Friday, September 02, 2005
Court rules against reverse engineering
The 8th Circuit Court of Appeals in St. Louis has ruled that players may not modify Blizzard games to make them access a different server. This decision was made in part on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act; but in addition, the court "also cited a contractual agreement that Combs and Crittenden OK'd when installing Blizzard software. That agreement prohibits reverse-engineering." It appears from the article that the court construed the "reverse engineering" prohibition broadly, covering analysis of TCP/IP packets from the game software.
Most likely the "contractual agreement" consisted of clicking on the "Agree" button which comes up at the bottom of a large quantity of legalese when you install an application. These documents very often include a prohibition against reverse engineering. The legal enforcement of this prohibition presents a legal risk to anyone who uses reverse engineering to figure out how an application's file formats work.
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