Bungie Wins Lawsuit Against Cheat Maker Aimjunkies (pcmag.com) 64
Bungie has won a first-of-its-kind lawsuit against cheat maker Phoenix Digital.ÂFrom a report: The case was potentially the first-ever video game cheating jury trial and resulted in Bungie winning $63,210 in damages from Phoenix Digital,Âwhich isÂalso known as Aimjunkies. While cheating in a game is not illegal, Bungie was able to sue the cheat maker under the argument that reverse engineering the game, specifically Destiny 2, to find those cheats violates the company's copyright. In this case,ÂPCGamer notesÂthat Aimjunkies also accused Bungie of violating its copyright by accessing one of its employees' computers,Âsomething Bungie argued was just part of its normal detection process for cheating and is covered by the game's EULA. The judge rejected Aimjunkies' claim.
A chilling precedent. (Score:5, Insightful)
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I'm not a lawyer, but there are certainly laws around it being illegal to reverse engineer patented products: https://www.law.cornell.edu/we... [cornell.edu]
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Here's a better link: https://www.eff.org/issues/cod... [eff.org]
You're right. (Score:1)
You're definitely not a lawyer, as witnessed by that poorly penned hot take.
Re:A chilling precedent. (Score:5, Insightful)
Whiteout reverse engineering IBM would still be the only one selling PCs
While true, in legal matters the devil is always in the details. The reason the reverse engineering of the IBM PC was legal was that the applicable copyrights on the BIOS ultimately were worked around in a "clean-room design" and because the hardware was commodity / off the shelf. You don't get in trouble for reverse engineering something, you get in trouble for how you release your clone.
IBM infamously won several lawsuits which resulted in knocking several IBM PC clones off the market, but critically failed to win one against Phoenix who showed they were able to make an IBM compatible BIOS without infringing the copyright. They then sublicensed the BIOS to other parties which really helped kick off the "IBM Compatible" computing generation. Others weren't so lucky, even into the 90s IBM's lawsuits about PC clones effectively became a whole profit centre for them, e.g. they won millions in damages from Panasonic for cloning the BIOS.
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I found the case text from the filing so I suppose this is what the trail arguments followed since this depends how narrow the ruling is.
https://casetext.com/case/bung... [casetext.com]
It's and interesting question since I don't think anyone would say video game cheating should be an actual crime (or would they?) but at the same time for the company a cheating tool can cost it revenue so it feels like they should be able to obtain damages.
Combine that with the fact that most everyone does not like cheaters and would want
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It might be better for everyone if video game cheating were made illegal and reverse engineering remained legal.
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Absolutely, my question is how do you legally navigate those two things together? What does making cheating illegal look like? Do we go after the cheaters or the authors? Does that put us in another round of everyone getting threatening letters in the mail for downloading a song?
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Ironically, there's an argument for lootboxes here. Your computer is Turing complete. It can execute literally any code given enough time. As long as you're not executing someone else's patented or copyrighted code or code that violates national security, you have the legal right to execute any code you want under the First Amendment. For most games, this covers most cheating systems. But cheat systems degrade the experience for everyone else. This, legally speaking, becomes a case of how do you allow free
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I don't think anyone would say video game cheating should be an actual crime (or would they?)
Be careful about what you wish for. To some just being a better player than them is "cheating" and "worthy of punishment / banning."
a cheating tool can cost it revenue
Companies are not entitled to a profit. Assuming they were paid for the game itself (and possibly any online pass), the company has already made it's profit. Saying that the company should be allowed to deny people use of their own equipment under their own authority so that the company can potentially make more money from others in the future is a far worse precedent.
Combine that with the fact that most everyone does not like cheaters and would want something to be done
What m
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Saying that the company should be allowed to deny people use of their own equipment under their own authority
I agree but with an online game there is a bit more to it than that since the whole thing is predicated on a client/server relationship, so if you make a private server and do whatever you want on there, no leg to stand on but you are not just interacting with your equipment but the developers and we could view it in such a way that you are interacting with every other players equipment. I think in the face of online cheating this falls a bit flat, it can't be that simple.
