Vivendi Sues Internet Gateway Inc.

Vivendi says that the gaming services offered by the St. Louis-based ISP are a copy of the Battle.net service offered by Vivendi subsidiary Blizzard Entertainment, developer of the blockbuster games StarCraft and Diablo.

by Michael Singer of siliconvalley.internet.com [April 11, 2002]

Vivendi Universal filed a lawsuit Friday asking that a St. Louis-based ISP stop distributing free software that acts just like its free Battle.net gaming service.

The suit focuses on Internet Gateway Inc. and its owner Tim Jung. The ISP hosts a free software project called "bnetd," a multiplayer gaming community created by gamers.

At the site, StarCraft and Diablo II game purchasers can meet online or on a local area network to chat, find competition, and start multiplayer games using the bnetd software.

Vivendi's subsidiary Blizzard Entertainment, which hosts the Battle.net gaming service says that sounds very similar to its own offerings and they want it stopped along with some monetary compensation.

Blizzard sent a cease and desist letter to Internet Gateway in late February, claiming violations of the anti-circumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) along with copyright violations.

Now the lawsuit claims that the creation and offering of the "bnetd" free software emulator for Blizzard games violates copyright and trademark laws, but does not mention DMCA in its text.

The suit caught the attention of the San Francisco-based online non-profit, civil liberties organization Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which is helping Internet Gateway organize its case.

"Blizzard contacted our lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) saying they would consider dropping the case if we help find ways to prevent pirates from using the bnetd server software," said Jung. "While we bnetd developers spent many hours last week trying to help Blizzard, they apparently spent many hours preparing to sue me and my small business."

Internet Gateway has removed the bnetd software temporarily in response to the letter. Because the current complaint does not claim DMCA violations, but instead adds trademark claims never mentioned before, Jung and the EFF think they have a good defense case.

"The complaint is a classic big corporate attempt to scare the little guy," said EFF Senior Intellectual Property Attorney Fred von Lohmann who represents Jung and Internet Gateway. "This software was developed by hobbyists using longstanding, legal reverse engineering techniques -- the same ones used by major hardware and software manufacturers. If bnetd is vulnerable to copyright challenge, then most reverse engineering projects designed to create interoperable products, from games to printers to network cards, are also vulnerable."

Representatives with Vivendi and Blizzard were not available for comment.

Vivendi also attempted to shutdown the FSGS group in similar legal fashion. The site is a fork of an older version of the bnetd project that is making an MS Windows version of the bnetd server.

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