Slashdot Mirror
Blizzard Sues Starcraft II Cheat Creators
qubezz writes: "TorrentFreak reports that on Monday, Blizzard filed a lawsuit in US District court in California against the programmers behind the popular Starcraft II cheat 'ValiantChaos MapHack.' The complaint seeks relief from 'direct copyright infringement,' 'contributory copyright infringement,' 'vicarious copyright infringement,' 'trafficking in circumvention devices,' etc. The suit seeks the identity of the cheat's programmers, as it fishes for names of John Does 1-10, in addition to an injunction against the software (which remains on sale) and punitive damages. Blizzard claims losses from diminished user experiences, and also that 'when users of the Hacks download, install, and use the Hacks, they directly infringe Blizzard's copyright in StarCraft
II, including by creating unauthorized derivative works"."
Suing programmers for their creation is a very bad practice. As code is a form of speech, denying someone a freedom of it is against a democratic constitution.
I'd like to see Blizzy sued to bankruptcy for this stupidity. But alas, pigs don't fly now do they?
"He's nothing but a low-down, double-dealing, backstabbing, larcenous perverted worm! Hanging's too good for him. Burning's too good for him! He should be torn into little bitsy pieces and buried alive! "
Good, if it is targeting twats that make hacks for online games. Those people are the lowest of low. They are basically brothers with malware authors. Still does the same thing, ruins your experience of a service at the expense of some 13 year old using his epic leet cheats.
Bad because it is likely going to be an insane amount of money they want.
Talk about double-edged. It is worse than betting on Microsoft or Google now. (Formally Apple, but Apple are irrelevant now, again, thank the gods)
Last I checked, sports bribery was outside the jurisdiction of copyright law.
Does the ends justify the means?
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
creating unauthorized derivative works
That's a stretch.........
You gonna get raped like Glider, bro. Better lube yourself up.
You don't have the right to modify software? I thought copyright only covered making copies, at least initially?
A tool that uses a small bit under fair use to match binary offsets or checksums should not be copyright infringement. I'm pretty afraid that some well meaning judge that wishes to protect players would establish some bad precedence here.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
You appear not to know that reverse engineering is legal.
As long as they're not selling Blizzard's own code, there is no copyright issue in writing something that interacts with that code using knowledge gained from reverse-engineering.
It's precisely to allow such interoperation that reverse engineering is a protected activity.
We can't see Higgs Bosons with our eyes, the LHC gives scientists an unfair advantage, and they exploited God's works without authorization to do so.
Yes, Starcraft II is already extensible modable, and supports multiplayer. The hacks that are being provided can already be done with the moding capabilities available. The only things these hacks are effectively doing is letting people use a mod and play against players who aren't using it, thus unfair play.
I think Blizzard did plenty on their own to diminish user experience on many of their new games.
This can be explained very simply even to people with no technical knowledge ... lawyers for example.
The memory in your computer belongs to you. If Blizzard's game writes troop positions into your computer's memory, reading those positions is your right as the owner of this equipment --- after all, it's a pattern of bits in memory owned by you. No company can disallow you access to the equipment that you own. They don't own it, you do.
Everything else in this case hinges on that fact. The Blizzard programmers created this problem themselves through incompetent design. Information which should not be known by a player should never be stored on the player's machine.
I think it sets kind of a nasty precedent.
"Use our product in a way we don't like, and we'll get you."
The fact that they look like the good guys in doing this, is irrelevant. Should that kid (dvdjon i believe?) have been sued over cracking CSS? or Geohot(sp?) for the Playstation hackery?
They aren't selling blizzard's code or product; just a product that lets people behave like jerks. (to cheat is to act like a jerk, of course) Enabling, or being a jerk is not illegal -- yet.
Applying the law in an evil way is not okay just because the target is someone "bad". Not even when it's someone who's actually, objectively bad, let alone someone who committed the heinous act of letting some dumb kid beat you at a video game.
What are you illegally copying by applying a cheat?
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Electronic circumvention does not have much protection under the law (see DMCA), particularly if the purpose of the tool is fraudulent in nature. DeCSS preceded DMCA, I believe, but probably would have been legally vulnerable at the time otherwise.
the maphack costs money that is why blizzard is sueing just like blizzard trying to do the same to valve with the dota name.
and the that wow bot tool
anything that uses the game is property of blizzard they are referring there to mods for the game but apparently now also hacks
Blizzard their EULA has that Bullshit clause in there
and yes if blizzard was serious about their competitive side of the game that data should not even be send to the client if the client cant see the units in the fog of war
Between doing something for the lulz and doing it for profit. The former gives you a slight nod from various interesting parties at Blizzard, the later gets you lawyers so far up your @$$ that you'd better live in a country not known for extraditing citizen to the US to avoid a severe pounding by the penal system.
