"Once upon a time, there was one company with a well-known service that used a non-standard protocol, and another company that was trying to reverse engineer the protocol in order to provide an alternative client."
Which version of the story you prefer depends on your perspective.
Of course, if the company trying to provide an alternative client was doing so to avoid paying for the service then my sympathies would be with the service provider. Otherwise, it's hard to make the case for non-standard protocols.
[The types of services people try to hack into tend not to be standardized in the first place. It's not like there's an RFC for "World of Warcraft client/server protocol." -Raymond]