Where they selling the game as altered or a hack that changes memory values of the code as almost all hacks do?
The first would leave Blizzard actual legal recourse, but the second not really so much if Bossland pushed back.
bossland was altering blizzards code and then selling it. Thats a big no.
The lawsuit seems to be about the cheats, not botting. Their software gave them information that normal players could not obtain. This is definitely a problem.The information in the OP references cheats not bots (which admittedly are sort of a cheat).
I'd say botting is far harder to argue against than cheats like the above which give you an advantage outside game mechanics. Botting is still functioning inside the game mechanics (at least the bots I'm familiar with) but having a computer do it for you. So you're shortcutting the amount of time you have to spend to acquire something. The above is bypassing game mechanics and giving you a clear advantage over everyone else.
The lawsuit seems to be about the cheats, not botting. Their software gave them information that normal players could not obtain. This is definitely a problem.
From my understanding, most botting is not against the rules of many of MMO's, including WoW. However, they do have a rule that you must be at your keyboard while botting. I recall MMO's in the past, when they spotted someone botting, they'd send you a message to respond to, and would boot you if you did not respond, or leave you beat if you did.
When you say altering their code, do you mean selling a compiled version of Blizzard's client or do you mean a separate executable that allowed you to cheat?bossland was altering blizzards code and then selling it. Thats a big no.
When you say altering their code, do you mean selling a compiled version of Blizzard's client or do you mean a separate executable that allowed you to cheat?
It is the point. If they altered the client Blizzard created, that is illegal. If they wrote a program that modifies memory on your computer that happens to be also used by a game, that isn't.fuck if i know. The point is they took blizzard code and tweaked it. If it ended up in another product or not doesn't matter. You can just take someones ip and use it to make money.
It is the point. If they altered the client Blizzard created, that is illegal. If they wrote a program that modifies memory on your computer that happens to be also used by a game, that isn't.
IMO if it's single player, hack away. If it's multiplayer, off-limits. Exception being if there's a special, 'hack all you want' free-for-all that the dev creates.
I hate cheating/botting in online games, but trying it to stop it through the courts is a total waste of time.
Blizzard will never see the first penny of that $8million, and it won't change a thing. The very next day a different company with a different website will be selling the exact same code. I don't agree with the court's interpretation of copyright law here either. You have to stretch the language pretty far to even apply the statute here, and I can't begin to guess how Blizzard quantified their damages.
Cheating in online games is a problem, but I'm still not convinced it's a legal problem.
To the bolded, this is true of all of them. For example, recently Riot won a civil case against a "cheat" making software company called LeagueSharp. The cheater making company said, sure whatever Riot. Instead of paying money (despite the supposed award) they also agreed to "shut down" their site. So leaguesharp is now "gone" and instead a new site called GamingOnSteroids has taken its place. Same cheats, different name. Heck the site looks the same except instead of a blue theme it is a green theme now.
Gaming companies are just wasting their money trying to think they can solve this through legal means. They can't. Nor should they. They should just focus on creating a better game that is harder to hack.
I disagree that using the courts is a waste of time. This particular case, sure, it's likely Blizzard will never see any of this money, and the people who ran the company will likely just take their code and restart the company under another name - or just take their money and go retire on a sunny beach somewhere. What's important though is the precedent it sets - the courts are now agreeing that developing and selling hacks/cheats for online games is illegal. This sets a legal precedent, which can now evolve over time. And as more and more of these cases are prosecuted, it will become easier and cheaper for game developers to pursue this type of legal action, and as law gains ground on defining and prosecuting cybercrimes, it will become possible for them to actually enforce fines, jail time, and other punishments.
As far as whether this is actually a legal issue or not, I'm not well versed enough in copyright law to say, but I'm fairly certain that Blizzard could have a 'no reverse engineering' clause in the EULA. That's a whole other bucket of worms though, as courts sometimes consider EULA's legally binding and sometimes not, depending on various circumstances.