Companies are not entitled to a profit.
I definitely didn't say that but i
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...but at the same time for the company a cheating tool can cost it revenue so it feels like they should be able to obtain damages.
Except that's the same argument used by anti-right-to-repair companies. It could also be used by companies to prevent someone from customizing their car, swapping out hardware on a computer, fixing bugs the company refuses to fix, modding games, etc. If you think about it in physical terms, this is like suing the manufacturer of the screw drivers for using it to open up an appliance.
...if not copyright or trademark I wonder what the legal through line is or even if there should be one.
There wouldn't/shouldn't be one. The network/system they make is their responsibility/private property. Unless they also want
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Depends on where you are. Our copyright here explicitly allows reverse engineering and you cannot waive that right.
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Copyright or patent? The purpose of a patent is to stop people manufacturing a clone product, there is no rule against ripping it apart to understand it. The patent forbids profiting without paying.
Copyright? Not unless you're gaming the system the way old console makers tried to use a copyrighted phrase as a cartridge password to stop people from selling their own games. Even then I think that failed in court.
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Article 40 (IIRC) of our copyright specifies that reverse engineering a product is permitted for the purpose of creating a derived product that is compatible with various functions of the product (the technical crap is pretty intricate and I don't think I'm qualified to give a translated version that covers all aspects).
For the purpose in this particular case, it would very likely be applicable.
Not all the world bends over to US copyright rules, you know...
rip screen readers! (Score:2)
rip screen readers!
Not really a surprising one though (Score:2)
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That is just chilling and will have massive ripples for decades to come. This needs appealed, despite the absurdly low monetary judgement amount.
Not really. The single ruling by one trial court of a state carries very little weight and sets virtually no precedent, not even for trial courts in other states. They may consider / reference what transpired, but ultimately this decision is unlikely to impact anyone if not appealed and can be appealed by a more significant case should the need arise.
Re: A chilling precedent. (Score:2)
Reverse engineering detection is also pushed as a legit use for circumventing privacy
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I just read through the jury instructions and their findings, and it doesn’t sound like the cheaters were punished for reverse engineering, per se. They were punished because they profited from distributing illicit copies of copyrighted software. Put differently, rather than being a clean room design [wikipedia.org], it sounds like what they actually did was modify and redistribute Bungie’s copyrighted materials with their modifications included. At that point, what they’re publishing is a derivative work
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It thrills me to no end to see your comment first and at +5 Insightful.
Not sure this is a good thing (Score:4, Insightful)
I dislike cheaters as much as the next person and these assholes have made me stop playing more than one game I actually enjoyed initially. But going via copyright here could have a lot of bad side-effects.
Attn editors... (Score:2)
Please go back and clean up the stray à characters. Thanks.
Re: Attn editors... (Score:3)
Look on the bright side (Score:1)
Without Unicode support, homographs are less likely, but they can stiIl happen.
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Does the judge not understand binding precedent? (Score:5, Interesting)
The legality of this sort of reverse engineering was already decided by the ninth circuit in Galoob [wikipedia.org]. That's binding precedent for this case. It should have literally been a one-day bench trial in which AimJunkies made a motion to dismiss and the judge granted it.
I just can't even imagine how this won't get overturned instantly on appeal. If they had sued on tortious interference grounds or something, then maybe, but not copyright violation. This ruling absolutely should not be allowed to stand, as it would overturn literally decades of legal precedent. Stare decisis is important.
Modern judges couldn't care less about precedence (Score:4, Insightful)
Basically our entire judicial system is kind of f***** right now and isn't going to behave the way people expect or want. Folks don't realize how important to our body politic the judicial system is but the people who have been getting ready to do stuff like this for the last 40 some odd years knew All too well.
