By John Walker on October 18th, 2010 at 1:06 pm.
As we reported last week, Blizzard have taken the extremely peculiar decision to ban players from playing StarCraft II for using cheats in the single-player game. This meant that, despite cheating no one but themselves, they were locked out of playing the single-player game. Which is clearly bonkers. But it’s not enough for the developer. Blizzard’s lawyers are now setting out to sue those who create cheats.
Gamespot reports that the megolithic company is chasing after three developers of hacks for “destroying” their online game. It definitely will be in violation of the end user agreement, so there’s a case. However, it’s a certain element of their claim that stands out for attention. They’re claiming using the hacks causes people to infringe copyright:
“When users of the Hacks download, install, and use the Hacks, they copy StarCraft II copyrighted content into their computer’s RAM in excess of the scope of their limited license, as set forth in the EULA and ToU, and create derivative works of StarCraft II.”
Blink.
Blizzard are claiming that copying elements of the game into your computer’s RAM is copyright violation. It’s so brazened that you sort of have to respect their moxie.
They are claiming damages because those who play the games with cheats will have an experience that harms their appreciation of the game, and in turn they may speak negatively of the game to others. Presumably they’re referring to those who create multiplayer cheats, as single player cheats would be too ridiculous for words.
“The harm to Blizzard from Defendants’ conduct is immediate, massive and irreparable. By distributing the Hacks to the public, Defendants cause serious harm to the value of StarCraft II. Among other things, Defendants irreparably harm the ability of Blizzard’s legitimate customers (i.e. those who purchase and use unmodified games) to enjoy and participate in the competitive online experience. That, in turn, causes users to grow dissatisfied with the game, lose interest in the game, and communicate that dissatisfaction, thereby resulting in lost sales of the game or ‘add-on’ packs and expansions thereto.”
I’m a bit frightened that id will be suing me because I used to type IDSPISPOPD into Doom. (From memory, that.)
18/10/2010 at 13:10 Monchberter says:
I installed a mod once. Don’t sue me bro!
Idiots.
18/10/2010 at 13:11 HerrSchmidt says:
And it starts…
18/10/2010 at 13:12 Pema says:
What made Starcraft was the online experience, any threat to a fair online experience must be dealt with harshly.
No sympathy for hackers and cheaters.
18/10/2010 at 13:44 Daz says:
“Pema says:
October 18, 2010 at 1:12 pm
What made Starcraft was the online experience, any threat to a fair online experience must be dealt with harshly.
No sympathy for hackers and cheaters.”
This, I think its great that people that make or use cheats for online games are finally starting to see some punishment for it, and I think its weird that people find that somehow unacceptable :P
18/10/2010 at 14:49 Rob says:
Yeah, pretty much.
I mean, it’s crazy that they’re cracking down on single player hacks, but how many previous Blizzard games have been rendered unplayable online by trainers and cheats?
That the first Starcraft managed to pull off a long and storied stint as an “e-sport” is incredible, but really didn’t happen with a whole lot of nudging from Blizzard when it started.
Obviously the money inherent in that stuff is still huge, and if SC2′s multiplayer gets wrecked by cheaters, then what’s the fucking point?
18/10/2010 at 16:52 Nessin says:
Here is the problem with all these arguments:
1) Being banned from Battle.net means you can’t activate Starcraft 2, which means if you have to reinstall it for whatever reason (new PC, new OS, etc…) then you can’t even play Starcraft 2 in Guest mode.
2) While I have no clue why people would use trainers when there are cheats built into the game, this could be more than about achievements. Maybe someone is so used to using trainers they don’t think to look for built-in cheats? Maybe the built-in cheats didn’t let him do what they wanted to in Single-player and a trainer did?
18/10/2010 at 20:19 DrGonzo says:
I don’t think anyone or the article is bothered by them taking action against multiplayer cheats. It’s the single player cheaters being punished that is concerning.
