Matthew Loriso
Staff Writer

In a recent case, the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals made a ruling against programs running other companies’ online computer games.

The program examined in this particular case was BnetD, which allows game owners to play games made by the computer game company Blizzard online. Traditionally, Blizzard developed games are played online through Blizzard’s own game service, Battle.net. This service runs games such as “Warcraft II” and “Diablo.”

Because Battle.net is an official online game service, problems arise with playing modified games. BnetD acts as an alternative to Blizzard’s official service, so game players could play games with modifications.
Modified games contain altered programs that allow the game to be played differently. These modifications include anything from altered game levels to new playable characters.

According to the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals’ ruling, running the BnetD service is in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which “prohibited the reverse engineering needed to create the program.”

It also violates the end user’s legal agreement, which everyone must agree to before the game is able to run at all on a person’s computer.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, the defendant’s co-counsel, is entirely against this ruling.

“This ruling is bad for gamers, but it could also be terrible for the software industry,” EFF Staff Attorney Jason Schultz said in a recent press release. “It essentially shuts down any competitor’s add-on innovation that customers could enjoy with their legitimately purchased products.”

“Add-on innovation is one of the hottest areas of creativity and economic growth right now in software, and this decision will slow investment and development in that field,” he added.

Locally, there will also be a ?negative effect.

Playing games online is a popular past time among high school and college students, many of which use modified content.

“I like playing games online,” sophomore Business Administration major David Duong said. “You get to interact with friends…it’s a social thing.

“But when there are some modifications [to a game], it keeps you from getting bored of it,” he added.

The concern many game players have is, with the closure of BnetD, innovation and creativity in games will no longer exist.

However, Graham Sharp, tech manager for the online gaming center Fanta-Sci Gaming, does not believe there will be a problem.

“Most of the new games, like Warcraft 3, contain a custom map editor,” Sharp said. “It is actually [played] through Battle.net.”

Matthew Loriso can be reached at mloriso@ulv.edu.