Ready to be published? LXer is read by around 350,000 individuals each month, and is an excellent place for you to publish your ideas, thoughts, reviews, complaints, etc. Do you have something to say to the Linux community?
The recent court decision on Blizzard Entertainment's Battle.net (also reported by Slashdot) does not deal a death blow to reverse engineering by any means. But it resembles the June ruling on Grokster in that it weakens an important right of technologists. Just as the Grokster case made it harder to develop technologies that carry audio, video, etc., without directly outlawing those technologies, so the Blizzard case insidiously eats away at the right to do reverse engineering, without directly attacking the legal foundation that protects reverse engineering. So this case marks not, perhaps, a major precendent, but another inch-long drift of the continental shelf in American law toward making established companies harder to challenge, and making both competition and innovation less likely.
A free account is needed to post. Write your comment here first: your text is kept in this browser while you sign up or log in, and is waiting for you when you come back.
Your message:
|||||
10
Markdown: **bold**, *italic*, [text](https://link), - lists, > quotes, $x^2$ for math. Formatting help
