Riot extorts League of Legends legacy version fan project? | Hacker News Reader

Riot extorts League of Legends legacy version fan project?

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101 pointstrashapr242129 comments

Very interesting. Why would you send some junior engineer to have this chat over Discord? It seems like all he accomplished was confessing to violating Discord's ToS and saying "yeah well I'm gonna sic the lawyers on you". Why not just sent the lawyers directly? It almost sounds like "legal told us not to go after you guys, but I personally really want to" at this point. It just doesn't add up.

Since this is a Reddit thread, how would you "maliciously comply" with this guy? Convince him, someone who probably doesn't dot their Is and cross their Ts, that he successfully got your domain, then pull it out from under them in a few weeks? I can't think of anything, and it obviously doesn't seem like a good legal strategy, but if someone else did it I would sure enjoy reading about it.

> It almost sounds like "legal told us not to go after you guys, but I personally really want to" at this point. It just doesn't add up.

Because it really seems that way. Legal might have explored this possibility and found no viable path, so this employee (or his team) thought they could bully the creators into submission. They must have thought that bringing legal into the equation would have led the creators to lawyer up and prepare for a defence, which would not have been their desired outcome.

I've always considered applying to work at Riot; but when I see situations like this employee acting extremely unprofessionally (saying, "I wish I could say it has been a pleasure" is just such a terrible way to conduct yourself as a representative of your company) I'm reminded why I will never apply.

Seeing stuff like this makes me think they've taken almost no steps towards changing their culture that was heavily reported on a few years ago.

If this is how they talk to their customers, imagine what the day-to-day internal chats look like!

From the whispers we've heard about Riot Games over the years I entirely believe this is their corporate SOP for shutting down unwanted fan projects.

That being said if I were in their shoes I'd shut down immediately, put up some angry screed on the project's website, and disappear off the Internet. If someone from Riot's actual legal team wants to demand destruction of source code or whatever, let them do the extra PI gruntwork.

Of course I'm also the kind of person who's massively shied away from fan projects precisely because there are people who not only do not appreciate them, but are entirely willing to legally prosecute you far beyond just shutting down the project and clearing the market. Why? I dunno. There's a weird school of copyright morality that wants to equivocate any kind of infringement with forcible rape, especially with regards to fan projects. It's like some sort of weird dual to toxic fandom.

(It does not help that certain fan scenes, notably Melee, are full of actual sex pests. I still consider it a false equivocation.)

>(It does not help that certain fan scenes, notably Melee, are full of actual sex pests. I still consider it a false equivocation.)

It's odd to cherry-pick Melee here: "full" is a very strong description to use, and fairly inaccurate - Melee's community tends to kick those people out once they're found out about, unlike some other communities.

The majority of recent issues with regards to this were also (alarmingly) in the Smash 4/Ultimate community, not Melee's. Just because they're both Smash games doesn't make them the same community.

Sorry, that was just the first competitive scene to come to mind. It certainly isn't inherent to competitive Smash or even the fighting game community at large to be full of sex pests, it just so happens that a lot of them have found such places to be an unfortunately comfortable niche to hide in.

So in other words, Melee is not notable?

Wow, I know nothing about this project, but if the person who reached out to this developer is actually employed by Reddit, this reads as one of the most unprofessional things I've ever seen from a company of Riot's size? It sounds like there's some questions regarding the legitimacy in the comments of the original thread, but OP provided email headers from a person with the same email as the handle in the discord screencaps.

Highlights:

>The courts are always an option, but it's long and messy so we thought we'd do some outreach to see if we could work together to prevent everyone the trouble

>You've obviously put a lot of work into Chrono shift, but I assure you that the Chrono break is coming

>If it were scare tactics Riot wanted you wouldn't be speaking to me

> if the person who reached out to this developer is actually employed by Reddit, this reads as one of the most unprofessional things I've ever seen from a company of Riot's size

(I assume s/Reddit/Riot/ ?)

Riot has a history of unprofessional conduct. The gender discrimination scandals across the entire company [0] is just one that springs to mind.

[0]: https://kotaku.com/inside-the-culture-of-sexism-at-riot-game...

Very fair, my comment was actually rather blasé, since Riot has done far worse on far more important things.

I suppose the Chronoshift developers should be happy no one farted on them.

It is surprising that their lack of professionalism has not improved over 11 years. The employees around a decade ago would make up a tiny fraction of those today, if that, yet things do not seem to have gotten any better; at this point it's institutional.

If this were really what Riot wanted, they would stop serving the now nine+(?) year old assets from their CDN.

Not sure why this "security" guy is the one responsible for reaching out.

Not sure why he's asking about how they distributed their "workload".

