Re:No sympathy from me (Score 1)

I own a parking lot. Should I be obliged to let only legal (not stolen reported) cars to park? I don't think so. Even if I could be ordered to do so, I should never be shut down over that. The act of stealing is wrong. The person who allows people with stolen things to use those things is doing nothing wrong.

That's analogy doesn't really work. Blizzard specifically engineered the game and Battle.net so that keys had to be validated in order to play online. They made a proprietary system with the purpose of ensuring that everyone playing online is paying for that privilege. Bnetd provided a way - pretty much the only way - to circumvent this purposeful limitation on Blizzard's part. This was arguably to the deriment of Blizzard's income.

Thus, your analogy would have to be modified in several ways. The cars would have to be purchased from a private company who designed the cars so they could only be driven on certain private roads, requiring a monthly subscription, established by that company. Then, your parking lot would have to be the only parking lot to allow illegal cars to park, thereby forming a sort of a safe haven for the illegal cars which would not otherwise exist. You think a court would side with you?

I'm not saying that Blizzard is a wonderful company. But you can't get mad at them for trying to make players pay for what they're supposed to pay for. They have a legally protected interest in the integrity of their Battle.net framework, and bnetd was infringing on that integrity.

Now, it does make it more interesting that Blizzard sued in response to bnetd wanting to be able to validate keys, but even so I understand why Blizzard would want to keep it all under their control. This is justifiable for a variety of reasons (simplicity, future updating of protocols, etc.).