I view it as a multi-prong approach. Certainly they will need to continue to develop new ways to prevent hacks and cheats, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't also pursue legal action. And I suspect that legal action may actually be cheaper. I can't even imagine how many countless millions of dollars the gaming industry has spent on trying to cheat/hack-proof their games, only to utterly fail over and over again. And it's not just the cost of programmers, network engineers, etc salaries, there's also the cost of bad publicity caused by these various attempts - things like DRM, installation limits, sub-optimal network infrastructure, and 'always online' games. All of these (and I'm sure I'm missing many other examples) have been attempts to prevent or limit the loss of revenue from hackers who would distribute their product for free or develop cheats that ruin the game experience for the rest of the player base.
I don't believe for a second that Blizzard thinks it can wipe out the cheating/hacking industry solely through legal action. Hackers have held a massive advantage over the gaming industries anti-hacking efforts for decades, and I don't see that ever changing as long as there is so much money to be made in the development and sale of cheats/hacks. By pursuing legal action, Blizzard is attempting to make it more difficult and less profitable, which in turn will reduce the amount of effort that the hacking community as a whole will put in to circumventing Blizzards ever improving anti-hacking efforts.
Granted this is all conjecture on my part, but it makes sense in my head.
This sets no precedents. This was a civil case which doesn't resolve anything at all. It was not a criminal matter. No parties were arrested. The US case was a judgement handed out without a trial and thus without need for Blizzard to provide evidence against a defense.
Blizzard claimed damages were done and made a whole bunch of wild ass claims they don't actually have to back up because there would be no one to defend against such claims. Whoop dee doo.
As I said it's pointless. More a PR stunt than anything.
For the US case, here's the court reference document.
https://torrentfreak.com/images/bossorder.pdf
It's a summary default judgement.
The German suit is far more interesting because of a strong "anti-competitive" law they have there which isn't the same in the US.
This sets no precedents. This was a civil case which doesn't resolve anything at all. It was not a criminal matter. No parties were arrested. The US case was a judgement handed out without a trial and thus without need for Blizzard to provide evidence against a defense.
Blizzard claimed damages were done and made a whole bunch of wild ass claims they don't actually have to back up because there would be no one to defend against such claims. Whoop dee doo.
As I said it's pointless. More a PR stunt than anything.
For the US case, here's the court reference document.
https://torrentfreak.com/images/bossorder.pdf
It's a summary default judgement.
The German suit is far more interesting because of a strong "anti-competitive" law they have there which isn't the same in the US.
I disagree. Your claim that this was a civil case (not criminal), is exactly what makes this ruling important, as civil cases are much more likely to be influenced by precedent. The majority of the US uses the "common law" legal system (including California), especially in civil cases dealing with reparations and where there are no specific legal statutes pertaining to the issue, or if there are they are too vague to be able to apply to every specific case that might fall under that statute. Common law is not static, it evolves as new issues need to be addressed, and the primary way that it does so is through the setting of precedents - e.g. when a judge rules one way on a particular case, that sets a precedent for all similar future cases. That's not to say precedents can't be refuted or overturned, but its a starting point, and as they start to pile up it becomes more and more difficult to do so.
Now I'll grant that this isn't the strongest precedent, but only due to the fact that the defendants never showed up, which means nobody will ever know if Blizzard would have even won this case, but that speaks as much to the weakness of their defense as it does to anything else.
I'm not sure what wild ass claims you are talking about. All I've seen so far is the court reference document you attached, and I see no wild ass claims in there. The fact that they didn't have to defend their claims, wild or not, is no fault of theirs either. Clearly they were prepared to, since they brought the suit to court. The same cannot be said for the other guys. Now again, I'm not claiming to know who would have won this court battle, but your thinking is completely fucking backward. The defendants don't show up for a court case that is threatening to fine them massive amounts of money, shut down their business, and even contains clauses for which Blizzard could bring further action against them if they continue in their same line of work. If Blizzard had nothing but a bunch of wild ass claims that they couldn't possibly hope to back up, how easy would it have been for these guys to just show up to court and win. They'd get off scott free, and the amount of publicity and marketing opportunities they would get from winning a legal battle like that would certainly be a massive boon to their business.
