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Comment by GavinB | Hacker News Reader

It's worth noting that crackers have been working on the Starcraft 2 battle.net for months and still don't have working multiplayer. Server emulation is a lot harder than cracking a single player game.

The future of profitable software is in architectures that allow you to keep a significant portion of the code on your own servers and only "sell" the client application.

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Their progress was hindered http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/100197-Blizzard-Su.... The costs of a lawyer will likely stop anyone from continuing to crack it, since I'm guessing these guys are mostly computer science students having some fun.

It's interesting they dropped the charges. I wonder if they were afraid to take the risk of a verdict that would have legalized alternate game servers (when you think about it : you bought the damn game, you should be allowed to plug it wherever you like). Even if that's really implausible, they really had nothing to gain with the lawsuit once they had scared the hackers away.

The charges were for copyright violations. It was merely a way to tell them to stop, as Blizzard has done this in the past, having lawyers show up to the doors of people making or promoting wow emulators.

The courts have already ruled that creating alternate gaming servers is against the law.

http://www.eff.org/cases/blizzard-v-bnetd

The future of profitable software is in architectures that allow you to keep a significant portion of the code on your own servers and only "sell" the client application.

You don't sell the client -- you sell the bit in the database that makes their account active. Let them have the client, for all the good it will do them. Downloading the WoW client lets you pirate WoW about as much as downloading Firefox lets you pirate Basecamp.

But yeah: welcome to the future. The game companies have heard your preferences and adjusted accordingly.

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