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Blizzard Sues Overwatch 'Cheat' Maker For Copyright Infringement (torrentfreak.com)
From a TorrentFreak report: Blizzard Entertainment is suing Bossland, the maker of the popular Overwatch cheat tool "Watchover Tyrant" and several other game cheats. Among other things, the developer accuses the German company of various forms of copyright infringement and unfair competition. Blizzard is not happy with the Overwatch cheat and has filed a lawsuit against the German maker, Bossland GMBH, at a federal court in California. Bossland also sells cheats for various other titles such as World of Warcraft, Diablo 3 and Heroes of the Storm, which are mentioned in the complaint as well. The game developer accuses the cheat maker of various forms of copyright infringement, unfair competition, and violating the DMCA's anti-circumvention provision. According to Blizzard these bots and cheats also cause millions of dollars in lost sales, as they ruin the games for many legitimate players. "Moreover, by releasing 'Overwatch Cheat' just days after the release of 'Overwatch,' Defendants are attempting to destroy or irreparably harm that game before it even has had a chance to fully flourish."
I hope people make entire botnets use this cheat. This is great.
if what you're doing doesn't sell don't resort to lawyers. Find a business model that does work or write better code.
first mover penalty
"Outdated business models" is code for "I don't like paying for things, but want them anyway"
Titan fall was (may be it's yet) impossible to play on Brazilian servers cause of cheaters, good to see someone cares about their business.
Trump would make the cheaters build the patch and then charge them for the fix. Make Blizzard great again and vote for Trump!
German maker, Bossland GMBH....violating the DMCA's anti-circumvention provision
How would that work? Germans are not subject to the DMCA, which is an American law.
They say that the cheaters are ruing the game for many legitimate players, but if these players are legitimate, then they have, in fact, already bought the game, and so the cheaters can't actually be causing lost sales.
It might discourage people who aren't cheating from playing the game, of course... but they don't say that, they explicitly use the term "lost sales". I'm not sure how that can possibly be true.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
...playing TF2 for free. Later, Blizz!
brwski
"Because without beer, things do not seem to go as well''
Perhaps your game is not very good.
Maybe they should work harder at cheat-proofing their games. If cheaters can so easily ruin the game for others, then they should perhaps design their games more robustly. Imagine if banking systems worked this way: they only way your bank can protect money in your account is to launch lawsuits at "cheat sites" which tell people how to steal money from other people's accounts. If their systems were designed that poorly, no one would have any money left in their bank accounts. Perhaps similar security practices should be applied to game design.
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
What about Blizzard's negligence in providing any sort of anti-cheat capability, or in allowing their code to be easily circumvented with decades old techniques...
So easy to crack that the cheat tools are released "days" after the game is released? Seems Blizzard can't secure their games or can't be bothered to invest in security. Typical corporate thinking.
If they can't be bothered to secure their game for their own benefit, they sure as heck aren't going to bother with security for the user's benefit.
Or maybe anti social dorks shouldn't make it so that entertainment requires banking level security to keep these losers from ruining the fun for everyone else. The fault lies with the cheats not the manufacturers.
"And your honor, my peeing on feet at the urinals and spilling my beer on everyone in the stands at the hockey game did absolutely NOTHING to ruin sales from current attendees, as they had already bought their tickets"
Something that detracts from the quality of a product/service tends to discourage future purchases from the same vendor, or new users from purchasing once it becomes common and word gets around.
Players quitting earlier == less microtransactions. Not all players will spend money on them of course but some will.
don't set a bad precedent that car manufacturers can use the same line in locking out 3rd party shops.
They can say that 3rd party parts and shops are hurting our income.
If you cheat banks, you go to jail
They have a right to police their servers. They have a right to prevent cheats from functioning. They have a right to ban players for using cheat systems.
They do NOT have a right to sue because it's their own responsibility to build software checks and balances that would prevent cheating but THEY ARE TOO TIGHTFISTED to do so. That would cost money. That would require hiring enough competent coders and paying beta testers a living wage.
