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Australian Federal Court Grants Publisher of GTA V Game Right To Search Homes of Five People Accused of Making Cheat Software (bbc.com)
The publisher of video game Grand Theft Auto V has been granted the right to search the homes of five people accused of making cheat software. From a report: The court order allowed Rockstar Games and its parent company, Take-Two Interactive, to search two properties in Melbourne, Australia, for evidence related to a cheat known as Infamous. The Australian federal court has also frozen the assets of the five, who have not yet filed a defence. The cheat went offline six months ago. It allowed players who paid about $40 to manipulate the gaming environment, generate virtual currency and use a "god mode" feature that makes players invincible.
Was patching the game not an option?
... all of this because the stupid half of mankind couldn't see buying drm enabled games and feeding microtransactions to companies would allow them undermine game ownership. Thereby taking away what every normal person who used to own their games do what they will with them, because they paid for it. This sick authoritarian feudal model is disgusting.
Hold on -- a private company can be given the right to search somebody's home in Australia? They have literally been given the legal right bust into multiple private citizens' homes? WTF? Is this life imitating art or some kind of crazy distopian future?
The great shithole from down under. I visited there for 3 months, and despite them being one of our anglo saxon neighbors with a comparable culture they are not like the rest of us. They look it on the surface with business deals, corporations, attire, television etc. Under all that though you start to realize they are violent, unstable people with a serious severe and incurable racist streak in them.
Seeing them violate laws rights and common sense is right in line with that I've seen from the in the past and will continue to see from them in the future. It comes as a shock to hear this because when we think of australia we think of steve irwin and kangaroos, but FUCK AUSTRALIA right up the bum with glass dust and razor wire. They are a horrible people.
All of this can be described as Ass Access
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Sucks that people are cheating at some game, but once you bring government into it (WTF?!) then I'm suddenly totally on their side and want to help everyone cheat at that game so that it's no longer fun and their sales drop to nothing. Again, that's just because they brought in government. If they hadn't drunkenly wandered around pointing a gun at peoples' faces, I'd be on the publisher's side.
Violence causes hatred. Nobody should ever be concerned, ever, under any circumstances, that their house might get raided and their bank account frozen, because of some game company. If that's what game companies do, then society is better off without them. All civilized people now have a duty to harm this company as much as possible, so that they no longer have the capacity to wage war. As long as they have enough money to hire a lawyer, they have way too much money.
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That is one step too far in making the virtual seem real
Freezing funds and conducting searches for a crime of this (pitiful) magnitude is an abuse of government powers. And if a corporation is being so empowered, it's outright cronyism (which I define as an act of treason).
No more GTA games for me.
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I expect that if a private research lab discovered someone had taken samples of something they were working on then they might need to be involved in identifying who they thought had taken it, and law enforcement would likely need their assistance in identifying it when a search for it was conducted. Cops aren't experts on plasma physics, advanced chemistry, gene engineering, or even software, for that matter. The government still had to be convinced to furnish a court order, so the decision was still where it should have been. And no, if you bought some produce at a grocery store and discovered some weirdo in the parking lot was spraying it with weedkiller while you were putting it in your car, you would probably welcome the grocery store's help in resolving the matter--and the grocery store would want it resolved even more than the customer because such illegal behavior directly damages their livelihood. It's not even stealing in this case, just vandalism. Cause, effect, and response. No one should be surprised.
These actions about GTA V mods are about mods that affect progression in online mode, as a Motherboard article linked from BBC's article clarifies, not so much about mods that affect only the offline experience.
Now to extend your analogy: Like other tabletop games, physical copies of the Monopoly property trading game support offline multiplayer. If Hasbro and EA were still offering an online version of Monopoly, and someone were cheating in that game, Hasbro and EA might be justified in seeking a civil search warrant.
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I even heard they are going after Amazon.com https://www.amazon.com/Hasbro-...