But you're not supposed to talk about politics let alone hot button issues like abortion let alone explain the broader ramifications of such a ruling. Because like Ronald Reagan said if you're explaining you're losing...
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When the supreme Court struck down roe versus Wade whatever else you thought about that decision it opened the floodgates to basically ignore precedence. Never mind the last 40 plus years of judicial appointments that are likely to make these kind of rulings.
There's some serious irony involved there. For decades, the Republicans paid lip service to overturning Roe, but pretty consistently did little or nothing to actually advance that cause at the federal level. Then, suddenly, Donald Trump, the least Republican Republican in the history of the country, goes in like a bull in a china shop and chooses judges with the deliberate intent to sway the court on abortion, and the Republicans get their worst nightmare.
After all, now that they've done it, they have ver
Went all in on scaring people with the border (Score:3, Informative)
Republican party ha
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Yes - everything they wanted PLUS a little language that gave the Administration authority to do literally anything it wanted (including F*** All) once the number of arrivals hit a certain threshold lower the current daily threshold that historically they are certain to hit.
It was really clever and if the average Republic representative and their constituents were as aggressively stupid and low information as the constituencies Democrats usually bamboozle to keep power, it might have worked.
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I wouldn't count the Rs out yet. There are still rich veins of Islamophobia, transphobia, racism, fear of "global elites" (Jews), xenophobia, red scare, and anti-immigration to mine.
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But how will they do the red scare when they've already done better Russian than Democrat?
Re: Modern judges couldn't care less about precede (Score:2)
Revisiting precedent is one of the functions of a high court. They normally avoid doing it because the ramifications are complex. The preference is to wait for legislature to clarify or overturn the ruling with new law.
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When the supreme Court struck down Dread Scott whatever else your thought about that decision it opened the floodgates to basically ignore precedence...
Oh wait that line of thinking is stupid and obviously so. Stare decisis is obviously important; because people need to be able to have expectations about the law. However I would think as "liberal" you of all people would recognize that alone should not force us to slavishly cleave to gross injustices!
Except you are not a liberal, you are Stalinist sack of
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The legality of this sort of reverse engineering was already decided by the ninth circuit in Galoob [wikipedia.org].
Not really. In law the devil is in the details, it's not just a case of what was done, but how it was done, and the terms under which something was done. In fact in the very same year that Galoob beat Nintendo, Nintendo beat Atari for creating a very VERY similar device. It was just the details on how (and if) copyrights were infringed differed slightly.
Likewise this is a story that birthed the IBM Compatible PC itself. With IBM clones both getting away with it as well as losing mountains of lawsuits to IBM
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The legality of this sort of reverse engineering was already decided by the ninth circuit in Galoob [wikipedia.org].
Not really. In law the devil is in the details, it's not just a case of what was done, but how it was done, and the terms under which something was done. In fact in the very same year that Galoob beat Nintendo, Nintendo beat Atari for creating a very VERY similar device. It was just the details on how (and if) copyrights were infringed differed slightly.
Atari literally had their lawyers lie to the copyright office to illegally obtain a copy of Nintendo's source code. That's not reverse engineering at that point. That's something else. And the court correctly ruled that fair use exemptions don't apply when you're starting from an unauthorized copy that was stolen.
Likewise this is a story that birthed the IBM Compatible PC itself. With IBM clones both getting away with it as well as losing mountains of lawsuits to IBM for the cloning, e.g. Phoenix successfully cloned the IBM BIOS and was able to sell their clone and sublicense it commercially. Panasonic tried the same and ended up losing millions to IBM all due to subtle differences in what was determined in the court cases.
Unless you're talking about a different case, Panasonic didn't "end up losing millions to IBM". They settled out of court [google.com] — and very quickly at that — to preserve their business rel
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Indeed, but that's my point. The issue here isn't the reverse engineering. Even in this case the ruling had nothing to do with reverse engineering, and everything to do with copyright terms. The differences between Atari and Galoob were ones based on the copyright. Additionally copyright law has changed considerably since the Galoob ruling.