Blizzard "Entertainment" lost my faith completely, long ago, since the Wrath of the Lich King WOW expansion. They are morons who are managed by people who hate gamers and want to break gamers down rather than offer something fun and enjoyable. The rule at Blizzard is that if something is fun, they must find a way to remove or break the fun. Fuck those guys.
I hope this company gets the court venue switch to somewhere neutral, because California will try and convict with prejudice, regardless of the law or moral inadequacy.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
They're fucking Muslims
...and anyone using said tool should feel the power of the banhammer.
Yeah, try to kick ass in any game and have a girlfriend who only laughs when she plays videogames and uses cheat codes, because she is a bible freak and can't do pot. People rape kids nowdays, but nobody can't hit a joint? FUCK.
To be doing copyright infringement they would have to distribute part of the material. unlikely unless they were dumb enough to make instruction video, in which case only the video can be hit by take down. Furthermore mentionned DMCA will not be useful outside of US or in country where fair use is somewhat stronger, that is even if they get a judgement in the US, it is highly unlikely to have any effect on the german firm. Basically they will get nowhere. Their only hope is *maybe* to convince the local US payment firm to not do any business with the german firm, like CC provider or paypal, which would set such a huge precedent any court is unlikely to respect that and far more likely they are getting the ire of many other countries if they get the precedent.
They should sue themselves, because by releasing 'Overwatch Open Beta' just days *BEFORE* the release of 'Overwatch,' Plaintiffs are attempting to destroy or irreparably harm their own game before it even has had a chance to fully flourish.
If you're going to make a shitty rip-off of a ten-year old game, sell it *before* you let people play it.
don't set a bad precedent that car manufacturers can use the same line in locking out 3rd party shops.
They can say that 3rd party parts and shops are hurting our income.
Nope, for one thing, there is existing law.
For another, it's relatively easy to distinguish between something that modifies your own personal vehicle, and something that interferes with a controlled driving experience.
Besides, Blizzard can always let somebody like Logitech hook into the game API for their LCD display without allowing another usage for a bot.
and something that interferes with a controlled driving experience. We can just put stuff in the cars like an force limp home mode if you don't have the dealer use there software to reset the oil change counter.
So put some servers in Germany and let them do as they will. Ban German networks from hitting any other servers and done.
The problem will solve itself, no lawyers needed.
-Don't even say VPN. Works great for Netflix and the like, not so much for low latency requirements.
We aren't sure how to patch our game so the cheats won't work so we are going to try to compel you to provide your source code to "prove" you didn't violate copyright law. Don't get me wrong cheaters can go @#%@ themselves as can those making/selling the cheats but let us not pretend that this is about much more than getting their hands on the source code.
I think that went over your head... Try reading the post again - keyword "imagine"...
Personally I think he* is partially right, the DMCA and associated shit shouldn't be used for something like this. If a game developer have a persistent world where money transactions are involved (subscription fees should be enough) they should also be required to make cheats and security intrusions (almost**) impossible. Maybe not to the degree that they should be considered banks but something close to that would be logical. Many hacks in games are due to a fundamentally fucked up development environment, hacking instead of developing mostly due to pressures to deliver something rather than deliver something working.
(* sexist, most likely true)
(** given the current state of art for programming almost impossible is the best possible level of security)
be violating the EULA in the process of making their software work? Is it even possible to do a 'clean room' implementation of something like this? If nothing else the crazy broad anti-hacking laws can be invoked. But I suspect Blizzard would prefer not to do that since it makes it a criminal matter. That's not just bad press. I honestly think nobody wants that.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Hurting revenue is not the basis in law for the suit, it is the basis of restitution and harm proving merit of the suit for standing. Although copyright has statutory damages and statutory rights to sue, most other cases need to show standing. These lawyers are throwing everything possible out to ensure something sticks.
If you need to cheat at the game to have fun, the game is fundamentally flawed.
