Blizzard Entertainment's victory over bnetd sealed in Appeals Court

September 3, 2005

has won a federal ruling in the U.S. Court of Appeals against the programmers of, a software package that emulates Blizzard's service. The court reaffirmed the original judgement, given in October, that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and click-through 's prohibited the reverse engineering of Blizzard's software in order to improve their playability. This was the first real test of the DMCA's applicability.

Bnetd, released under the, was created to enable users to play multiplayer games, bypassing Blizzard's freely accessible Battle.net servers, which have sometimes been unreliable or slow for gamers. The software also disabled the CD-Key check which is present in Battle.net to prevent users of pirated copies from being able to connect to Blizzard's servers. Offers by bnetd developers to incorporate Blizzard's CD-Check system were declined.

The CD-Check system itself has faced controversy, with some users complaining it borders on breaching privacy in the same way as and other malevolent software. This is not confined to Blizzard: controversy occurred when 's had a similar system which was later disabled due to complaints. Other games designed for network play are also known to have similar systems in place, the most prominent perhaps being 's system developed for.

Blizzard has produced many popular titles such as, and the  series.