Blizzard Entertainment Wins Summary Judgment in BnetD Case.

IRVINE, Calif. -- A federal district court in St. Louis has found that members of the BnetD project violated Blizzard Entertainment(R)'s End User License Agreements (EULAs) and Battle.net(R) Terms of Use (TOU), as well as the provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) that prohibits the circumvention of anti-piracy technology and trafficking in such technology.

"We consider this ruling to be a major victory against software piracy," stated Mike Morhaime, president and co-founder of Blizzard Entertainment. "By ruling in our favor on every count, the court is sending a clear message that creating unauthorized servers which emulate Blizzard's Battle.net servers is without question illegal. We have worked hard to provide gamers with a free, safe, secure, reliable environment on Battle.net, and this ruling is a strong validation that we are justified in protecting and ensuring the integrity of our game service."

Granting Blizzard Entertainment's motion for summary judgment on all counts, Judge Charles Shaw ruled that the defendants were bound to the terms of Blizzard's EULAs and Battle.net TOUs, and that by reverse engineering Blizzard software, creating servers that emulated Battle.net, and providing matchmaking services for users of Blizzard software, they were in violation of those terms. Furthermore, Judge Shaw held that because the BnetD servers created a functional alternative to Battle.net and were used to bypass Blizzard's anti-piracy technology, "the defendants' actions constitute a circumvention of copyright under the DMCA."

This judgment upholds Blizzard Entertainment's End User License Agreements and Battle.net Terms of Use as legally binding documents that are legally enforceable. In addition, the judgment enjoins others who distribute BnetD or act in concert with the BnetD members from creating and providing access to unauthorized servers that emulate Blizzard's own servers for the purpose of playing legal or illegal copies of Blizzard games as against the law.

Best known for their series Warcraft(R), StarCraft(R) and Diablo(R), Blizzard Entertainment (www.blizzard.com, a division of Vivendi Universal Games) is a premier developer and publisher of entertainment software renowned for creating many of the industry's most critically acclaimed games. The company's free Internet gaming service Battle.net(R) provides a forum in which owners of Blizzard's games can play in a multiplayer mode remotely across the Internet and against other gamers from around the world.