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Tecmo Sues Game Hackers Under DMCA
blueZhift writes "This Reuters report on CNet states that Tecmo has filed a federal lawsuit in Chicago under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act accusing the site owners and perhaps some users of game hacking site www.ninjahacker.net (now offline) of knowingly infringing on their game software. This should be another interesting test of the DMCA and just how far it can be pushed to restrict what end users can do with/to their software purchases. This might ultimately affect the legality of cheat devices like the Game Shark and even the mere sharing of cheats or exploits."
They aren't being sued for the cheats, they are being sued for making skins (including a bunch of nude ones that TECMO doesn't seem to like) for these games.
Apparantly they had to reverse engineer the games to make these skins and therefore they are being sued under the cover of the DMCA (natch).
Personally I think it's a bitch that modifying something that you've paid for, to add value to it so that others are more likely to want to pay for it in the future is seen as a suable offence by TECMO. Bioware, Id, Valve and others make it as easy as possible to make mods since the community efforts can add considerable value to the product at zero cost to the developers.
Counterstrike anyone?
This is one of the reasons I will never buy a console. Console games are geared to be throw-away games. i.e. You spend $50 on a FPS, and you are stuck with whatever maps the publisher sees fit to let you have. Even those games on the Xbox that have downloadable mods. Mods on Xbox live see: here are limited to publisher produced material. This means that you will never see a candyland map for Uneal Championship, or the gigantic burger joint map for that matter.
I have a few hundred megs of Maps for games like Unreal Tournament, Doom 3, Red Faction, Starcraft, etc, etc, etc. that were created by fans. I have a friend who is really into Morrowind, which is over 3 years old, and mods that offer nudity, god mode, extra locations, extra equipment, skins, and anything else some fan has the imagination and inclination to produce. He has been playing this game off and on for 3 years... I'm still playing Neverwinter Nights.
And for the game companies: attack your customers at your peril... We don't care about IP, we don't care whether you are too puritanical for nude skins, or whatever. A new game is a toy to us that will be used as we see fit. If you want to clamp down, many people simply won't buy from you. I sure as hell won't. And furthermore this makes me feel like I have made the right decision in avoiding the console market altogether.