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LA Attorney Sues Rockstar Over Hot Coffee
Next Generation reports that the L.A. city attorney has filed suit against Rockstar, for a misleading ad campaign and 'unfair competition'. The suit was prompted because of the much publicized 'Hot Cofee' mod discovered last year. From the article: "'Businesses have an obligation to truthfully disclose the content of their products - whether in the food we eat or the entertainment we consume,' Delgadillo said. The lawsuit is actually part of a wider effort to investigate the marketing of videogames."
"Businesses have an obligation to truthfully disclose the content of their products - whether in the food we eat or the entertainment we consume"
Now we can sue film makers to disclose all the goofs and inside jokes that show up in films, instead of waiting for people to single step through DVDs to find 'em!
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." -Albert Einstein
> Delgadillo [...] has requested that the companies fully disclose the content of their games.
Doesn't that sound strangely like "There may be no surprises in any game, we must know exactly what's going to happen before it happens?"
If they deliberately mislead the ratings board to give them a lower rating, then they're trying to get away with fraud. And yes, they knew that the PC version had a good chance of getting hacked to make the sex scene availible.
They should print out the entire code of the game, and present it to the attorney and ask him tom point out the objectionable scene...
In order to view the Hot Coffee, a grainy, non detailed cartoon fellatio scene, didn't you have to go onto the internet and download the code? If someone has access to the internet, couldn't they download non graing, non cartoon fellation? Isn't this somewhat akin to walking past nude women and Hustler mags to get to the SI Swimsuit issue?
Lawyers sue- it is what they do. You can't get mad at a lawyer for suing any more than you can get mad at a dog for barking....
And All I Ask is a Tall Ship And a Star to Steer Her By
Money grubbing lawyer
If it's dead, you killed it.
Does the McDonald's case act as precedent?
This guy's the limit!
'Businesses have an obligation to truthfully disclose the content of their products
Wrong.
Otherwise, Sherlock Holmes books would be illegal, because they don't tell you who the murderer is up front.
What? Hot Coffee? Never heard of it, lawsuits are educational, I'll have to go get that now.
"whether in the food we eat or the entertainment we consume"
Wow! I haven't heard an analogy that terrible in awhile. Playing a video game that has content (not accessible unless you unlock it), is most certainly not like selling food with poison as an unlabeled ingredient.
The 2 most notable differences being 1) Video games don't cause death and serious illness, and 2) If there is arsenic in my candy bar it's still bad for me even if I'm not interested in eating poison.
'Businesses have an obligation to truthfully disclose the content of their products - whether in the food we eat or the entertainment we consume,' Delgadillo said.
*sigh* I wish. Two words: Natural flavors.
It seems to me that this stupid thinking could be applied to a lot of things. Like what about all those Disney movies that had inside jokes and pranks that were dirty. What about if we sued Leonardo Davinci because of The Last Supper.
Why should any company be held responsible for the actions of a few individuals? Imagine if record labels got sued because of the things that their artists say in their songs. All of these things might not be quite the same thing but they related enough to show that thinking like this only damages a society.
So it seems to me that another idiot jumped on the band wagon of attacking the video game industry because its been in the news and it seemed like the cool thing to do if you want to create a lawsuit and attempt to generate money for a city thats lacking the funds to maintain its infastructure.
And the "sex scenes" themselves were comical, to say the least. First of all, CJ was fully clothed. No penetration or genitalia were shown. At worst, it was full frontal nudity with sexual situations, which would have earned a movie an R rating. The original "M for Mature" was still consistent with the content, in my opinion.
I'm not defending these guys... That content should have been removed prior to the game's release. They really were stupid about it. But it's not like "the children" were exposed to some horrific pornography in an "E for Everyone" game or anything like that.
psmylie's dictionary: Godzillion (noun) Any number large enough to destroy Tokyo
I trust the suit against Sony over XCP will follow shortly. In fact, that limelight is already taken, so instead monies from the public fisc are being wasted on this. [Which isn't to say Rockstar's handling of this matter wasn't foolish and incompetent.] This is what you get when civil law enforcement is a popularity contest.
They put their ice cream and other products in that handy single serving container and they say it has four servings!
Or the twenty oz Coke bottles, Servings per container: 2.5.
I'm so gonna sue Id Software for not letting me know about the NOCLIP cheat in Quake 1!
Is this when we see a dozen other law firms file law suits against all major software houses for not disclosing any other "easter egg" during the past 10 years?
Give me a break. I'll pass on the kit-kat.
Delgadillo also opposes the police enforcing immigration law because he's bought and sold by local business interests who want the cheap labor.
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_coffee
The Hot Coffee mod is a mod created for the personal computer port of the video game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (GTA:SA, 2004/2005, Rockstar North). When installed, it unlocks a hidden part of the game which involves having sex (featuring oral sex with an "invisible" penis and dry humping) with the main character's girlfriend to try to improve the relationship between the two.
What's a "cofee"?
