Comment by oneplane | Hacker News Reader

Comment by oneplane | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Their behavior might be terrible, but calling it 'defraud' is a bit weird, isn't it? Sure, we should be able to have gameplay without cheaters, but copyright, EULA and making money off of that is hardly comparable to any physical thing.

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.

> 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?

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.

If you flip a board game you ruin everyone's experience. Doesn't mean you sue them.

This analogy is growing very thin. If you've got a business operating board games, and I start a business to flip your board games thus ruining your business, what recourse do you have?

Hacking software and hacking an online service are not equivalent activities.

I think your recourse should be in a real world solution and not a soft-lawyery-fake-solution. I.e. with the board-flipping-case, glue your board to the table. Pretending copyright is a thing you can use to prevent people from flipping your boards is just stupid and ruins the copyright system even further, beyond the broken mess it is now.

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.

But, in this analogy, one should assume that the copyright owner of these books can and does implement restrictions on "making paper boats out of a book" (analogous to restrictions on what code one can run on their own PC while the game is running). Should they be able to do so in such a situation? If not, why is it justifiable to allow copyright owners that level of control over their work?

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.

I believe in Korea this could be charged as a criminal offence rather than a civil one. Which is even more crazy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com