18/10/2010 at 20:32 DJ Phantoon says:
Except rather than having a better system, they’re suing people. They are suing people for a ridiculous idea. I’m not pro-cheating, but I am NOT pro-legal action when someone steps on your foot.
And if Blizzard gets away with this one, they’re just gonna keep going. They may have had a point with wowscape since the person was profiting a fair sum off their creation. They should not let a precedence be set for this kind of thing. Big companies already have too much power, and it’s not wise to forget that.
I’d rather deal with a bunch of cheaters than worry that Blizzard could pursue legal action against me because I reduced a cheating manchild to tears by crushing him anyways.
18/10/2010 at 20:36 pkt-zer0 says:
“It’s the single player cheaters being punished that is concerning.”
“Single player cheaters” in this case being folks running multiplayer hacks online but swearing they were not actually using them. How about not going online while running a maphack in the first place?
18/10/2010 at 20:38 sinister agent says:
As someone who thoroughly enjoyed Starcraft for many years, and plays almost exclusively played single player, and who has no interest at all in multiplayer for Starcraft 2, I strongly disagree. People buy a game so they can play that game, however they want to, and for many people that means playing mostly, or even entirely single player.
18/10/2010 at 21:20 Devan says:
Aside from the whole issue of cheating, there are a couple very serious legal implications from this.
a) Using copyright law to control how a work is used, exploiting a loophole made possibly because computers must make internal copies of any program in order to execute it. This is clearly not what copyright law was designed for, and allowing it to be abused in this way sets a very dangerous precedent. Unfortunately, I believe that Blizzard has successfully sued before using this loophole.
b) Suing tool creators for the use of the tools. Aside from the over-the-top “Patriot Act”, I know of no laws that would allow a program creator to be sued for how the program is used by others. For example, hacking tools are freely available if you know where to find them and there’s nothing wrong with creating or distributing hacking tools. Hacking itself is illegal unless you have the permission of the owner of the system (ie. intrusion testing), but creating tools is not and should not be a violation, regardless of whether or not it is eventually used for harm.
I think that the courts should think very carefully about how the laws should rule on these issues, so they set the right precedent. It’s easy to side with an industry giant, especially when the defendant is considered shady. Technology is advancing fast and things like copyright law should be evaluated often to make sure they give an end result that is balanced and beneficial all around.
18/10/2010 at 23:19 FhnuZoag says:
If Blizzard wins this case, I’m sooo going to pirate Starcraft II. Since if I am breaking copyright anyway by loading the game into RAM, I might as well break copyright at the source.
19/10/2010 at 01:43 Corrupt_Tiki says:
I’ll just echo a post I saw on here about the same topic..
“What is concerning is that they can stop me playing my singleplayer game when they feel like I have ‘infringed’ on their ‘EULA’ or rules”
Who the hell reads the EULA anyway
18/10/2010 at 13:14 Rich says:
“This meant that, despite cheating no one but themselves”
Except that the hack they were using was intended to allow them to unlock achievements while still cheating. You can cheat in the single-player if you want to, but you can’t normally unlock anything.
Now, I’m not saying I agree with their decision, but it’s a point you seem to be ignoring.
18/10/2010 at 13:15 Pema says:
The hack also allowed to cheat in MP games.
18/10/2010 at 13:28 Axess Denyd says:
Rich:
That’s because nobody cares about frigging achievements.
18/10/2010 at 13:29 AndrewC says:
Except the ones using the hacks.
18/10/2010 at 13:54 Starky says:
Quite a large chunk of the SC2 community care about achievements (not me personally, but there you go) because unlike many games, the ones in SC2 are vast and many of them meaningful. Many are a true challenge and benchmarks of skill, or dedication, and people want to show that they have that.
The SC2 Achievements could be compared to the titles in WoW – you defeat the hardest boss in the game on the hardest setting you get a title for your character – people care about that because it means something – it shows the community you achieved something difficult and noteworthy.
So yes, people cheating and instantly gaining those achievements diminishes their value for legitimate customers.