Blizz are control freaks and grip tightly to the software as a service model HOWEVER the one thing they should have learnt from Valve and their team-based shooter was hosted server security is extremely important and that people are FOR SURE going to figure out your shit to exploit it for fun and profit.
I have to say this again, give us the ability to run our own dedicated servers. Sometimes gamers do want to configure weird shit, sometimes they don't want to wait in queue for ages to play a pickup game with friends and / or incorrectly matched team comps. Sometimes they want LAN mode to run private tournaments.
I haven't looked but I'm sure by now if there aren't several "pirate" servers out there already there will be soon (the game is just too huge), and Blizzard will put all this effort into litigating the fuck out of fans instead of locking down their servers.
Side note Blizz recently went on a porno witch hunt and DMCA'd tons of artists off the face of American hosted sites for "damaging the brand", like if you want to encourage people to be shitty do shitty things...
and something that interferes with a controlled driving experience. We can just put stuff in the cars like an force limp home mode if you don't have the dealer use there software to reset the oil change counter.
Been there, done that..
Ok, but none of those things are illegal, and shouldn't be. Claiming DMCA infringement is disingenuous.
Ok, but none of those things are illegal, and shouldn't be. Claiming DMCA infringement is disingenuous.
Why shouldn't Blizzard have a means to deny people from engaging in this conduct on their servers? Do they not have rights?
It isn't fun when people cheat. I'd wish hackers would target something else than fun video games.
Or maybe anti social dorks shouldn't make it so that entertainment requires banking level security to keep these losers from ruining the fun for everyone else. The fault lies with the cheats not the manufacturers.
That would be a perfectly valid philosophy in a situation with a small population of people that know each other. Most people are honest, and most people don't want to be the jerk that screws things up for everybody. But that kind of thinking doesn't scale to large populations, especially where the "anonymity" of the Internet is concerned. There are people in the world, admittedly a small minority, that actually enjoy making life miserable for others. And if you have a sufficiently large population, it will include some of the those people. So building software with proper security shouldn't be limited just to banks.
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
Some of those things might currently be illegal, but I am not a lawyer and ultimately that is really for the courts to decide.
Whether they should be illegal, well I'm not even sure of my own opinion on that. If you produce a product whose sole purpose is to allow users to break the EULA of products they purchase, and in making that product you had to break the EULA as well, then I suppose the opinion on what the legality of that is comes down to your opinion on EULAs in general.
As for DMCA infringement, since the DMCA includes anti-circumvention provisions it seems likely that the product does indeed violate the DMCA. If the game executable has integrity checks to ensure it has not been tampered with before launching then that is a technological measure used to control access to a copyrighted work. If the cheat needs to modify that in order to run (which I suspect it would) then it has seemingly violated the DMCA in doing so.
then you shouldn't have released the game. -_-
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
According to the USSC, yes, Blizzard is a perspn so "they" have rights.
I dont think corporations are people but I'm not (yet) on the court so my opinion doesn't matter.
Unfortunately, yes, Blizzard has rights - just like a real boy!
You really can't build games like you build bank systems.
Banks don't care about things like smooth game play in the face of latency, dropped packets, server main loop update bottlenecks, etc.
Yes, a bank can implement a proper client-server architecture that never trusts the clients.
Given the limitations of the speed of light and modern computers you really can't do that for games and have an enjoyable entertainment experience.
In my experience, multiplayer games have to trust the client to some degree and are much better off doing deferred cheating checks, memory scanning anti-cheat, and statistics to get rid of cheaters after they cheat rather than make the game unplayable for everyone and prevent cheating in the first place.
Just imagine having an fps game that had a captcha you had to fill out every time you tried to shoot your gun so that you could prove you were a human.
They are now services. One that the publisher regulates, and may discontinue at any time. The EULA might as well be called the "terms of service".
Ok, but none of those things are illegal, and shouldn't be. Claiming DMCA infringement is disingenuous.