To me, it sounds like some script kiddy wants to steal their project and sell it for profit. Otherwise, they wouldn't need the source code, domain name, or details of how the project runs.

Also, why would they configure their mail client to have "Riot Zed" as their name? Makes zero sense, smells like a scam to me.

I think it's relatively common to have support responses not sent under the employee's real name. "Riot Zed" sounds about as common as "Alice at Foobarcorp" or "Gamemaster Bob".

There is just too much out there for someone to find when using their full name. No need to give angry customers an easy way to dox your employees.

All the riot folks use handles when communicating externally.

Even their lawyers?

Not their lawyers, no, but their not-lawyers, yes.

Reminder: everything you say on Discord, DMs included, can be subpoenaed in a civil suit against you for all time.

Discord is not end to end encrypted and you should assume that they log everything forever: IP address history (rough location/ISP), the list of processes the Discord client app scans from your local computer and uploads, and all chat messages and attachments (even in DM).

Discord is not private.

> Reminder: everything you say on Discord, DMs included, can be subpoenaed in a civil suit against you for all time.

Also remember that’s true of every record about you, and every observation any person makes of you (because subpoena power extends to testimony, not just records), ever, outside of narrow sets of specific legal privilege.

Yes, but most conversations with most people don't create permanent records, historically.

Phone calls don't. SMSes do, but the logs kept by the carriers for the national spies are immune to subpoena, because it is illegal for them to exist in the first place. Signal conversations generally don't (except on the device, and it has features for controlling that).

Discord does. iMessage does. Instagram DM does, Facebook Messenger does - all with not only the conversation partner, but with an uninvolved third party who can divulge the conversation content voluntarily if they wish.

Something smells fishy here. Surely sending a C&D letter would have been more cost/time efficient for all parties involved? Then again, I wouldn't put it past Riot to try to employ these kind of shakedown tactics given their... ah, "culture".

'zed' sounds and acts like a child. Sure he's a 'not-lawyer' but c'mon, is he also a 'not-professional'?

What the devs are doing here seems similar to the private RuneScape servers that exist to this day. The only thing I can think of is that RuneScape created OSRS (olde school RuneScape) off of a backup from 2007. Maybe Riot is planning on doing something similar?

While this seems outrageous I can see why Riot is interested in protecting their IP especially given how they’re looking to expand their lore of Runeterra to other mediums (TV Shows, other games, etc..)

Regardless there is a right way to confront them on legal concerns. A dev threatening on discord is not that.

RSPS server sources are all from leaks; you can decompile/reflect the client all you want but the server bits (let alone sources) were never distributed. Jagex has used this fact to go after RSPSes.

It's not totally clear from the post, but it sounds like this is different in that Riot is just straight-up serving all the assets they need? I can see how that'd lead the project developers to think they're in the clear.

It seems like a lot of people who get involved in fan projects are unfortunately naive about both the technical legality of what they're doing and how eager the company will be to stick it to them. From my perspective having done RSPS things, it's absolutely insane to have not operated from the beginning assuming that adversaries wouldn't do everything possible to dox you and ruin your life. You need to be able to laugh at threats like this if the goal is a long-lived project, though that presumes an adversarial relationship with the devs. I guess my point is that non-adversarial relationships with projects of this sort are really rare and that assuming this was fine strikes me as questionable at best. Even if you do think you have some sort of fair-use defense, you should expect to have fun experiencing legal-system process-as-punishment for a couple of years.

No RSPS server uses leaked code from RuneScape. All of the server implementations have come from reverse engineering the client.

Also, all of RS content is written in RuneScript, Jagex's custom scripting lang, so you wouldn't be able to easily use a leak (nor would you want to.. it's hideous: https://twitter.com/JagexAsh/status/1184869534756491265)

I can't directly contradict you (couldn't find the source I thought I had), so maybe I was getting trolled by copyright notices in the base networking stuff (so not runescript) circa 2009. But yeah, either way you're right that at this point they're not using anything verbatim; thanks for the correction.

- you distribute edited Riot's file to allow people to connect to your servers, it is IP theft, and a big security threat towards Riot's consumers

- leaking private discussion online, that's a thing that'll be used against you in the court

- you complain about the way they handle the situation, you wanted them to work with you on the project instead? .. what a terrible excuse

I don't believe there's any law against "leaking" a private conversation like this. For one, there's no expectation of privacy established. For another, it's a member of the conversation deciding to make it public. That has to be protected.

I'm not sure about what legal issues might exist around intellectual property, but it must be better to make a forthright claim - "You are infringing on our IP by doing X. Please stop or we will bring legal action" compared to whatever this is.

> leaking private discussion online, that's a thing that'll be used against you in the court

No it won't. There is no expectation of privacy for that kind of stuff.

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