18/10/2010 at 14:09 Risingson says:
… which does not mean that Blizzard’s move is a valid one.
18/10/2010 at 14:15 Starky says:
Well it kind of does, banning a small percentage of the player base who are breaking the TOS and cheating in an online environment thus lessening the value of achievements for much, much larger percentage of players who value them – seems perfectly reasonable to me.
Removing a small but disruptive section of the community for the good of the larger whole – I’ve no problem with it.
Just as I prefer to frequent forums that are strict as hell about enforcing decent behaviour and banning trolls and idiots.
Also why I read and comment at RPS, and avoid the likes of Kotaku like the plague.
18/10/2010 at 14:33 Eamo says:
Not to mention that they could still play the single player game in offline mode even after the ban.
I am getting the impression that our esteemed Mr. Walker did not even read the responses in the last thread since several people pointed out that much of the claims he reported as true in that post were incorrect and now we see the exact sames posted again here as true.
Come on John, we expect better from you!
18/10/2010 at 13:14 HerrSchmidt says:
Also I think that it’s not Blizzard itself, but their owner who has shoved their arm up the puppet’s backside, wiggling the joints.
This, coming from the MMO what has HOW many Mods and tweaks and what have you for it?
More like some attempting to set up a precedent methinks…
18/10/2010 at 13:19 mrmud says:
All legit mods for WoW use the Blizzard UI API.
They have gone after other kind of modifications to wow since the start (such as model switching) by banning people. This is not new.
18/10/2010 at 13:22 SpinalJack says:
WoW mods are mostly UI tweaks or macros rather than cheats seeing as the game is server based. It’s difficult to create more gold from a button press for instance (not including exploits or glitches) So it’s not really the same.
18/10/2010 at 13:15 ManofMuchManliness says:
I just don’t know what to say… are they stupid? are they trolls? are they stupid trolls?
I call shenanigans!
p.s.
Please please please please please god don’t let them fuck D3 up, idk how I’ll survive with yet another awesome franchise FUBAR’d.
18/10/2010 at 13:50 JKjoker says:
the problem is even if D3 ends up being the best thing since the invention of Pizza (and i believe it will because the formula is simple and the polish only Blizzard can give is the only thing most diablo clones are missing to be awesome) it will be packaged in the bnet2 shit sandwich and deep fried in Activision DLC drool
18/10/2010 at 19:04 RyePunk says:
People keep tauting that Activision will pressure Blizzard into DLC, but thus far those claims haven’t proven anything. At best it has coaxed Blizzard into releasing content that is entirely disengaged from their games entirely (I’m thing ring tones, merch and such).
Furthermore DLC is not entirely a bad thing. Certainly bad DLC does exist, but so does good DLC. Shouldn’t we at least give Blizz the benefit of the doubt that if they make DLC it will be worthwhile for those who purchase it, and non-gamebreaking for those that don’t?
19/10/2010 at 05:36 JKjoker says:
yes, DLC *could* be awesome but its not, kind of like Activision *could* be a great company but its not, and taking away my freedom to play the game as i like goes past my benefit of doubt line
19/10/2010 at 07:50 Thants says:
On one is taking away your freedom to play the game as you like. If you want to hack the game, just play in offline mode.
19/10/2010 at 15:16 JKjoker says:
what about LAN and playing maps that didnt have to go through the corporate filter ?
18/10/2010 at 13:16 The Hammer says:
How does
“Defendants irreparably harm the ability of Blizzard’s legitimate customers (i.e. those who purchase and use unmodified games) to enjoy and participate in the competitive online experience.”
translate into:
“They are claiming damages because those who play the games with cheats will have an experience that harms their appreciation of the game, and in turn they may speak negatively of the game to others.”
18/10/2010 at 13:16 Ben says:
What a load of arse. Blizzard needs a new hobby.
