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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?"
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
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.
"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.
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
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.
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.
Actually, there's really no evidence to say that anybody in management or even most of the programming staff knew that there was a "good chance" (or even remote chance) of it being hacked. The most likely scenario is that the DMA guys were kicking the idea around and decided not to put the scene into the final game, but neglected to remove it properly from the code and from the art. I'd be willing to be dollars to doughnuts that this was almost entirely a case of one guy making a minor screw up, and that's why I'm pissed at all these people who want to crucify Rockstar and Take2 over this. It's so insanely trivial and inane that it actually makes my brain hurt.
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I'd rather be flamed than ignored.
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.
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