Epic Games Sues YouTuber 'Golden Modz' Over 'Magical' Fortnite Powers
torrentfreak.com
torrentfreak.com
So these folks bought a book and have figured out how to cut out a page and glue in another one. Seems totally OK.
Now they're selling a kit that helps you "mod" your book by teaching you how to cut out a page and replace it with another one. Still no problems IMO.
Could someone prevent you from running a service where someone mails you a book, you cut out some pages and replace them, and then mail it back? I don't think so.
These aren't great analogies obviously. But it's hard to understand how they have standing given that they sold the copies of the game already. Seems like they'd have better luck going on some kind of contractual violation like their EULA or their agreement you have to subject yourself to in order to connect to the game servers.
Suppose it costs you 10 million dollars to make product X, and you are able to make that money back barely (say 11 million). Then, someone else comes along and builds something quickly on top of your expensive investment and is able to make 5 million of their own. Wouldn’t you be mad? They’ve essentially found a low-effort way to make returns without taking any of the risk you did. Without you, they wouldn’t be able to do what they did unless they came up with the whole original item on their own and then built on top of it. Therefore, in essence they are profiting off of your investment.
The law may be significantly more complex and nuanced than this but it’s not hard at all to imagine scenarios where the original producer of a product does not want to enable profits of spin-offs from their work.
Edit: This is one reason patents exist. You are allowed to protect your massive investment for a period of time, no matter how much society may benefit from building on it immediately.
Copyright has no legitimate economic or technological grounds.
Also, just because something cost you a lot doesn't mean you get to claim protection over it. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweat_of_the_brow#United_State...
That's a terrible analogy. Practically everything is built on using materials built from others. That's essentially specialization.
The Software is licensed, not sold, to you under the License. The License does not grant you any title or ownership in the Software.
First sale doctrine does not apply. We don't own many things anymore. Books, music, software, movies—they used to be products you bought but now they are services you subscribe to. It is not a trend that I like.
The EULA may or may not be binding in any appreciable way: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-user_license_agreement#Enf...
If they can establish that their EULA does bind then maybe they've got a case.
Given that, why should it be okay to hack Fortnite, but hacking Netflix or Spotify would be considered criminal behavior?
https://torrentfreak.com/images/epic-golden.pdf
The lawsuit does also contain many claims of breach of contract, and goes beyond that, saying that they are also interfering with other peoples' contractual obligations since they have promoted something that has resulted in other people breaching the game's contract.
It might be significant that in this case it is not a book. Copyright is a bundle of different rights, and some of them usually only come up for certain kinds of media.
In particular, one of the rights in the bundle is the right to publicly perform the work. Perhaps broadcasting playing the game could violate the performance right?
> Could someone prevent you from running a service where someone mails you a book, you cut out some pages and replace them, and then mail it back? I don't think so.
I wouldn't be so sure. Here are two cases, both involving a company that apparently buys works of art, mounts them on ceramic, and sells the result.
In the first case [1] they bought books containing good quality prints, removed the prints from the book, mounted each print separately, and sold the tiles separately.
The 9th Circuit found that this was a derivative work and was infringing.
In the second case [2] it was apparently again the same company buying and mounting art. This time the works they bought and mounted and sold were notecards and small lithographs. The 7th Circuit said that this was not a derivative work and not infringing.
[1] https://openjurist.org/856/f2d/1341/mirage-editions-inc-v-al...
[2] https://www.law.cornell.edu/copyright/cases/125_F3d_580.htm
In one hand, the user should have ownership of their computer, and what happens in it. The user should not be prevented from testing and modifying whatever occurs in their memory, in the same way, I can load Adblock, or Reddit Enhancement Suit, to make my experience on a website better.
On the other hand, online gaming has become a sport. Having cheaters in-game is almost like bicycle racers using enchantment drugs for a competition. I would hate to lose a bicycle race for having another athlete using illegal unhealthy drugs, as I would have to lose an online game for other players paying hundreds of dollars for a significant unfair advantage.
For me, there should be a new kind of law that would cover gaming cheating behavior under unfair gameplay. Users are detracting from the experience from the other players, who are playing the game on an even playing ground.