Why shouldn't Blizzard have a means to deny people from engaging in this conduct on their servers? Do they not have rights?
*facepalms* Um wut? Saying that suing the people making cheats under the DMCA is dangerous is not saying they can't keep people from cheating on their servers. What kind of stupid guff is that?
If you believe in privacy, and believe you have "nothing to hide" at the same time, you're a goddammed idiot
1) The game has cheat detection.
2) Cheat detection has anti-circumvention mechanisms.
3) The cheats must disable or defeat anti-circumvention mechanisms to work.
That is textbook DMCA violation. It's EXACTLY the kind of thing the DMCA was created for.
If you have to cheat at a video game.
The problem is that no matter how many people Blizzard sues, the cheat still exists, and more cheats will come.
Blizzards solution has to be to find and eliminate the exploits.
That said, I don't have much sympathy for Blizzard "losing sales". Even with the Field of View slider they implemented, they have the FOV maximum locked low enough that people with motion sickness can't play the game. Reading through forums on Overwatch, it seems that the FOV settings might even be over-exagerated, with 103 being more equivalent to a setting of 90 in other first person shooters.
... you can't sue and win from somebody who's trying to solve your own created puzzle ! HAHA ! Be it by hand or automated ! Or are we now going to discriminate automation ?! Vvvvvery dangerous for the future hybrid or fully robotic human ! ;)
Blizzard does realize california cant dictate laws in Germany? Nor does Germany have any sort of DMCA laws... In fact most of europe allows reverse engineering in order to make compatible software, witch cheat software clearly is....
At the very least, the cheat makers are guilty of the "unfair competition" claim; it's their main selling point ;)
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The fault for cheating lies with the cheaters. The fault for not securing the game against cheating lies with the manufacturers. More than one party can be independently responsible for the same situation, and the failing of one does not absolve the failing of the other.
You are talking about a company that took three years to add extra deckslots to a card game
I have always been puzzled by people subscribing to a game, then cheating. I can understand the temptation to cheat a little to get over a hurdle that seems impossible, surely the pleasure of playing a game lies in knowing that you have achieved it all, or most of it, simply by your own effort? How much fun would it be to get a professional chess player to play for you right up to the last move, just before you say 'check mate'?
This is the new normal in multiplayer gaming though—a rapidly growing portion don't see past their own personal enjoyment... which also coincidentally happens to be ruining the game for others.
How is it the manufacturer's fault for not writing perfect code? Writing perfect code is really hard and expensive. It's a game, not an investment bank.
This is the difference right there between Blizzard and Dice, the difference between them and Electronic Farts
Look, i dont really like overwatch (from Blizzard), the only game from blizz i ever liked was wow, but even me not really digging overwatch, thats a game i could eventually buy just for the simple reason that is a game where they care about the cheating situation
Im sick and tired of cheaters in battlefield 4 (from Dice and Electronic Farts), i see them every single fucking minute, they have NO protection NO bans And NO policy whatsoever, and its FULL OF THEM, ive never, ever, in my entire life seen a game with more cheaters than battelfield 4, every single time they drop the price of the game, more cheaters come, some matches, 64 player matches, theres like 8 or 10 players easily with either a good ol wallhack, a bot, or a combination of both (active bots, reactive bots, wallhacks, speed hacks, health hacks, damage hacks, ive seen it ALL). And there are more and more every single day
The company policy is the reason of it and its the reason i will never buy Battlefield One even tho i consider BF4 as one of the best games ive ever played, because everybody knows its the same engine and will have cheats from day one, so even tho i consider the game one of the funniest games ive ever played, im NOT buying Battlefield One, ever, no matter the price, from the videos you can see its an obviously worse game, and its going to be full of cheats, so theres literally no reason to play it
I see one of this companies spending a lot of money in stuff like denuvo copy protection while leaving the people that actually bought their games to deal with MASSIVE amounts of hacking and others like blizzard doing whats RIGHT and going against bot makers, and even tho i dont like overwatch at all, at least they are doing the right thing so its something i could consider buying if they made something out of it with more time and game modes.
