in the case have little recourse at this point save for appealing to a supreme court, though no such motion has yet been filed.