I find GTV 5's strategy particular interesting, that instead of banning cheaters in online servers from playing, they just moved players to a "cheaters pool," in which cheaters can play with other cheaters. It still allows everyone to play the game, but now they are put up against other players who also have an unfair advantage, and have to compete for a better strategy.
Similar category to hacking. Stricter penalties.
My main software is a digital copilot for starcitizen.
It does voice control, screen verlay and eventual screen grabs to load states. It perfrms nothing a skilled pilot cannot do, but makes it so almost anyone can match with those skilled pilots. Is it considered cheating when it makes me a much better pilot, faster reaction speeds and easily performing difficult movements?
What about my testers why are physically challenged in some way? There's no way they could keep up without my software, but I can understand the arguments that a pilot of equal skill vs one with my software will be at a large disadvantage.
It's a difficult thing to codify into law I believe.
Much like StarCraft, I think there would be interesting competitions and challenges for people to develop AI for the game. There could also be challenges for games in developing better interfaces, helpers, and plugins.
Which honestly is what probably would happen from guidelines (sigh) - which will put me and my users back to where we were :P
I’m having hard time thinking of a justification for the government fining you or throwing you in jail for cheating at a video game.
Were we to hold otherwise, Blizzard or any software copyright holder could designate any disfavored conduct during software use as copyright infringement, by purporting to condition the license on the player's abstention from the disfavored conduct. The rationale would be that because the conduct occurs while the player's computer is copying the software code into RAM in order for it to run, the violation is copyright infringement. This would allow software copyright owners far greater rights than Congress has generally conferred on copyright owners.
No, what worked for Blizzard was DMCA. Because they had an ineffective "anti cheat" system in place, somehow they found a judge willing to consider a bot evading that a violation of a DMCA copy protection device.
People pay $$$'s to mod their sports cars with additional speed but drive them in urban areas. Or they'll add cosmetic exhausts for looks.
Gamers might want to skip levels or access advanced locked features without investing huge amounts of time. Gamers might also enjoy the thrill of playing the game in a way that it wasn't meant to - with hacks or cheats.
'Magical' powers = he was selling cheats.
That is not a comment on the substance of Epic's claims against these people; just on the clickbaity phrasing.
You can sometimes make a valid copyright claim if they are using your game logos in their advertising, but unless you have the budget of Epic it’s pretty hard to even get an effectual site or YouTube video/channel take down.
Realistically a developer has little alternative than to attempt both code fixes and social ones - once a game has a reputation for being full of hackers it can quickly become the end of it (though again, probably less of a concern for Fortnite due to its scale and popularity)
There are a lot of games that get this wrong but even games that get it right can be cheated.
Since you mention MMOs, most or all them don't check for movement even popular ones like WoW.
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/59p7qd/this-man-h...
Imagine someone making paper boats out of a book, selling them for one dollar each and the book has 300 pages (but costs 20 dollars). Is making paper boats suddenly copyright infringement? Or breach of contract? I think mangling law for profit this way is a load of bs and if this needs to be handled in court, the way to do it would be finding something that actually applies.
At the same time, if the law doesn't provide anything for this type of cheating or selling software to help you cheat, then that is something that could be addressed, instead of hacked together (pun intended) by applying some bs law that should have nothing to do with this. Also, it would be much better if Epic gave the money to the security department instead of lawyers to actually fix the issue (it's an engineering/security issue, not a law issue).
I'm glad this nonsense lawyering pretty much only exists in the USA and not the real of the world.
This isn't a good analogy. Creating and distributing cheats ruins the play experience for everyone. Making paper boats doesn't detract from anyone else's enjoyment of reading a book.
Hacking software and hacking an online service are not equivalent activities.
In real life games, say, a tennis match, you have someone sitting outside the playing field checking if you are playing by the rules, and stopping the game if you don't. That is the correct way to to things. You're not going to sue all the players that don't follow the rules, you just kick them from the playing field.
Now, creating and distributing cheats doesn't ruin the play experience for everyone. It's evident that it doesn't ruin the experience for those using the cheats. It's also possible that there are groups of people who wish to use cheats when playing separately from non-cheaters. Instead of suing this guy and shutting down the cheats entirely, I would suggest they should put those players on their own server, where they won't encounter any players who wish their experience to be cheat-free.