In what world is getting a 5 year prison sentence for aimbotting a "good" thing?
E-sports are serious business in South Korea. The Korea e-Sports Association is operated by the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism and affiliated to the Korean Olympic Committee. E-sports have had serious problems with cheating, match fixing and illegal gambling. We're not talking about some niche hobby, but a significant part of the Korean economy.
I don't necessarily agree with this decision, but I think that it's unfair to characterise it as petty or draconian. The integrity of sport is a precious thing that needs protection. You might see an aimbot as the moral equivalent of a patch, but a professional e-sports player might see it as equivalent to a vial of steroids or a credit card skimmer.
There's a very fine line between cheating at a game and outright fraud.
which cause bodily harm..
> making devices for cheating at casino games
which cause financial fraud
> or fixing the outcome of sporting events.
same as above.
Cheating in an every day game does not benefit you financially or cause harm to other human beings. If this law was limited to eSport tournaments then I can see it being effective.
You also have to accept that not every gamer in Korea is a professional.
Match-fixing in professional games is clearly fraud, that doesn't mean that letting your friend win because it is his birthday should be prosecutable.
"Oh, that wasn't a foul"
"Yes it was"
"Are you going to make a federal case about this?"
"Yes. Yes I am."
Of course there are people who abuse them, but then that could be said of pretty much anything. Should we also ban fizzy drinks, doughnuts and grandma's apple pie because of type 2 diabetes?
Or you could just infer they are talking about controlled anabolic steroids without a prescription.
I hate cheaters in video games, just not enough that I think they should be jailed. Cheating at an event with a monetary reward though...
I don't see how this is any different. People are going to cheat. They should get punished for cheating. If that cheating involves fraud, they should face charges for fraud. But it should not be illegal to drill a hole in a baseball bat and fill the void with ground-up bouncy balls.
The situation is you have people who break the rules and profit from that, you have enforcers who know who the people are who are breaking the rules but don't have a practical method for controlling them. So this gives them a bigger stick to threaten the bot makers with and presumably they will back down and try some other way to subvert the system that doesn't have the risk of jail time.
The big challenge is that they don't want to turn of players who are paying a subscription revenue but they don't want players that cheat either. If they can make it harder to cheat they hope to keep the revenue and reduce the cheating. Otherwise they ban players which reduces the cheating and reduces the revenue.
My own opinion is that finding the equivalent of shadow banning for these game players would be much more interesting. Back when I was playing World of Warcraft it was suggested that Blizzard might implement a way of adjusting the odds of reward for cheating players against them and in favor of people who were not cheating. That being a more subtle way of making cheating less beneficial and moving people away from it.
I guess it depends on the details. As another commenter stated, it might make sense for professional e-sports. If you are cheating say on a ranked pub, then may be it matters but I wouldn't go as far as indict people on criminal charges. But the way it is stated in the article seems like you can go much further than that and even harm one's private usage of a program. It's like going to jail for playing cards with your buddies in your home but taking a suit out for whatever reason. I hope there are sensible exceptions but this sounds pretty draconian.
This is Korea, but regarding the US:
> for selling steroids
Not if you're a doctor or if the steroids you sell aren't scheduled. There are plenty of legal methods for obtaining steroids. Even for performance enhancement reasons. The laws at play here are only concerned with illegal distribution and possession.
> making devices for cheating at casino games
This appears false: http://www.blackjackcomputers.com/ My guess would be that you only get into legal trouble if you actively tamper with gambling machines.
> or fixing the outcome of sporting events
What about the WWF? I would imagine any laws have to do with the application of gambling regulations and not the sport itself.
Gaming is something that a) a lot of people care about, and b) is big business. People manufacturing and distributing cheating tools harms that. The whole purpose of the law is to prevent societal harm, and a great deal of law is about eliminating parasitic activity to keep systems healthy. E.g., with the adoption of electronic communication, we had to invent wire fraud laws to keep up.
When it was just us coding in our basements, we could pretend that software was harmless. But as software eats the world, our work becomes just as important and meaningful as people working with atoms. We want the world to take software seriously, but that doesn't happen half way. We can take credit for serious benefits, but we also have to take responsibility for the serious harm.
Sometimes you get an impatient government intervention that attempts to render silence upon a non-issue, as quickly and ham-fistedly as possible.
The motivation for absurd, paternalistic government intervention could find it's source in nepotism, cronyism, or a simply an unexpected groundswell of headache inducing tattle-tales.
The nature of the non-issue will inform you about who is capable of gaining the government's ear. In this case their are people getting mad about video games, who are savvy about government process, somehow.
I think this is overlooking just how important video games are to S. Koreans.
To me, I see it not much different than this http://www.dw.com/en/germanys-anti-doping-law-comes-into-for...
In what world is getting a 5 year prison sentence for writing an aimbot a "good" thing?
Rather than adding legal penalties that can be wielded at will by companies for less-than-moral purposes (protecting customer-negative revenue streams), they can spend more improving their netcode. Catapults and outlaws, etc.
From the article (I can't read Korean): > Based on this law, manufacturing and distributing programs that are not allowed by the game company and its Terms of Service is now directly illegal. That would include [...] or anything not allowed by the ToS.
Those guys have been around for over a decade. There are many more like them. I'm not sure which services are popular these days.
The problem is that the lines can get pretty blurry. A long time ago there were transparent hacks for everquest[1] that did packet sniffing, and displayed the information in a friendly UI. So is wireshark a hacking tool? Hard to say.
Breaking an old BASIC game was how I got into programming. If I did the same thing in Korea now, I could face 5 years in prison.
(Not saying this is actually the case, but that is a theoretical world where this would be okay)
Federal sentences for bank robbery are 5-10 years.
A much more convincing argument could be made that theft and copyright violations are the same. Buy theft has quite low punishments (at least in California).
Stealing your furniture is theft. Taking a look at your furniture, and carving another set exactly like it is copyright infringement.
You may violently disagree with this, but if you're struggling to figure out at least a lower bound for how much damage might have been done, the answer is probably "almost none".