Running head: Discussion 2 1
Discussion 2
Jerry Quarles
Liberty University
BMIS 570 Ethics and Legal Issues
Dr. Dwight Elliot
April 24, 2021
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Davidson & Assoc., Inc. and Blizzard Enterprises v. Internet Gateway, Bnetd
I think there are several strategies the plaintiff could have taken advantage of before
proceeding with litigation against defendants. At the time of installing the Blizzard games on
their computer and registering for the first time in Ballte.net, the users had to agree and accept
the End User License Agreement (EULA) and Terms of Service (TOU) which prohibited the
reverse engineering of the source code used in the products designed by Blizzard (Davidson &
Associates, Inc. v. Internet Gateway, 2004). Although reverse engineering is granted for fair use,
the user of Blizzard's game had specifically forfeited their rights to reverse engineer the Blizzard
product, when they signed the EULA and TOU (Davidson & Associates, Inc. v. Internet
Gateway, 2004). Both parties could have resolved this without resorting to litigation simply by
pulling up the End User License Agreement [EULA] and the Terms of Use [TOU] that the users
agreed to. The users clicked on the “I agree” button, agreeing to the terms of not reproducing,
photocopying, modifying, or reversing the source code[Are12]. There has to be some price point
at which honest purchases and pirating meet to form the best possible profits. Blizzard (the
plaintiff) could have communicated the laws and possibly change the outcome of litigation to the
defendants. This may have helped the defendants come to a resolution outside of the courts.
Agreements, like in this case, are voluntarily entered and Courts make every effort to
uphold it (Reder et. al, 2015, p 359). Along with Copyright and trademark, agreements are used
to protect intellectual property. To avoid similar litigations in the future, I would suggest and
advise my client to make their EULA and TOS as descriptive as possible so that the user would
know what they are agreeing on it. I would also tell my client to label the EULA and TOU on the
packaging of the games in a way that it would be easily visible to the purchasers. I would also
advise more flexible marketing and pricing strategies to reduce the likelihood of pirating. I
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would also define, in the contracts/agreements, stratified penalties to offenses that would give
would-be defendants a more real picture of what their punishments could be.
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References
Davidson & Associates, Inc. v. Internet Gateway (2004) The United States District Court for the
easter district of Missouri. https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/districtcourts/
FSupp2/334/1164/2520607/
Reder, M. E., Darrow, J. J., Melvin, S. P., Chang, K. K. (2015). Cyberlaw: Management and
entrepreneurship. New York, NY: Wolters Kluwer.
Ferrera, G. R., Reder, M., Bird, R. C., Darrow, J. J., Aresty, J. M., Klosek, J., & Lichtenstein, S.
D. (2012). CyberLaw Text and Cases. Mason: South-Western.
Reply
Hey Adewale, You make a good point on this case and I do
I agree with you. This case is all about the End User License Agreement (EULA) and Terms of
Use (TOU) between Blizzard and Bnetd. The EULA of Blizzard Games stated that the “user
would not photocopy, reproduce, translate, reverse engineer….without prior written consent of
Blizzard” Blizzard (Davidson & Associates, Inc. v. Internet Gateway, 2004).
Intellectual property
is the most important property for any corporation (Reder et. al, 2015, p 401). Blizzard was
trying to protect its intellectual property by using EULA and TOU. Even if Bnetd users reverse
engineered Blizzard’s source code to provide its user a better experience to play the game on an
alternative platform, in the process of doing it, they violated the EULA and TOU.
I agree with the statement that the ruling of the Court should encourage the innovation of
the technology and reverse engineering does help to understand the code better so that the others
code come up with an even better solution to a problem that needs to be solved. The District
Court ruled in favor of Blizzard. but, as you said, they could also have settled this
case by having a direct conversation with Bnetd creators. The root cause of this case was the
dissatisfaction of Blizzard users with their gaming experience in Battle.net. Blizzard should have
offered an opportunity to Bnetd creator to take down their emulator and instead work for
Blizzard to fix the shortcoming that Blizzard had with their Battle.net application. It would have
been a win-win situation without breaching any legal agreement and without suppressing any
innovative approach to solving a problem. Court cases can be very time consuming and costly
and should only be used as a last option.
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Rerply
Justin,
Thank you for sharing your interesting point, I agree with you. Reverse engineering is a process
of analyzing the computer code to figure out how an application works. If an application
developer has not released the code, then it is the only way for the third part to figure out how a
program was written so that they can add a feature to it (Neufeld, 2007). Reverse engineering is
now considered as fair use. The Bnetd creators installed Blizzard’s game on their computer, the
very first thing was to accept the End User License Agreement. When Bnetd creators registered
their games on Battle.net, they had to accept the Terms of Service agreement. Court considers
EULA “as an agreement and thus are governed by Contract law” (Reder et. al, 2015, p 359).
Both of these legally binding documents prohibited the rights of the user to reverse engineer the
Blizzard program without the consent of Blizzard (Davidson & Associates, Inc. v.
Internet Gateway, 2004).
I agree with the statement that the ruling of the Court should encourage the innovation of
the technology and reverse engineering does help to understand the code better so that the others
code come up with an even better solution to a problem that needs to be solved. Bnetd creators
were providing their source code free of charge via their website. They were also letting the user
play Blizzard’s games for free via their emulator. They didn’t appear to be motivated to generate
a profit at expense of Blizzard games. However they did violate the EULA and TOS and from a
legal point of view, the District Court did the right thing by ruling in favor of Blizzard.
Davidson & Associates, Inc. v. Internet Gateway (2004) The United States District Court for the
easter district of Missouri. https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/districtcourts/
FSupp2/334/1164/2520607/
Reder, M. E., Darrow, J. J., Melvin, S. P., Chang, K. K. (2015). Cyberlaw: Management and
entrepreneurship. New York, NY: Wolters Kluwer.
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