"On February 17th, Vivendi sent a cease and desist letter to the ISP hosting the bnetd project (which had developed a Battle.net emulator) for alleged copyright infringement of Blizzard’s games as well as violations of section 1201 of the DMCA."
Executive summary: fuck Blizzard and its owner Vivendi Universal
Considering that:
- I bought Diablo II the day it was released to play it online during a vacation week
- after the release the Battle.net servers were almost completely unavailable for weeks
- you can’t get your money back on software in France once you open the shrink wrap
- now Blizzard now comes with these lame arguments to prevent other people from providing server access to their games
I’ll never buy any of their software again, and will make my best to avoid Vivendi Universal products and services as well (not an easy thing to do in these times of oligopoly). I encourage you to think hard before you give them any of your cash. These attempts at selling me something, then telling me how I can’t use it ("you won’t listen music on a PC") are really getting on my nerves.
You think your problem is piracy? Let’s see how you handle boycott. And I mean to entrench, not let it go when they eventually bow on that case (only to try to fuck with us in a dozen other ways). Their behavior is the essence of anti-business (business means you listen to your customers and serve them). Communism is even more obnoxious when it comes from large corporations. Let’s show them the power of the marketplace.
And don’t think it’s limited to entertainement, there’s impact on business too:
"The problem here is one of precedent. If you thought you were free to use legally obtained software any way you wanted, think again. Under the guise of protecting its intellectual property, Blizzard has also demonstrated that it is possible to force its customers to use its software with its services alone. And don’t think for a minute that the rest of the software industry hasn’t noticed."
Hey, this is worth for Sirius too.