The devil is in the details, Galoob's precedent isn't some carte-blanche approval to go reverse engineer things.
Unless you're talking about a different case, Panasonic didn't "end up losing millions to IBM".
I may have conflated Panasonic and Kyocera, or any of the
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Indeed, but that's my point. The issue here isn't the reverse engineering. Even in this case the ruling had nothing to do with reverse engineering, and everything to do with copyright terms. The differences between Atari and Galoob were ones based on the copyright. Additionally copyright law has changed considerably since the Galoob ruling.
Mostly in harmful ways. But not in ways that should reasonably affect whether a game mod infringes a copyright. This clearly isn't anti-circumvention tech (it doesn't allow someone to play the game who otherwise couldn't), so the DMCA does not at least prima facie appear to apply, and no software exists that would have gone out of copyright without the Sunny Bono act.
Nintendo effectively addressed anti-circumvention despite being a pre-DMCA case, when talking about the fact that the user had to buy the ga
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From what I could gather, this case didn't hinge on the legality of reverse engineering: it hinged on the distribution of copyrighted material.
The impression I get—which may be incorrect—is that the cheat they distributed still included Bungie's copyrighted material, and as such was a derivative work over which they did not have complete ownership. This is exactly why clean room designs [wikipedia.org] are used in the industry to sidestep these sorts of issues, since those result in entirely original works.
Anyw
Complete Record of the Case (Score:4, Informative)
The case's Federal docket number is 2:21-cv-00811. A complete record of the case, including all filings and, crucially, instructions to the jury (and, amusingly, an ORDER from the judge to pay for the jury's lunch), may be found here: https://www.courtlistener.com/... [courtlistener.com]
Get reading.
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What a stupid ruling (Score:2)
What this ruling does, is set a very dangerous condition, that you don't have access to the code behind the software, a
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This is the issue, a judge just ruled that you don't own, or have freedom, over the stuff you bought, and by proxy this mean anything you own, can be controlled by the company who produced it.
Is this like judges ruling you don't have freedom over your own body and by proxy this means you can be controlled by the government? That sounds horrible!
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This isn't a win for Bungie... (Score:2)
The coverage that Slashdot chooses not to bad is low resolution spam designed to help private equity firms at the expense of workers rights. Yuck to this article. Yuck to Sony. Yuck to publishers. And Yuck to section 230.
We had a really good internet until they erradicated corporate responsibility with Section 230. Since then, social media have turned into treasonous fraud machines b
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We had a really good internet until they erradicated corporate responsibility with Section 230.
Not only does Section 230 of the CDA have nothing to do with this case and vice versa, but it hasn't erradicated [sic] corporate responsibility. That's what corporations are for.
Fix the submission! (Score:2)
The summary is riddled with formatting errors. Yeah yeah Slashcode sucks etc. Get off your iDevice and fix it already.
Jail conversation (Score:2)
- i robbed a bank, you?
- i used an aimbot in a video game
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- so what are you here for?
- i robbed a bank, you?
- i used an aimbot in a video game
I'm pretty sure the vast majority of players would say this is a good thing. All they want to do is have fun, but if someone is cheating, what's the point?
Didn't Blizzard already set a precedent... (Score:2)
by their lawsuit against Glider in World of Warcraft. And if memory serves, they also abused copyright in their lawsuit.
Bye-bye Samba (Score:2)
It was nice using you.
MAGAtard! (Score:1)
Definitey not the first (Score:2)
This was most definitely not the first such case. Blizzard sued us to close down Honorbuddy and Demonbuddy, bots for WoW and D3 saying that using their games to develop our bots was breach of copyright. We lost over $10 million in 2018 and were wiped out.
clearly overwhelmed by bungies' lawyers army (Score:2)
What a stupid name (Score:2)
What a stupid name for a company. The judge should have punished them extra for choosing the name Phoenix Digital.ÂFrom.