18/10/2010 at 13:17 Cryect says:
The copying into RAM as breaching copyright is the same technique they used with the Glider bot person and succeeded with unfortunately considering most cheat applications often just change a few bytes after its been loaded up by the OS.
18/10/2010 at 18:27 Dances to Podcasts says:
^what I was going to say. They used the exact same method with Glider and won it that way. So not that strange an approach at all.
18/10/2010 at 13:17 Baboonanza says:
I find it very difficult to believe that any cheat has cost them more money than the bad press from this insanity will.
18/10/2010 at 14:00 Starky says:
Are you kidding me? WoW cheats have cost them MILLIONS…
I can’t find it now, but there was a study done that calculated all the gold farmed by bots, and then sold to players – how many hours those players would have needed to play (and pay for) to gain legitimately and it was staggeringly large.
Especially in china where they pay by the hour.
Even in the west though, Gold sellers selling someone 10,000 gold to buy all the stuff he needs instead of spending 3 months earning it is basically them losing $30, because that guy will run out of content quicker and quit – obviously no true for all gold buyers, but it is true for enough that it becomes a loss of real money.
18/10/2010 at 14:26 The Great Wayne says:
Except this isn’t WoW, and we’re aren’t talking mp cheats. We’re talking single player. And don’t come trying to argue around that, cause it’d be nonsense.
Reading comprehension ftw.
18/10/2010 at 14:35 Starky says:
Except we ARE talking multiplayer cheats because they are the ones that Blizzard are suing… NOT the single player trainer makers…
So how’s your reading comprehension now?
18/10/2010 at 14:37 Baboonanza says:
Whether it’s MP or SP cheats seems to be a matter of some debate. As noted however, SC2 isn’t WoW and cheating doesn’t directly hurt their bottom line in the way they are claiming at all.
The bigger issue is that banning cheaters is one thing, suing the people who make the cheats for spurious loss-of-earnings is quite another.
18/10/2010 at 14:50 Starky says:
It does indirectly harm their bottom line though.
Starcraft is a MASSIVE esport – and SC2 is shaping up to be even bigger. Especially in Korea, but quickly spreading to the west – especially thanks to high quality replays and youtube near professional commentaries.
So if hackers harm the validity of Blizzards ranking systems, it damages the reputation of the game and prevents the growth of popularity that will ensure long term sales over the next 10 years in the same way that Starcraft achieved.
Single player achievement cheats don’t do that same harm, not to the same degree – but Blizz can’t detect the difference with it’s anti-cheat – or they could, but it would be WAY too much work to verify it all – because cheaters regularly change what memory they alter and how – it would be a massive task to trace which hacks altered which specific things and how. Would require them to reverse engineer every hack tool by version. Which would mean getting copies of them to do so.
So Blizz simply ban anyone who alters game memory with a 3rd party tool while logged into battlenet.
It is the same reason that sport/athletics ban illegal (and even legal) drugs that might not be performance enhancing, might not offer unfair advantage because they need to take a hardline stance so that their is no illusion of wiggle-room or excuse that can be made. So that the rules are clear and in stone.
Like it or not Starcraft isn’t simply a game – it’s a competitive sport.
18/10/2010 at 23:33 Carra says:
@Starky. So someone doesn’t spend 3 months getting 10K gold. Instead some Chinese fella spends 3 months doing it for him.
Blizzard still gets their 3 months of payment.
19/10/2010 at 01:54 Starky says:
No, it will take that chinese botter about 3-4 days a week max, running 24/7 (one guy running about 10 computers 3 of them in shifts)
Where as the average player grinding 2-3 hours per night for that gold (as well as doing other stuff) will indeed take months.
18/10/2010 at 13:17 mrmud says:
IDSPISPOPD (IDNOCLIP for DooM2), IDKFA, IDFA, IDDQD are all built in cheats, just like there are for built in cheats for SC2. This is more like if ID were suing makers of aimbots, something that I think is perfectly commendable. Cheating in multiplayer ruin games.
