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."

Comments

All right!

[faloi]

"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!

No entertainment, by law

[hesiod]

> 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?"

RE

[Alex P Keaton in da]

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....

Re:RE

[BewireNomali]

isn't this game rated mature? if so, the issue here isn't that mature content was on the disc. IT was about disclosure.

I've made a point of this before. Coders are a select subclass. They communicate in a language that most cannot comprehend. Further, they can communicate with machines and make them do things. It's an awesome power - really the penultimate modern day power.

The issue here is that the non-technical non-coding governmental and institutional bodies are impotent in the face of this power. Not only is this code completely opaque to them, they've no inclination to learn of it or to gain knowledge of it. So they want full disclosure. Hot Coffee is like pulling off the fig-leaf. Suddenly it dawns on most luddites that there's a whole world out there they know nothing about - an empire being constructed right under their noses. They are now aware that to a segment of the population, they are naked and defenseless.

Someone above posted that they should just print out the code and have the pols pick out the offending portions. That's exactly it. They can - and you can. And no one in power or invested in the status quo wants that at all.

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.

Hot coffee?

[gEvil (beta)]

Does the McDonald's case act as precedent?

Um no...

[voice_of_all_reason]

'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.

Wishful thinking

[Bastian]

'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.

Lawyer has not point but Rockstar could be liable

[goombah99]

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?