If it would have been free, there would, most likely, not an issue.
e.g. in Belgium the courts will not go after somebody sharing music. Sell 1 CD and you are toast.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Actually, no. Hasbro got you covered, fam.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
wait you have to PAY $40 for cheat codes these days? we used to get "idkfa" and others for free
Get off your high-horse about "intended experiences" and other such crap; and just put the cheat codes back into your games. Then people won't bother to waste time hacking at your code so they can race up & down Vice City Beach in the tank, with recoil of the back-facing gun making you zoom along faster than the Vice cops' Infernus, before they actually unlock all of the other islands.
Not everyone enjoys games in the same way. The way some people enjoy the game you develop will not be the way you envision. And THAT'S OKAY! Hell... I'm not sure I've *ever* not used the money cheat in a Maxis game. I have more fun building cool cities, neighborhoods, and houses than I ever care about the day-to-day lives of my sims. The GTA games, I'd always play through once before exploring the cheats. But even if I hadn't; I've already paid. And how I get the most fun out of the game is none of your damn business.
Imagine all the people...
Will apple do this to shutdown 3rd party repair?
but when that EULA in front of a judge what will happen??
When your defense wants it read page by page in court?
When the jury needs to read over each page with lot's of questions for the court when they get confused?
At the very least in case with an 100 page EULA they may just deadlock.
A laptop they never bothered to trash for months, containing deleted files that detail how the cheats worked?
Months old print outs of code?
If they do find something, how is that ever admissible in a courtroom, given that some random nerd from Rockstar performed the search?
I so wish they'd do that. The game as described in the official rules is bad but playable. The game played with the rules that people actually use is absolutely atrocious.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
Granting a company rights to search a person's home over game cheats? GAME CHEATS?
Dafuq is wrong with these people? How do they feel about Microsoft kicking in their doors?
Love the game, hate the cheating... it's going to kill the whole thing.
This is what happens.
You can expect this sort of shit when the government bans gun ownership.
Meanwhile, in America... Hey TakeTwo Come at me, Bro!
as a concept and a form of argument,
either you should go out sometime and meet actual humans,
or start taking your aspergers medicine again.
is now on my do not buy list. The irony is that they're calling the Police on people playing their crime simulation game.
Trust me. It will have rewarding first results much quicker and easier.
...in a civil search like this what happens if everything is encrypted (as they should be), and/or in a cloud provider's storage?
Do they have the "right" (using the term loosely) to seize devices they can't access like the US Border Patrol can?
After 6 months, doubtless the victims (eg, those being searched) would have had time to prepare.
To be judged by a kangaroo court.
These weren't just cheaters, these were people profiteering off of making cheats. If you agree with Rockstar selling virtual money, or not, this shows that people were willing to pay money, thus a credible monetary loss for Rockstar under the law.
Adding on top of this that the cheat product, affected other people's use of the original product.
Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon what's the difference? All steal money from devs and control with walled gardens.
I don't think this thread would be happening if they just made the cheats available as a free download; but they were charging $40 a head. I would wager that's what R*/take-two are after.
Why not the police or the district attorneys office etc?
Put all this time and effort into validity checking all events that happen in multiplayer and banning accordingly. Someone can't gain more than X money in 5 minutes, can't take X amount of shots from a gun without dying, can't be off the ground outside a vehicle for more than X seconds etc. Put in these basic cheat checks for a little CPU overhead or even review the data server-side and data, no more cheaters.
Considering how much crazy, gangster-level money they made on GTA V, why are they even bothering with the horrendous expense and limited capacity of the court system?
If I were them I'd just send Jay and Silent Bob on a bunch of plane rides to physically beat the shit out of these 13-year-old cheating punks right on their mom's doorstep. Much easier and effective that way.
GTA V is a cash cow for Take Two. It is obviously in their interests to come down hard on people selling tools that deprive the company of revenue either directly or indirectly by griefing / cheating other players. It's too bad for the perps if they live in a country where they can be pursued through the courts.
but when that EULA in front of a judge what will happen??
EULAs have a tendency not to carry much weight in Australia. It becomes more of a legal / law based issue than an EULA based one.