And that is why electronic farts makes the top every year in the worse company in america list, and gamers love blizzard (even tho they are lazy as hell and their games are pretty mediocre). Because they dont actively hate on their customers
Forget Blizzard getting off their lazy asses and fixing these problems, let's just go after those who find and exploit Blizzard's sloppy work....
I think those guys...and yes they are almost ALL young men, should lose their internet connections.
Or failing that, their IP (and voice chat) should be logged, the ISP contacted, and a call made to their location.
"Hello, Smith residence? This is Blizzard, one of the computers at your location was logged as cheating and being a general Internet Fuckwad in our game Overwatch. Here's some of the voice chat"
Blizzard plays bit of homophobic "shitcock" style speech.
"Oh, that's your son? Well doing what your son has been doing is actually against your ISP's TOS....they could cancel your service."
Blizzard rep listens while a modern version of the Christmas Story scene where Schwartz gets punished for supposedly teaching Ralphie the Eff Dash Dash Dash word plays out in the background
I think private servers, where only a small population of people that know each other has access, would help here.
Sadly, very few games these days offer such things. In the 90s and early 2000s, many games came with software that allowed to host your own multiplayer server, but today this seems to be the exception.
Blizzard in particular has a history of trying to prevent this kind of self-help, see the bnetd lawsuit (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bnetd). Which makes them arguably part of the problem.
C - the footgun of programming languages
Allow us to run dedicated servers and moderate them our self, like in the old days.
Then cheating software will be less effective for the general public as active servers will moderate them self and the players will be less bothered by them.
- Don't do what I do, it's probably not healthy nor safe. -
It's just a symptom. What you are describing is in no way singularly related to gaming, it comes from the greater society, where everyone from politicians and business leaders have become shameless "I'm all right Jacks". You can't have such a massive trend and expect online gaming to stay free from it.
Whatever overwatch tyrant is doing, it is merely exploiting design weaknesses in the published interface for third party devs. It is not an MMO Gider; Blizz can't leverage the DCMA, but Blizz could and did claim tortious interference against MDY (the company the created and sold MMO Glider to hundreds of thousands of WoW players.) Blizz extracted $6M in damages after its claims of tortious interference against MDY were upheld, and I won't be surprised if Blizz makes the same claim against the makers of overwatch tyrant.
And that is why Blizz is on the wrong side of this. Knowing where enemies and friends are in a game where combat is a significant part of the experience would be a decided advantage, so Blizz probably should have considered that and shut down (read: made private) that part of the published interface that exposed location information. If you are going to open up the interface to encourage third party devs (yay Blizz!) don't complain when the more unscrupulous segments of the dev community decide to try to exploit your generosity for their own gain.
Overwatch tyrant is not doing anything that Blizz's game developers didn't let it do, and now that it is commercially successful, Blizz wants a piece of it and is trying to get by law what it couldn't get through good design.
Anti-cheating and DRM both have some performance implications, and - depending on how you do it - this may especially affect server vs client and network communication.
Now obvious one rule if you want something to be *really* secure is "never trust the client." However, in gaming the client is going to be the one with the fancy video card and/or other hardware. If you can't run something on the client, you need to run it on the server, which means
* Potentially really beefy server/hardware requirements
* Increased network traffic (for all the extra data that's not processed locally)
Too much of the above, and you have a platform that's simply cannot run in real-time. The only way you'd have a game that's 100% uncheatable would be if it essentially ran it all on the remote server and did remote display, which would obviously be crazy in terms of bandwidth and lag.
It's different from something like banking, email, etc where you essentially have a transactional experience. In those cases the client can be almost like a dumb terminal and you can do all your checks-and-balances on the server side.
>"Oh, that's your son? Well doing what your son has been doing is actually against your ISP's TOS....they could cancel your service."
And that would be an actionable lie. So yeah, that's retarded.
