With BnetD having been ruled illegal, I wonder if the outcome would have been different if everything else were the same, except BnetD prevented the use of pirated copies of Diablo or Starcraft. I think it’s great when a game has such a following, that the players want do all kinds of cool mods, but if the game’s creators aren’t onboard, then it can only end badly. It’s hard to make the interoperability argument for something as proprietary as a game service, and the judge didn’t buy it.
In any case, the BnetD genie has already escaped the bottle, so I guess the next step for Blizzard is the probably impossible task of shutting down all of these servers out in the wild. Oddly enough, their best bet may be to just leave them alone as long as none of them take on too high of a profile. Afterall, people playing on small private servers can get hooked on the game and eventually be enticed to play on the official servers which presumably should be able to offer a wider range of experiences. That may just persuade them to buy legitimate copies of the game. Indeed, Blizzard might be well served to provide a mechanism for legitimizing a pirated copy to play on Battle.net servers if they haven’t already.