18/10/2010 at 16:50 Legionary says:
“You’re spoiling my game. You deserve thousands of dollars in fines.”
18/10/2010 at 20:27 DrGonzo says:
That sums it up for me. It’s cheating in a GAME. It seems perfectly fine to me. Ban them from the game if you like but you can’t possibly do anything more. I don’t like cheats, but it’s only a game and they aren’t doing anything criminal.
18/10/2010 at 13:18 SpinalJack says:
They’re probably acting all serious cos they think they’re a proper sport with TV channels dedicated to it, which they kinda are in Korea. So cheating in SC2 multiplayer is like taking drugs at the Olympics. If they just released a couple cheats themselves then people wouldn’t need to use hacks for single player, simple fix I think.
If they want to go after hackers then more power to them but leave the poor users who bought your game alone, they just want to cheat themselves or god forbid, have some fun.
18/10/2010 at 13:20 Rich says:
“If they just released a couple cheats themselves”
They have.
18/10/2010 at 13:20 mrmud says:
There are built in cheats for SC2 singleplayer.
18/10/2010 at 13:18 SquareWheel says:
Morons.
If I buy your game, I can run any tool, trainer, memory editor that I want. “Boo hoo, cheaters get achievements and it ruins it for the rest of us!” Give me a break.
18/10/2010 at 13:54 pkt-zer0 says:
Are you seriously trying to write off map/drop hacks with just a “boo hoo, cry me a river”? Because that’s not cool, at all.
18/10/2010 at 16:55 bildo says:
This is a huge problem.
Cheating in multiplayer, that’s one thing. Cheating in a game against a computer opponent, is another.
Blizzard should just release a version of the game which allows you to cheat, no problem built into the game, ALA Goldeneye. This way, beating certian challenges and unlocking certian cheats is an achievement in and of itself. In this mode, you may not get achievements but instead you can unlock cheats to use for yourself when you play this cheat-single player mode.
Jesus, Activision must have a tight grip on their balls. Unless anyone can show Activision isn’t involved in this…which I’m sure they since they are the same company…
Problem solved. Next!
18/10/2010 at 22:47 JWill says:
“Blizzard should just release a version of the game which allows you to cheat [...] In this mode, you may not get achievements but instead you can unlock cheats to use for yourself when you play this cheat-single player mode.”
This is a great idea! So great blizzard has already implemented it. The only people who use single player hacks rather than the built in cheats are one who want to cheat for achievements. For the record, I don’t care one whit about achievements in SC2, but Blizzard has to take a hard line on this sort of thing.
If hacking is shown the slightest leniency, people will think it’s okay, and start using maphacks in competitive matches, where it actually matters…
Not to say I agree with suing the poor crackers who thought hacking SC2 would be an interesting challenge… but anyone with half a brain would look at Blizzard’s history curb-stomping anyone who so much as looks at their games the wrong way, and realize it’s really not worth making hacks for SC2.
PS: The most important thing this article failed to mention was that the achievement cheaters only got banned for a few weeks… and even then only from multiplayer.
19/10/2010 at 09:32 ChainSOV says:
[q]The only people who use single player hacks rather than the built in cheats are one who want to cheat for achievements.[/q]
Wrong! For example, there are ppl who just want to play this game in eyefinity mode in singleplayer. Blizzard didn’t bother to implement it properly, so a hack is needed to enjoy it this way.
Oh, you forgot to switch to offline mode before playing singleplayer campaign?
Say bye-bye to your account.
Hacks arent necessarily cheats, they can add functionality.
Think about how many fan-made/unofficial hacks/patches exist for old games and now imagine if all the devs of these games would act as hysterically as Blizzard.
18/10/2010 at 13:18 Theory says:
Modifying a computer program in-memory creates a derivative work? Is there any precedent for that?