Wild ass claims are that they re-engineered the code, stole code, and committed anti-competitive actions. All those are really wild ass claims. Hacking rarely involved re-engineering or stealing code at all. They weren't reselling a "hacked" version of Blizzard's product. Hackers sell their own code product that works on the same memory spaces that the game does. It's not the same thing at all. The anti-competitive claims have a VERY narrow margin of usage. Otherwise there wouldn't be more than one grocery store per town/city as another grocery store being in the area would reduce their potential customers and be anti-competitive in that nature. Blizzard basically has to show malicious intent by Bossland for that claim. Bossland actually has a vested interest in Blizzard doing well because if Blizzard does well with their product, then by that very nature there would be more people wanting Bossland products to work with Blizzard products.
Again wild ass claims that didn't have to be proven. So a summary judgement without defense sets no precedent here at all.
As for why Bossland didn't show up for defense in the US is because they are NOT IN THE US! It's prohibitively expensive to defend against that. Even if they won then they would have to counter sue in the US again to get back all their costs. There is no guarantee they would get it all back even if they won. They are right now concentrating more on the German case which to them has more value so they are actively defending there. Of course German law is different than US law and Blizzard may have more legal standing there than here had Bossland decided to fight back here.
All I have to go off is this court reference document, so if you've got additional information to share I'd be glad to look at it.
That said, there is no mention of re-engineering the code, only reverse engineering, which I'm certain they did as it would be quite impossible to create any useful hacks or cheats without disassembling and examining the code of a game. As for re-engineering, I'm not sure that such a claim is all that wild anyway. Any change at all to even a single file that is a part of a games code or other assets used by that game could be construed as re-engineering, as well adding any additional code that interacts directly or indirectly with the original game code, even if it doesn't actually modify the game code itself. If you've modified the way that a game plays/operates at a mechanical level, then you have re-engineered the game, because it is no longer the same game that everyone else is playing.
At this point I'll have to admit my ignorance on the subject of cheats and hacks. Personally I don't see how it is possible to create any kind of significant cheat or a hack without making at least a few minor changes to the code. The closest thing I can think of would be packet inspection - you could intercept packets carrying data between your machine and a game server or your machine and another player (in a peer to peer server environment). I still feel like that might need some kind of hook into the game code somewhere in order to understand and make use of that information in a timely manner, but I could certainly be wrong there. The only other example I can think of off the top of my head is just inspecting game files or data in memory, which could be used for things like removing the fog of war in a RTS game or something like that. But again, even in that scenario, even if you've built a completely separate program from the ground up to go in and inspect data in memory, you still need to communicate that information to the game somehow. But what do I know, I'm not experienced in programming or hacking.
Moving on. I don't see anything in that court document suggesting that Blizzard was accusing them of stealing code or reselling Blizzards products, so I'm not even sure where you are getting that from. I also don't see anything in there about anti-competitive claims. Really starting to feel like you are getting a lot of information from other sources, or just making this shit up. But I'll address the anti-competitive argument you put forth just because of its sheer absurdity. First off, the analogy of grocery stores in a town is not even remotely applicable. Two grocery stores are competitors, running the exact same type of business, and vying for the same limited pool of customers. Blizzard and Bossland are not competitors, they are not running the same business, and they are not competing directly with each other for market share of a limited pool of customers. Blizzard makes games, their customers buy those games and play them, and Bossland then tries to market its products (hacks, cheats, bots) to users of Blizzards games. The problem is that Bossland products have an extremely negative affect on the user experience and enjoyment of Blizzards paying customers who don't partake of Bossland products, and the number of users who don't cheat outnumber those who do by a massive margin. This in turn has a multitude of effects - loss of paying customers who are fed up with playing with/against cheaters, overall customer dissatisfaction even among those who stick around, loss of revenue from future sales because customers have lost faith in Blizzards ability to stop cheaters, negative press, loss of brand name prestige, additional costs incurred on an ongoing basis to employ people and develop systems to try to help combat cheaters.. the list goes on. None of this is anti-competitiveness or malicious intent on behalf of Bossland, but that doesn't matter. What matters is that Bosslands products are costing Blizzard customers and money and damaging their reputation, and they are doing it through illegal means - copyright infringement, reverse engineering of Blizzard products, DMCA violations, and EULA violations.
