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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?
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
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.
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.
shhhhhhhhhhhh before all the churches get any ideas
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.
No. I think banning is sufficient, but otherwise I share your sentiments. Cheaters are lazy, incompetent players, pure and simple.
Cheaters may be dicks, but are they copyright infringers?
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What are you illegally copying by applying a cheat?
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I agree with you and Hanover Fiste.
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.
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.
You are assuming applying the law in this way is evil. That is a huge assumption.
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!
The modded game, into RAM.
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.
chill out. it's just a freakin' game!
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.
Luckily precedent from the past shows that claim holds no water: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/....
That's a fantastic point. Fixing your link: Lewis Galoob Toys, Inc. v. Nintendo of America, Inc. In the same way that Game Genie didn't infringe on Nintendo's copyright, the court should rule that this game modification does not infringe on Blizzard's.
I like to think of it as a variation of Plato's Forms -- the copyrighted product "Starcraft II" exists only as what is on-disk -- a fixed collection of code, art, and everything else that makes up the game. However, once this "ideal" form of the product is loaded into the computer's memory, it becomes a separate and mutable thing. The game itself has become a different and derivative thing simply by executing it, and any number of things can cause that state to be changed. This one single participant of the "Starcraft II" form is ephemeral and isn't being distributed (redistribution being the one reason their suit might be reasonable).
Trust me, I hate people who cheat against others as much as anyone, but this is a much larger issue with far-reaching consequences. Restricting what someone can do with code running on their own computer is a slippery slope, and we have already had enough ignorant court rulings (such as Blizzard v. bnetd). There's also the question of single-player cheating -- should it be illegal for someone to mod their single-player game, to give themselves infinite health, for example?
Blizzard is attempting to rectify a relatively simple technical flaw through the court system, and that's just sad. I hope you're right, AC, that the Game Genie precedent will be upheld.
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
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Doesn't surprise me at all, they already won this same type of lawsuit against cheat programmers for World of Warcraft.
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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).
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.
...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?
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Somebody who cheats at sports, for instance a cyclist using performance enhancing drugs, could be sued for copyright violation of the rulebook?
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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.
I guess that's for the court to decide.
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.
By dealing with them within your own power or by lobbying for legislation that allows you to deal with cheaters.
Definitely not by starting frivolous lawsuits intended to torment them into submission.
It isn't okay when companies do it to people you like, so it isn't okay they do it to people you don't like either.
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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.
You had me right up to the politician part. Politicians love cheaters and in their world they're called lobbyists.
In a multiplayer game yes. They should get perma-banned. In single player I say: cheat on, it hurts no one.
No, but I fail to see how bypassing Warden or whatever it is to do DLL injection could possibly be construed as copyright anything.
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...
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...
To say this has "nothing to do with the purpose of copyright" seems pretty blatantly false. The legal framework is supposed to prevent you from modifying the game them distributing the modification. The hack is (I'm assuming) being distributed, allowing the player to *then* modify the game, which admittedly would mean it's not really violating the rules, if true, but it is very much in the same area of legal consideration.
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Streisand effect to try and revive interest in an old game?
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