18/10/2010 at 13:19 Theory says:
Apparently so, see Cryect’s post above. :o
18/10/2010 at 15:33 zoombapup says:
Aye, weirdly enough it is. I was an expert witness on a similar case (for a gambling gaming company) and the case rested on essentially the same issue. In the case in question, the fact that the code was loaded into memory was enough to be a violation. Worst thing was that the code was never executed (it was old code the company had licensed and then lost the license but not removed).
The law is very strange in this respect. It scared me in many ways.
18/10/2010 at 19:44 Torgen says:
Perhaps…
Loading it into RAM means it also gets written to a pagefile, therefore “producing” a derivative work?
or..
We could demand our politicians quit taking money from media corps and rescind all these asinine copyright laws.
18/10/2010 at 13:19 Crabtacular says:
Bum baileys, the lot of them. That kind of action is too extreme. Surely they realise how this could impact on their reputation? Is it worth it Blizzard, really? Oh dear…
18/10/2010 at 14:12 kikito says:
I like them more because they fight cheaters.
I do concede that the ‘copying to RAM is copyright infringement’ is bonkers, though. I expected them to be more technically-savy than that.
18/10/2010 at 13:20 Brumisator says:
Removing all cheats from the game was borderline understandable. Temporary bans were issued, creating a big enough threat for people to stop cheating, F’ing suing people who weren’t even sure they were breaking.
I just hope that they get thrown out of court. But with their army of lawyers fuelled by billions of dollars, I fear for the use of logic.
18/10/2010 at 15:17 ChampionHyena says:
They’re suing hack developers, not hack users.
18/10/2010 at 13:20 Berm says:
Oh Blizzard, how the mighty have fallen…
18/10/2010 at 13:20 Goomich says:
Now they should sue their lawyes, becaus I feel so dissatisfied wit Starcraft 2, lost interest with it and I’m just communicating it.
18/10/2010 at 13:20 pipman3000 says:
now if only they could do something about the WoW gold vendors who keep spamming everyone with advertisements.
18/10/2010 at 13:21 bleeters says:
Multi billion dollar corporation vs folks banging out the odd trainer or two in their spare time.
Gee, I wonder who’ll win that case. They might as well sue them for drawing breath.
18/10/2010 at 13:21 Dean says:
Yup, the “copying in to RAM” thing has been used a few times. As well as Glider I seem to remember it being part of the early DS Flash-card cases, possibly other mod-chips too (they tend to work by copying the console loader in to the chip, modifying it, then running the modified code).
It seems to work, but clearly it shouldn’t…
18/10/2010 at 13:22 Cinnamon says:
Sid Meier sent me cease and desist letter the other day warning me that I was taking illegal advantage of the weaknesses in the Civ 5 AI. Only two months ago Ken Levine sent me a letter informing me that the vita chambers were only there for the use of his grandmother and if he caught me using them I would be arrested for trespassing. This is out of control.
18/10/2010 at 13:40 EthZee says:
I got a Cease and Desist from John Carmack for trying to talk to the monsters in Doom.
18/10/2010 at 13:23 Ernheim says:
You sell a game, what people do with it is up to them. Suing for the single player hacks is ridiculous, and arguably it’s the same for multiplayer. Valve seems to have a competent way of separating hack servers from lawful ones (I speak from no experience other than a mate whinging about getting banned from valve anti-cheat servers for some reason), no reason that Blizzard can’t you know, police the servers without dragging people into court.
Speaking as somebody who loved the creativity in the mods and maps for Warcraft 3 (Christ Wintermaul was addictive), it saddens me to see how far Blizzard has fallen.
18/10/2010 at 14:14 kikito says:
Starcraft is completely modable. There’s a map editor that allows all sorts of crazy things, and a script language.
Cheats are not mods.
18/10/2010 at 14:17 Starky says:
You can even play all the single player missions in the map editor – with all kinds of crazy and fun modifications – like play the missions as other races – or with units from all races.