Valve sees hackers as a means to make easy money.
CS:GO is a huge mess the community is constantly trying to clean up. And just as soon as the community cleans up the mess via overwatch. Valve has a sale on cs:go and the hackers create a new steam account and buy CS:GO and immediately go back to hacking, leaving the community to clean up the mess once again.
In theory, if you had the hack written using a clean room design, the only person who could be liable for violating the ToS would be the person who bought the game and ripped it apart to figure out the hack.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
If I want to play the game with cheats that's my fucking business.
The modded game, into RAM.
Registrant Name: TROY MASON
Registrant Organization: VALIANTCHAOS (TM)
Registrant Street: 25 GAMELIN ST
Registrant City: STAFFORD
Registrant State/Province: QUEENSLAND
Registrant Postal Code: 4053
Registrant Country: AU
Registrant Phone: +61.0437753370
Registrant Phone Ext:
Registrant Fax: +61.
Registrant Fax Ext:
Registrant Email: aroundtheclock@GMAIL.COM
When you apply a cheat like this, you are altering the game into game+cheat. This game+cheat is a derivative work of the original game.
Making derivative works without permission from the copyright holder is a violation of most copyright laws, and you won't get permission from Blizzard to make this kind of derivative work.
That seems to be the legal argument.
Blizz is doing the right thing here, they are protecting their players. And the law should treat cheat software the way it would treat cash bribes to a soccer referee or baseball umpire.
Nobody is forcing players to run exploits and cheat. They are choosing to do these things on their own separate from existence of tools that can be created by anyone anywhere in the world including outside of practical legal reach of a US business.
What would "the law" have to say about treating hacking tools (e.g. tcpdump, nmap, gdb), browser cookie and ad blocking software the same way as they can be used to bypass "view source" protections or filter out ads and tracking cookies content owners demand as a condition of viewing their content.
Do creators of root exploits for mobile devices so owners can have more control over their own devices they paid for deserve to be fucked by the same law as well? How can you have one and not the other?
The more we go crying to mommy and daddy on account of not liking what our annoying brother is sticking up his nose the more everyone pays.
Freedom isn't free one of the major costs is having to tolerate asshats.
Shouldn't that be "Johns Doe"?
Actually, when you apply a cheat, you aren't modding the game, you are tweaking data to be used alongside the game.
ie - this is a bit that reads data from the same stream the game does, then modifies it, and sends it to the game client as though it had been sent by the server that way...
meh - only with a brain dead judge would Blizzard win.
Oh wait, when it comes to technology, they are almost all brain-dead.
The issue here is that players who dont want to cheat and dont want to play against players who cheat should be allowed to do so. The cheats being produced by these guys are allowing someone to cheat in a way that the other players in the game don't know they are playing against a cheater and that is unfair.
WTF is that?
I guess those Evil h4xx0rz had better go sit over on the Group W Bench.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Doesn't surprise me at all, they already won this same type of lawsuit against cheat programmers for World of Warcraft.
Vermifax
Logout
This can be explained very simply even to people with no technical knowledge ... lawyers for example.
The memory in your computer belongs to you. If Blizzard's game writes troop positions into your computer's memory, reading those positions is your right as the owner of this equipment --- after all, it's a pattern of bits in memory owned by you. No company can disallow you access to the equipment that you own. They don't own it, you do.
Everything else in this case hinges on that fact. The Blizzard programmers created this problem themselves through incompetent design. Information which should not be known by a player should never be stored on the player's machine.
yea..your theory is nice and all but in the real world, if you need game that is as responsive as SC2, you need to write stuff to the player's memory. even when he should not be aware of that info.
Try anything else and your game will run like shit and no one will play it.
the amount of gamers who are willing to forget the law and their best interests (and specially in a supposedly hacker friendly community like slashdot) for the sake of "punishing those cheaters that ruin my fun" is staggering.
With people like this, who don't know what's best for all of us, it's no wonder we fucked again and again by politicians.
"Science can amuse and fascinate us all, but it is engineering that changes the world. " - Asimov.
If I want to play the game with cheats that's my fucking business.
It's not if you cheat in multiplayer games against other Blizzard customers and ruin their fun, because then it causes financial losses for Blizzard (if those other customers decide not to buy another Blizzard product because of their bad playing experience).
If you want to use cheats in single player games, that's perfectly fine (and you do not need to buy a cheat tool for that anyway, Blizzard thoughtfully already provides cheat codes for that).
Bankrupcy? I'd like to see some Blizzard folks get shot. Along with their families. Preferably the family members first.
Anyone remember open battlenet? Idiot judge in that case shut down the totally open-source, non-commerical open battle net server which allowed people to run their own private Startcraft/Warcraft servers on their own private networks. Sure it could allow people to play others without a valid serial number, but it opened up another very interesting legal question: can certain software be considered illegal?
