On September 1, 2005, the US Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit ruled (Blizzard Entertainment Inc v Jung et al, No 04-3654) on the "fair use" right to reverse engineer software and create programs that are interoperable with older ones.
The plaintiffs (Blizzard) were the owners of the copyright in certain computer game software and online gaming service software for games used over its 24-hour online gaming service called "Battle.net". Battle.net users experienced frustrations with the software and service and banded together to form a group of non-profit volunteer game hobbyists called "bnetd", who used a server location with the URL
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