I'm not an open source advocate nor am I overly liberal, please try not to label me as such in the future.

My comment about Blizzard not caring about their community might have been misguided and too hastily typed - I have no insight into their internal company "culture" or processes and I'm sure they do care about their paying customers.

As far as I know (I'm not a laywer) you don't need to have a "purpose" to reverse engineer software. Reverse engineering is perfectly legal in most countries as long as the original was obtained legimately.

You could argue the free hosting didn't benefit community and it only benefitted software pirates - my experience was completely different, most servers were/are setup with legal copies of the game. It also ensures you could still run the game through bentd even if Blizzard would choose to close Battle.Net (or if it was unavailable). As a consumer and a community member, I would argue it benefited both consumers and the community.

I certainly don't claim to have any 'clue' about the wider implications of the ruling when it comes to its legal aspects, as I said I'm not an lawyer.

However, I do work in the software business and the ruling does cast some doubt over whether I should really engage in otherwise lawful reverse engineering (rev.engineering competitors products is quite normal), this can be quite agitating, as you pointed out.