09-23-2003, 05:24 AM
You've got to reflect upon what the intention of copyright is before you can make such sweeping pronouncements. In the constitution, the establishment of copyright is to grant content creators limited monopolies over their creations, to encourage innovation.
By finding in favour of Blizzard, the court would essentially be establishing that through proprietary access controls, they can lock up peripheral markets in which they would normally have to compete. It is legal to reverse engineer the Diablo matchmaking (bnet) protocol in order to create an interoperable matchmaking service, even if that service competes with bnet.
However, since the access control would be impossible to implement, and they would legally have to implement it in order to compete legally, obviously they would not be able to compete.
So, what has the establishment of copyright in this case done? It has suppressed innovation, instead of encouraging it, as nobody can compete for the matchmaking services for Blizzard games. And I, for one, would welcome competition: bnet has many easy-to-fix problems (for example, bans don't stick, you can't ban people without them entering the channel, color hacking channels, etc.) which I'm sure a rivalry for market share would take care of.
So, in my humble opinion, if the law finds that Blizzard/VU can lock up this market, then the law is wrong.
By finding in favour of Blizzard, the court would essentially be establishing that through proprietary access controls, they can lock up peripheral markets in which they would normally have to compete. It is legal to reverse engineer the Diablo matchmaking (bnet) protocol in order to create an interoperable matchmaking service, even if that service competes with bnet.
However, since the access control would be impossible to implement, and they would legally have to implement it in order to compete legally, obviously they would not be able to compete.
So, what has the establishment of copyright in this case done? It has suppressed innovation, instead of encouraging it, as nobody can compete for the matchmaking services for Blizzard games. And I, for one, would welcome competition: bnet has many easy-to-fix problems (for example, bans don't stick, you can't ban people without them entering the channel, color hacking channels, etc.) which I'm sure a rivalry for market share would take care of.
So, in my humble opinion, if the law finds that Blizzard/VU can lock up this market, then the law is wrong.