If renoir painted a nude orgy on a canvas, and then changed his mind and painted most of it over and put clothes on everyone so it looked like people spraweld on the grass at a sunday church picnic would there be a problem. If some currator scraped off the covering paint to reveal the draft orgy form should we go after renoir for public obscenity?
IN the case of the game there were some dark corners that were painted over. Someone wrote some code to expose them. They presumably were not inteded to be exposed. If anything they suggest the probity of the maker in deciding to remove them. But they did not excise them they painted them over. There could be lots of reasons to do this. Like the great painters they might have just been trying to save cash on canvases and just swithed off access rather than paying someone to carefully extract the sexy bits from the main code.
On the other hand another analogy is to prohibition era vinters who while forbidden to make wine except for sacraments, would ship barrels of "grape juice" to New York city with explicit instructions no to add so much sugar and certain kinds of yeast because then it might accidentally turn into wine which would be illegal. This winking cover up of the underlying product was of course intended to sell more grape juice because of it's unauthorized potential.
So perhaps this comes down to proving intent. Did rock star intend hot coffee to happen? Did they want to create a whisper marketing regime. And did they actually seed the hints that it existed?
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I prefer to sue over tea myself.
But will Rockstar be able to recover damages if they can prove that the city attorney is filing a frivolous lawsuit?
On technological merits, as has been discussed before, being able to manipulate the game engine into performing activity that was not originally intended seems out of scope of liability for the manufacturer. It's a bit like suing gun manufacturers for vicarious liability. I understand that this code exists in the product, but I do not understand to what lengths the users had to go through to expose it. Which would seem to be the crux of the argument against Rockstar.
I read the article and I read the comments, but I still don't exactly understand what this is about. Can somebody enlighten me? What exactly is the infamous hot coffee sequence? I take it it has something to do with nudity or sex?
-- Cheers!
My roommate just finished playing Indigo Prophecy, and that game had a lot more adult situations right in the intended story of the game. As of yet, I have heard no big-time lawyer complaining about that game not being rated AO. (Indigo Prophecy was a really cool game actually).
...Wait, that's all inferred by the title "politician," isn't it?
Based on GTA's popularity versus Indigo Prophecy's popularity, I would argue that anti-gaming legislators are just looking for some more headline space to boost their political stance rather than honestly wanting to make any meaningful change...
Does this mean we can sue Microsoft for not disclosing all of their security holes?
Does this also mean all software (in turn) should be open-sourced?
This is ridiculous.
Why isn't there a big uproar regarding the Sims 2 no censor patches that are available?
Hell, you can even get re-skins that add anatomically correct genetalia to the Sims and a nudity patch that can be used to make your Sims run around naked all the time.
The no-censor patch is pretty much the same as the Hot Coffee issue. ie: both patches simply unlock images already contained in the shipping game.
The re-skins are a different issue, since they actually replace the "barbie doll" style nudes that ship with the game with more graphic skins (however, the base nudes shipped with the Sims2 are much more detailed than the images in Hot Coffee)
The whole "Hot Coffee" debacle is a crock of shit. If Sims 2 was as popular as GTA:SA, I'm sure we'd be reading about suing Maxis over the decensor patch instead. But since it's not, there isn't an uproar.
Can you imagine if this held how liable companies like Microsoft would be? Forcing them to disclose the content of all Microsoft operating system nuances and 'hidden' features that were not fully disclosed?
I just have to ask, what is the freakin point of all this!!
the game is already leveled at M which is 17 and above. If you change the rating to AO, the age becomes 18.
This begs me to ask, is all of this litigation and all this uproar worth it? It's the difference of a year. I didn't learn anything that earth shattering between 17 and 18.
this isn't going to make any difference at all. besides, like stated, the content is the same as a rated R movie, which, surprise surprise, has an age limit of 17!
I think we should start suing on the grounds of stupidity and wastes of time.
I've said it before. Coders devalue themselves - coders have ALL the power in this world. They then turn around and give it away for a paycheck.
Until you can show me how I can write some code that will make beer and pizza flow out of my PC's uSB port, I am pretty sure I will continue to need that paycheque. At least until the replicator is invented, or the whole world becomes communist.
In fact, in GTA:SA with a set of cheats and quite a bit of skill, you can uncover several (I know of two) partially-furnished, somewhat-non-solid bordellos. R* left them in the game because, well, it wasn't worth to cut them. I think this points in the direction of Hot Coffee being a similar left-over.
If Renoir painted a nud orgy, I'd be willing to download spyware to see it.
Let's think about this for a moment... Why should they be responsible for what someone else did to their product? The license agreements and such probably even specifically stated that you couldn't mod it, reverse engineer it, etc.
But hey, let's sue some bleach company because some stupid idiot mixed it with vinegar.
Scott Swezey
When you look at Rockstar and Hot Coffee what you see is:
1 a company that has pushed hard, recklessly, against the limits of what the general public --- not the young male-dominated gaming community --- will tolerate in an M-rated game. This is what unites Little Haiti with the soccer moms of Westchester County.
2 adult content embedded in three commercial pressings of the game
3 a "blame the hackers" PR blitz that unravelled quickly when Hot Coffee was unlocked on the consoles