Fuck Blizzard.
This includes anybody, which includes cheater creators as well.
...It's Blizzard and their lack of willingness to properly balance the game.
Protoss has no repercussions for doing any of a dozen types of proxy or "all-in" openings.
The memory in your computer belongs to you. If Blizzard's game writes troop positions into your computer's memory, reading those positions is your right as the owner of this equipment --- after all, it's a pattern of bits in memory owned by you. No company can disallow you access to the equipment that you own. They don't own it, you do.
Not true. Let me illustrate this with another analogy.
This gun you bought legally belongs to you. Firing your gun is your right as the owner of this equipment --- after all, the gun is owned by you. No one can disallow you the use of equipment that you own. They don't own it, you do.
To test that belief, bring that gun to the nearest supermarket, fire it and see what happens.
My point is that ownership rights are, unfortunately, not absolute. For example, note the DMCA restrictions and how they affect products that belong to you.
Your argument is basically that the ends justifies the means. They're stopping cheaters who are evil therefore its ok even if what they're doing is an abuse of copyright protection.
The problem is its a slippery slope- they may be going after cheaters today, but tomorrow they can use the same legal precedent they set for themselves (with your enthusiastic support) to go after others who use their software in a way they don't approve of.
Such as going after modders.
Addon makers.
Data miners.
Manufacturers of macroable mice, keyboards etc.
You may think, oh Blizzard will never do that. My answer is it is never a good idea to put yourself at the mercy of their corporate policy. After all, not that long ago, they introduced RMAH to D3 despite objections from their playerbase.
And that is the crux of the problem. If you want to prosecute someone for sports bribery, then do so as sports bribery. Don't try to twist copyright infringement to cover odd scenarios it was never meant or intended to deal with.
Twist it too far, and it will cover everything and there goes your precious fair use.
So the Half-Blood Prince potion book was a copyright violation by Harry and Snape. Altering a copyrighted work with notes (cheats) creates a derivative work, and use of that by someone else turns Snape into a criminal, as well as Harry.
It doesn't make sense when applied to other copyrighted works, so why does it work for computer games?
Learn to love Alaska
Somebody who cheats at sports, for instance a cyclist using performance enhancing drugs, could be sued for copyright violation of the rulebook?
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Rules aren't copyrighted, software in memory is (that's the entire point of a software license. It gives you permission to copy the software from your HDD to memory). The layout of the rulebook might be copyrighted, so you can't tweak a few pages by adding cheat pages and selling it as a new copy. However, you can sell those pages by themselves and suggest the user insert those pages manually.
The cheater is making the derivative work not the cheat developer.
When you apply a cheat like this, you are altering the game into game+cheat. This game+cheat is a derivative work of the original game.
Making derivative works without permission from the copyright holder is a violation of most copyright laws, and you won't get permission from Blizzard to make this kind of derivative work.
That seems to be the legal argument.
While it is indeed a derivative work it doesn't become a copyright violation until you redistribute the derivative work. Big distinction there. You can modify copyrighted works all you want, you just aren't allowed to redistribute without a license. I'd be interested in seeing how this turns out considering that the lawyers for the defence is almost certainly going to ask "Where's the redistribution happening?"
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
Then they should sue themselfs for the pandas!
Distribution counts for a lot in copyright law. And that fantasy example was never distributed in the sense covered by copyright law, it existed as the original modified copy only.
They should just use the Spring RTS engine. It's far superior to anything Blizzard can conjure up internally.
In other news... Hasbro sues my kid sister for cheating at monopoly by hiding monopoly money.
The law makes no distinction between single player and multi player, so making a mod for a SP game would be a high level felony. Remember there is NO legal distinction between a wall hack cheat for an FPS game and a new vehicle mod for say Race the Sun.
All the more reason I don't buy from this company.
A long time ago, some programmers made a map hack with mods for Warcraft 3 known as DotA (Defense of the Acient).
Archimage Blizzard had never understood the power of this mod until Sir Valve came in and conquered programmers and copyright for DotA.
Then, Sir Valve improved DotA, making Dota2.
Nowadays, Dota2 is one of the most played game. Archimage Blizzard just don't want the history to be repeated (and neither wants to keep an eye on mods and make a possible profit over it)
You had me right up to the politician part. Politicians love cheaters and in their world they're called lobbyists.
Good would be using appropriate charges. Copyright infringement? Really? How is that even remotely appropriate?
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Give us back our LAN mode, you fucking balls of shit!.
PS.- Blizzard?. Fuck those losers.
Streisand effect to try and revive interest in an old game?
--- Say something clever. Pretend it was me. Thanks.