Blizzard needs to allow private dedicated servers like games used to have. They don't like that, so they should have to deal with the resulting fallout.
And that would be an actionable lie. So yeah, that's retarded.
If you closely read the TOS of many ISPs you will find that violating a TOS of a service provider/hack/etc is also considered a violation of the ISP's TOS.
Or maybe anti social dorks shouldn't make it so that entertainment requires banking level security to keep these losers from ruining the fun for everyone else. The fault lies with the cheats not the manufacturers.
I'm a programmer and have done a lot of security work for banks (American and Australian, mostly)
While giving any specifics would probably land me in jail or at least with a hefty fine, I can assure you that Blizzard has a far better level of security than many/most banking systems. The truth is appallingly scary.
"lt;dr" is the correct response to most of my posts.
How is it the manufacturer's fault for not writing perfect code? Writing perfect code is really hard and expensive. It's a game, not an investment bank.
^This
Assuming writing "perfect code" was even possible (It's not), and assuming this would be a base requirement for producing an enjoyable game (It's not) the investment required would mean you'd be paying more for your copy of Overwatch than you did for your car, which (I assume) relatively few would be willing to do.
So our options here are threefold:
1) stop making software, as it can't be perfect.
2) assume everyone is/will cheat, and make it part of the game (then it wouldn't be overwatch or competitive or enjoyable - again noone would buy it or play it)
3) Use whatever legal resources are available to protect your intellectual property and prosecute those who both devalue _and_ profit off of your work
I know which one I'd pick.
"lt;dr" is the correct response to most of my posts.
This is the new normal in multiplayer gaming though—a rapidly growing portion don't see past their own personal enjoyment... which also coincidentally happens to be ruining the game for others.
:s/multiplayer gaming/life/
:s/new/same old/
ftfy.
"lt;dr" is the correct response to most of my posts.
>"Oh, that's your son? Well doing what your son has been doing is actually against your ISP's TOS....they could cancel your service."
And that would be an actionable lie. So yeah, that's retarded.
Blizzard needs to allow private dedicated servers like games used to have. They don't like that, so they should have to deal with the resulting fallout.
Yeah, I'm also pissed that microsoft won't let me host my own copy of Win Server 2012 as I like. They claim it's their intellectual property or some such crap. So unfair I can't use all their hard work for myself however I like, and even profit off it myself.
It's like some people think if I want to have my own game server I should have to build my own game server, or find one someone is happy and willing to sell me, and pay for that.
And don't forget, having my own dedicated modifiable server would allow me to help fragment the playerbase, and subvert the in game expectations of players, so that fair competition (the single core purpose of the software) is unachievable.
"lt;dr" is the correct response to most of my posts.
I think that went over your head... Try reading the post again - keyword "imagine"...
Personally I think he* is partially right, the DMCA and associated shit shouldn't be used for something like this. If a game developer have a persistent world where money transactions are involved (subscription fees should be enough) they should also be required to make cheats and security intrusions (almost**) impossible. Maybe not to the degree that they should be considered banks but something close to that would be logical. Many hacks in games are due to a fundamentally fucked up development environment, hacking instead of developing mostly due to pressures to deliver something rather than deliver something working.
(* sexist, most likely true) (** given the current state of art for programming almost impossible is the best possible level of security)
OK, do me a favour, and remember that Blizzard is a for-profit company. Done that? Good. Now try to take the perspective of someone trying to ensure this company continues to profit. A little tougher? Got it yet? Good. OK, so now, you tell your devs you want "almost impossible" security, but to still make a profit. This is where you might imagine a kindly dev pointing out that there's this thing called "diminishing returns" that applies particularly well here, and they tell you that with the budget allowed, they've got as close to "almost impossible" as they can already. Getting "closer" will mean spending significantly more time (exponentially, actually) and turn those profits inside out. Now pretend you want to keep your job, and go hire a lawyer to stop these thieves like every other company in a similar situation does.
"lt;dr" is the correct response to most of my posts.