Wild ass claims are that they re-engineered the code, stole code, and committed anti-competitive actions. All those are really wild ass claims. Hacking rarely involved re-engineering or stealing code at all. They weren't reselling a "hacked" version of Blizzard's product. Hackers sell their own code product that works on the same memory spaces that the game does. It's not the same thing at all. The anti-competitive claims have a VERY narrow margin of usage. Otherwise there wouldn't be more than one grocery store per town/city as another grocery store being in the area would reduce their potential customers and be anti-competitive in that nature. Blizzard basically has to show malicious intent by Bossland for that claim. Bossland actually has a vested interest in Blizzard doing well because if Blizzard does well with their product, then by that very nature there would be more people wanting Bossland products to work with Blizzard products.
Again wild ass claims that didn't have to be proven. So a summary judgement without defense sets no precedent here at all.
As for why Bossland didn't show up for defense in the US is because they are NOT IN THE US! It's prohibitively expensive to defend against that. Even if they won then they would have to counter sue in the US again to get back all their costs. There is no guarantee they would get it all back even if they won. They are right now concentrating more on the German case which to them has more value so they are actively defending there. Of course German law is different than US law and Blizzard may have more legal standing there than here had Bossland decided to fight back here.
All I have to go off is this court reference document, so if you've got additional information to share I'd be glad to look at it.
That said, there is no mention of re-engineering the code, only reverse engineering, which I'm certain they did as it would be quite impossible to create any useful hacks or cheats without disassembling and examining the code of a game. As for re-engineering, I'm not sure that such a claim is all that wild anyway. Any change at all to even a single file that is a part of a games code or other assets used by that game could be construed as re-engineering, as well adding any additional code that interacts directly or indirectly with the original game code, even if it doesn't actually modify the game code itself. If you've modified the way that a game plays/operates at a mechanical level, then you have re-engineered the game, because it is no longer the same game that everyone else is playing.
At this point I'll have to admit my ignorance on the subject of cheats and hacks. Personally I don't see how it is possible to create any kind of significant cheat or a hack without making at
least a few minor changes to the code. The closest thing I can think of would be packet inspection - you could intercept packets carrying data between your machine and a game server or your machine and another player (in a peer to peer server environment). I still feel like that might need some kind of hook into the game code somewhere in order to understand and make use of that information in a timely manner, but I could certainly be wrong there. The only other example I can think of off the top of my head is just inspecting game files or data in memory, which could be used for things like removing the fog of war in a RTS game or something like that. But again, even in that scenario, even if you've built a completely separate program from the ground up to go in and inspect data in memory, you still need to communicate that information to the game somehow. But what do I know, I'm not experienced in programming or hacking.
Moving on. I don't see anything in that court document suggesting that Blizzard was accusing them of stealing code or reselling Blizzards products, so I'm not even sure where you are getting that from. I also don't see anything in there about anti-competitive claims. Really starting to feel like you are getting a lot of information from other sources, or just making this shit up. But I'll address the anti-competitive argument you put forth just because of its sheer absurdity. First off, the analogy of grocery stores in a town is not even remotely applicable. Two grocery stores are competitors, running the exact same type of business, and vying for the same limited pool of customers. Blizzard and Bossland are not competitors, they are not running the same business, and they are not competing directly with each other for market share of a limited pool of customers. Blizzard makes games, their customers buy those games and play them, and Bossland then tries to market its products (hacks, cheats, bots) to users of Blizzards games. The problem is that Bossland products have an extremely negative affect on the user experience and enjoyment of Blizzards paying customers who don't partake of Bossland products, and the number of users who don't cheat outnumber those who do by a massive margin. This in turn has a multitude of effects - loss of paying customers who are fed up with playing with/against cheaters, overall customer dissatisfaction even among those who stick around, loss of revenue from future sales because customers have lost faith in Blizzards ability to stop cheaters, negative press, loss of brand name prestige, additional costs incurred on an ongoing basis to employ people and develop systems to try to help combat cheaters.. the list goes on. None of this is anti-competitiveness or malicious intent on behalf of Bossland, but that doesn't matter. What matters is that Bosslands products are costing Blizzard customers and money and damaging their reputation, and they are doing it through illegal means - copyright infringement, reverse engineering of Blizzard products, DMCA violations, and EULA violations.
You make a semi-valid point about Bossland having a vested interest in Blizzard doing well, as more people using Blizzard products means a larger potential customer pool for Bossland. The problem is that Bossland knows full well that nothing they do is going to bring down a behemoth like Blizzard. Sure they are going to cut in to Blizzards profits, piss Blizzard off a bit, but in the end Blizzard will keep chugging along. If Blizzard does eventually fail, it wont be (entirely) Bosslands fault, and they'll just move on to the next big thing anyway and start making hacks and cheats for other games. So yes, its very nice for Bossland right now that Blizzards games have such huge numbers of players which can provide a great source of income for them, but when all is said and done, the rise or fall of Blizzard is outside Bosslands control, and should it some day come to pass that Blizzard crumbles, it hardly spells the end of Bossland.
I know it probably comes off like I'm hardcore defending Blizzard here, but really I'm not. I've played a lot of Blizzard games, I think they are a good game developer, but honestly I don't care all that much about them. Blizzard just happens to be the main party in this debate about the validity and effectiveness of trying to fight cheat/hack developers through the legal system, and I'm a bit surprised at some of the opinions here. I talked earlier in this thread about the absolute futility of trying to fight the hacker community by trying to build better and better security, but as I said it is a losing battle, and it has been for decades. I've talked a lot in this post about how Blizzard is being hurt, financially and otherwise, by Bossland (and by extension, other companies like it), but I don't do it to defend Blizzard in particular, I've been doing it to try to demonstrate that, given time and the right strategies, it could be both viable and effective to go after the hacker community through legal action. Not to eradicate it, that will never happen, but to weaken it enough so that game developers can actually start to bridge that massive gap.
Because the truth is that the real losers in all of this are us, the consumers. If the status quo continues, Blizzard will go on, Bossland will go on (albeit maybe under a different name after all these lawsuits are settled), game developers will continue to make our gaming experiences worse for the sake of combating cheats and hacks, the cheat and hack developers will continue to make our gaming experiences worse by making every new online game a lousy cheat fest and always being 5 steps ahead of the game devs. And all of them are just sitting back making money off of it, while the rest of is just grow frustrated. We need a new approach, and I don't see why legal action can't be part of that approach, and frankly I'm more than just surprised at some of the reactions in this thread, I'm dumbfounded and a bit disgusted.