Blizzard Wins Case Against BnetD

The 8th Circuit Court of Appeals in St. Louis has upheld an earlier ruling in Blizzard's favor, saying that BnetD's unauthorized multiplayer game service for Blizzard games was prohibited under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Essentially, BnetD reverse engineered Blizzard's Battle.net service, allowing players to connect for multiplayer matches without going through Battle.net. This also made it possible for people to bypass anti-piracy mechansims integrated into Battle.net. It will be interesting to see if programs like XBConnect and XLink Kai, which allow people to hook up their consoles outside of official networks such as Xbox Live, are also affected by this decision. (Thanks Gamasutra.)