IIRC even reverse-engineering is legal is certain countries, though that list is a lot smaller, and certainly doesn’t include France.

There’s a lot of reasons why Blizzard can’t “just employ them” unfortunately.

I would venture that Blizzard could and would have been able to permit these guys a limited scope copyright distribution license that would have allowed them to stay operational. But, since they couldn’t think of a way to monetize it, or maintain effective control over it, it was more simple to just shut them down.…

I really doubt you have the omnipresence to know whether or not the players on that service were really just playing because it was free, or because they preferred the version of the game they were playing to the current Blizzard alternative. I sure don’t. But saying otherwise is just like the MPAA/RIAA claiming that…

It’s not really accurate to say that they reverse engineered blizzard’s code. What Nostalrius did was write a completely custom server application capable of talking to the clients in a way that those clients could understand - that’s not the same thing as reversing Blizzard’s server code or decompiling the clients.…