I had to stop using Safari just because of bb
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They do have a perfectly good copyright infringement claim here. The kid making the video demonstrated himself violated the terms of service of the game in the video, effectively providing all the evidence you need to show he’s in breach of the license (which, it’s arguable, he has implicit permission from his parent(s) to be binding) and therefore in violation of copyright and vulnerable to a legit DMCA takedown request. Which he counter-claimed.
No sympathy for the idiot kid whatsoever.
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If minors can’t agree to contracts then it doesn’t matter if the contract says they are assumed to be adults, they can’t agree to that part of the contract. You can’t have the contract itself change the law about who can agree to the contract.
If you sign a contract with a 14-year-old it’s your fault that you did so.
That would be quite the argument. When my kid needs to sign a waiver to get anesthetic it’s me who signs. She doesn’t sign and then the doctor says, “Well, she had implicit permission to do so.” Kids can’t agree to contracts. If game companies don’t want 14-year-olds playing their games because you need to be old enough to sign a contract to play them, it’s up to them to do something about it.
The approach you outlined is interesting to me. I don’t like the law surrounding this, but at least this argument makes some sense. I think (1) might make sense depending on the nature of the cheat, (3) is plainly true, (4) is copyright gobbledygook that I’d need to be a copyright lawyer to evaluate. So assuming they have a good case in (1) I’d be very skeptical of the word the idea of “effectively” distributing the code from (2).
I certainly err on the side of videogame makers being responsible for their own security (rather than allowing them to offload that responsibility to the public through the courts), but I can also see that there can come a point where someone is being so vexatious you have no choice but to sue.
One thing that still troubles me is that several people have talked about this as having a “deterrent” effect, and I think suing children to make them examples is a pretty poor way to set an example.
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Caleb injected malicious code into a shared application with the intent of breaking the system and making it unusable for others. He did so multiple times and with multiple warnings. He continues to do so even after multiple removals from the system. He distributed the malicious code to others and encouraged it’s use further breaking the software for other users. The lawsuit is more than justified.
This runs way beyond his poor sportsmanship, lack of empathy and some YouTube videos.
But I also understand Caleb is a minor, it’s a game, they are dragging his family into this and his family is fighting back. It’s a very serious situation he’s got himself into. Sucks for Caleb he ended up the one who gets made an example of.
Violating the EULA != DMCA violation, that simple.
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I’m pretty sure that (at least in the US) the parent is held responsible for returning all good to the vendor and invalidating the contract (as well as held libel for the minor’s actions), while what she is arguing seems to be that the contract is invalid so they can’t touch her son or her son’s videos nor can they ban him for cheating. Had she contacted Epic Games as listed in the EULA when Caleb got a strike, the would scrub everything and she would be required to scrub everything on her end. Again, INAL but minors entering contract does have legal ramifications even in the cases of using fake IDs or lying about their age. I know one person who got into legal trouble for this sort of thing with Napster, and it didn’t just go away. I somehow doubt things got better for the minor since then.
So they basically rip off 7 Days to Die and then get all agro possessive about a how-to video?
Given the nature of Napster, I would guess there were criminal charges as well, no? Can you elaborate a bit? I’m interested to know more from a legal perspective.
Nice analysis! I wish you were writing for Boing boing! 
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It is interesting and frightening, as anytime a new approach is tried legally whether it succeeds or fails sets a legal precedent in the usa for years to come.
They could certainly take the usual approach, but i think they are more concerned with laying the ground for future cases in this instance. That is my take, anyway.
Thanks! 
He and his family aren’t making their case any easier by admitting to what the charges in the case with in their video and letter. It is clear they don’t understand the charges nor are getting adequate legal representation from someone who does.
In the video he has a gem that goes something like “they are saying they closed my accounts and banned me like 14 times, it was only like…um…10 or 5 times.” LOL…it wasn’t fourteen for sure, it was either ten or five…priceless.
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It’s an interesting case and kudos to the parent for going to bat for her son, but if that counts as an “outstanding memo” our standards need some raising and our high schools have some work to do. (OK, I guess this is not really news.) The The Verge story [*] speculates that the mom is a lawyer herself, which… well, I hope not. Most lawyers seem to write better than that, anyway.
[*] It’s awkward when a definite article is part of a name. Couldn’t they at least have used a foreign language? “The Le Meridien” doesn’t sound quite as dumb, even though it actually is. I suppose there are style manuals for this sort of thing, which would probably tell me not to repeat the definite article.
That’s called a nuisance lawsuit, and it’s a bug, not a feature of our legal system. If they filed the suit in a jurisdiction with strong Anti-SLAPP legislation, Epic could be in hot water.
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Man, the Napster era… I used to have a cease and desist letter framed on my wall I got in college over a file server I ran on the campus network. Mind you, I actually did knuckle under and took that machine off the network. I was lucky and never heard from them again.
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Her argument is also irrelevant as the court will not consider it. She’s not an attorney and she needs to get one for her son and get him/her to file a responsive pleading or her son will be in default.
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Isn’t that the same thing Sony tried agaainst BLEEM!, or at least Nintendo v Gameshark?
And he’s bucking the system, so
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I don’t know the full details because I don’t even think he knew the full penalties. His parents got him a lawyer and there was a big mess, and they bailed him out of whatever that final number was. He used to brag about the 10,000 songs he had stored on his HD and sold after-market CDs from them so he went whole hog into the flaunting his piracy.
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Yeah, though there may be juuuust enough legal weight to some of their arguments to not obviously fall afoul of Anti-SLAPP legislation. Not enough to win a court case, but enough to create some doubt about it beforehand.
That definitely sounds like it would have involved criminal charges, not just contract claims. Sounds like a real character!
It is a little frightening, but mostly because I don’t trust to the courts to actually understand what is going on. If someone is actually somehow making the game servers run malicious it and that code is then affecting other players, that strikes me as a completely different thing than someone figuring out loopholes to abuse the code the servers are already running. I don’t trust judges to understand computers or code well enough to make this distinction.
There’s a legal expression: bad facts make bad law. There is a danger that the facts of this case (multiple attempts to warn and ban him that he’s circumvented, the kid persisting in malicious behaviour) will make the courts favour Epic and then that will make an overreaching precedent.
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