個案總覽

Personal computer game maker Blizzard filed a lawsuit in 2002 against the developers of the bnetd project. The bnetd project was a volunteer effort of game enthusiasts and programmers frustrated with difficulties encountered playing Blizzard's personal computer games on its 24-hour Battle.net online gaming service. Via reverse engineering of Blizzard's software, the bnetd developers created and disseminated a free open source software program that mimicked the Battle.net playing experience while improving on some of its deficiencies. Blizzard, one of the world's most successful PC game publishers and a part of international media conglomerate Vivendi Universal, charged the bnetd developers with breach of contract and various counts of intellectual property infringement. The defendants maintained that U.S. law, in an effort to spur innovation in the United States, protected their activities. Describes the events leading up to a court-ordered mediation session between the two parties in October 2003. Students are asked, as business managers, to determine the legal and non-legal alternatives available to Blizzard and the bnetd developers, and to decide which strategy to pursue from each party's perspective.

For the last five years, America Online (AOL), Yahoo!, and Microsoft have been battling to grab market share for their instant messaging (IM) service. Each company has its own software and network to deliver the service, which allows users to write online, real-time text messages to other users on the same network. Although IM began as a small venture in 1996 by four Israeli engineers, it has ballooned into one of the largest means of online communication. The number of IM users has grown 30% faster in its first five years than that of e-mail when it was first launched. Today, almost half of all North American online households use some version of IM. Despite the large number of IM users, the three major providers--AOL, Yahoo!, and Microsoft--have not earned any significant profit from offering their services. Each firm offers its IM service for free and many questions remain as to how any company will one day capitalize on its millions of users. Some looked to the possibility of developing IM as a corporate technology tool, allowing co-workers to send messages securely to one another, and efforts were already underway to make this a reality. Firms have also made significant efforts to establish a common protocol for IM that would enable users to communicate across different networks. But competition has hampered progress, forcing analysts to wonder whether consumers will continue to tolerate using multiple IM programs to reach friends on different networks.