You make a semi-valid point about Bossland having a vested interest in Blizzard doing well, as more people using Blizzard products means a larger potential customer pool for Bossland. The problem is that Bossland knows full well that nothing they do is going to bring down a behemoth like Blizzard. Sure they are going to cut in to Blizzards profits, piss Blizzard off a bit, but in the end Blizzard will keep chugging along. If Blizzard does eventually fail, it wont be (entirely) Bosslands fault, and they'll just move on to the next big thing anyway and start making hacks and cheats for other games. So yes, its very nice for Bossland right now that Blizzards games have such huge numbers of players which can provide a great source of income for them, but when all is said and done, the rise or fall of Blizzard is outside Bosslands control, and should it some day come to pass that Blizzard crumbles, it hardly spells the end of Bossland.
I know it probably comes off like I'm hardcore defending Blizzard here, but really I'm not. I've played a lot of Blizzard games, I think they are a good game developer, but honestly I don't care all that much about them. Blizzard just happens to be the main party in this debate about the validity and effectiveness of trying to fight cheat/hack developers through the legal system, and I'm a bit surprised at some of the opinions here. I talked earlier in this thread about the absolute futility of trying to fight the hacker community by trying to build better and better security, but as I said it is a losing battle, and it has been for decades. I've talked a lot in this post about how Blizzard is being hurt, financially and otherwise, by Bossland (and by extension, other companies like it), but I don't do it to defend Blizzard in particular, I've been doing it to try to demonstrate that, given time and the right strategies, it could be both viable and effective to go after the hacker community through legal action. Not to eradicate it, that will never happen, but to weaken it enough so that game developers can actually start to bridge that massive gap.
Because the truth is that the real losers in all of this are us, the consumers. If the status quo continues, Blizzard will go on, Bossland will go on (albeit maybe under a different name after all these lawsuits are settled), game developers will continue to make our gaming experiences worse for the sake of combating cheats and hacks, the cheat and hack developers will continue to make our gaming experiences worse by making every new online game a lousy cheat fest and always being 5 steps ahead of the game devs. And all of them are just sitting back making money off of it, while the rest of is just grow frustrated. We need a new approach, and I don't see why legal action can't be part of that approach, and frankly I'm more than just surprised at some\
of the reactions in this thread, I'm dumbfounded and a bit disgusted.
As a developer for 20+ years and a current developer now, I can safely say I know what I'm talking about when it comes to the code. I have made more than a few hacks for games in the past.
So when I say wild ass claims about how the hacks are made, I am being serious.
Now are some hacks done with a disassembler? It helps, but is not needed. Even a disassembler doesn't actually give you the code. It gives you assembly code. Which is how the disassembler interprets the code. I promise you that not a single game written by Blizzard is written in assembly code. If it was, they would still be coding those games out even today without being even close to being done.
I'm not here defending the hacking company. Could care less. I am defending certain key constitutional rights that if companies like Blizzard actually win true land mark litigation with would spell some very bad disaster for consumers. Take a look at the current Lexmark case in the supreme court and you'll understand. Speaking of which that case had direct implications to any case brought by any company going after hacking/bot making companies. This is speaking strictly for US cases and companies.
I personally dislike and hate the idea of online hacks/cheats for games. They piss me off. But still I can't abide by the erosion of rights that companies are trying to enforce through litigation methods with their own reinterpretations of the law.
We need a new approach, and I don't see why legal action can't be part of that approach, and frankly I'm more than just surprised at some of the reactions in this thread, I'm dumbfounded and a bit disgusted.
Well I guess I can understand your adamant stance on Blizzard being in the wrong here if you think this is about something much larger than the game industry. But I don't have a lot of free time to go digging up all of the information surrounding a supreme court case and then connecting all of the dots, assuming I would even connect them the same way you did.
Maybe you could enlighten me as to exactly what constitutional rights you think are being trampled by Blizzards legal action against Bossland, how exactly its going to be a disaster for consumers, which rights Blizzard is trying to erode, and what laws they've reinterpreted to try to push this lawsuit through.
EDIT: That came out sounding a bit facetious. Not intentional, I am actually interested.