Originally published at: Bungie sues Destiny 2 cheater, wins $12M | Boing Boing
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“The court’s ruling marks the latest in a series of legal victories for Bungie against Destiny 2 cheat sellers. Previously, it was awarded $4.3 million in damages from AimJunkies and $13.5 million in damages from Elite Boss Tech.”
Reminder from Patriot Act how big gaming is:
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Bungie sues Destiny 2 cheater
This is where people like Mihai Claudiu-Florentin come in, selling cheats that help less scrupulous players
These are not the same thing.
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I’m guessing that this clown didn’t make anywhere close to $12-million selling cheats to other losers while ignoring the fact he was upsetting a ruthless corporation with attack-dog lawyers.
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Obviously I dislike cheaters in games as much as the next person, but I do wonder what the grounds for this suit were. This smells like corporate overreach here. Like are they claiming DMCA violations, copyright violations, something else?
Unless the cheats he was selling relied on stolen IP (like code), I’m finding it hard to imagine how this isn’t legal reverse engineering and/or fair use.
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Definitely not, that was his whole business model: I’ll sell you that $100 shooty thing for $10. Bungee probably took a look at what he sold would have cost in their store, then doubled the amount for penalties and lawyer fees (unless that was baked in the ruling as well).
I’m sure, buried away in thay 6000 page terms of service document everybody skips through and checks they’ve read and will comply with is buried a prohibition on reverse engineering, and forward engineering cheats, hacks, workarounds, etc. I’ve read similar before in software licenses, and they are all pretty much the same to the point where some courts are actually rejecting licensing agreement violations because they are so long and so convoluted that no reasonable person actually reads them.
The amount is pretty harsh. I don’t really care about Bungee or their “loses”, but I feel for the players who followed the rules and worked hard to get their shiny toys, only to beaten by cheaters.
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It was that. And the DMCA has statutory damages that can add up in a hurry, because they’re for each instance. They definitely wanted to make an example of this guy. It seems excessive to me. Hopefully he has a good lawyer and files an appeal. I could see that damage award being reduced.
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Nintendo did the very same to one of the people selling mod chips for the Switch, who doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of ever paying a fraction of the judgement against him.
Which is why it’s morally correct to pirate Nintendo games, especially for their earlier and now unsupported consoles.
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These sorts of cases make me deeply uneasy. Sure, griefers are assholes and the people who sell them tools aren’t desperately sympathetic; but it’s hard to think of some sort of cogent legal distinction between them and others who build things that interoperate with software in ways that disagree with the vendor’s business model; and it’s hard to understate what a disaster handing any vendor who can get a software copyright somewhere into their product veto power over 3rd party interactions they dislike.
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Seriously. They are not even close. I thought some random gamer was being sued.
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My feelings as well. Everyone is quick to dogpile on the “cheaters” but the implications of decisions like this are not good. Our human tendency to punish bad people for the wrong reasons or in the wrong ways gets us into a lot of trouble as a society.
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There may be legal niceties that I’m not appreciating that distinguish the two; but it’s hard for me to not read this as as basically Lexmark International v. Static Control Components; but decided particularly harshly in the opposite direction because the defendant was unlikeable.
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Game company upset that he intercepted their grift before they could make a buck on it.
They would monetize checkers if they could.
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