I played some of the missions with a ghost that did 500 damage per shot and had a range of 20 and near unlimited energy – was a great laugh beating the final mission with 1 unit – snipe, snipe, snipe, snipe… nuke, nuke, nuke… hehe
18/10/2010 at 13:24 Guildenstern says:
Except that the hack they were using was intended to allow them to unlock achievements while still cheating.
Who the fuck cares?
18/10/2010 at 13:53 Rich says:
The people who made the hacks, in order to play multi-player games against the AI to farm achievements and give themselves an inflated rating, that’s who. That doesn’t include me by the way, as I don’t give a damn about achievements. Never have.
18/10/2010 at 13:27 Axess Denyd says:
A US court already ruled that copying into RAM can be copyright infringement when they sued the creator of….some big WOW hack that I forget the name of. Yes, US courts can be very, very stupid sometimes.
Blizzard has complete legal precedent for this in the US.
18/10/2010 at 13:28 Tony M says:
There must be at least a dozen Single Player trainers (hacks) for Starcraft 1 ONE!!!! Despite the fact that SC1 has plenty of official cheats available.
So the idea that players are only downloading trainers to get cheap achievements can’t explain the popularity of SC1 trainers. (and trainers for hundreds of other games before achievements were even invented).
My guess is that most of the people who use trainers don’t take the game (or achievements) very seriously. My son used them until he was old enough to play games as they were designed.
Tony
18/10/2010 at 13:52 qrter says:
I’m old enough to play games as they were designed, but I’ll cheat in a heartbeat if it enhances my enjoyment of a game.
That’s all singleplayer, mind, I wouldn’t cheat in multiplayer. (Or would I..? No, I wouldn’t. Or would I! No. Ah.. but what if I would!? I wouldn’t….. or woouuld I..? Etc.)
18/10/2010 at 13:58 Tony M says:
I used a trainer to play Prince of Persia: Sands of Time (on the PC) because I liked the puzzles but didn’t care about the fighting.
18/10/2010 at 13:34 Rory says:
Blizzard I am dissapoint
18/10/2010 at 13:35 bill says:
“Defendants irreparably harm the ability of Blizzard’s legitimate customers (i.e. those who purchase and use unmodified games) to enjoy and participate in the competitive online experience”
Are those that use hacks ILLEGITIMATE customers? Surely those that use hacks are still legitimate customers. Isn’t that like Ford saying I’m not a legitimate customer because I used the Fiesta I bought to ramraid a shop?
18/10/2010 at 13:48 CraigT says:
I haven’t red it, but I would imagine Blizzard have laid out what an illegitimate user is in the EULA or ToS.
If they have stated in the EULA that ‘thou shall not use a hack or trainer’ then the user has broken the EULA and they can do what they please with them.
18/10/2010 at 13:49 Starky says:
That comparison fails –
It’s like Dell saying you’re not a legitimate customer, and the warranty and support contract is void because you opened up and modified your laptop.
or for one closer to your example… It’s like your Insurance company refusing to pay for repaids because you used the car to ram raid the shop.
Ford don’t care if you’re legitimate or not, given you’ve already paid. Though I bet it would still void any warranty.
18/10/2010 at 20:51 DrGonzo says:
So could I write I get to shag everyone who agrees to this EULA’s girlfriends and they would then have to comply? I think EULA should be abandoned. Nobody reads them anyway.
19/10/2010 at 17:02 Bonedwarf says:
EULA’s aren’t even legally enforceable in some countries. I remember getting into this argument with Sports Interactive when I said about using a no-cd crack for CM01/02. They said that violated the EULA. I pointed out they weren’t legally valid where I lived, and they concurred and admitted that I hadn’t actually broken any laws where I live. (Canada. Don’t know if the law has changed now.)
18/10/2010 at 13:39 VelvetFistIronGlove says:
Blizzard seem to be basing their copying into RAM argument on their success in MDY v. Blizzard, where the court determined that the player only had a limited licence to use the software subject to both the EULA and the Terms of Use of WoW, and that by violating the specific sections against the use of bots, the subsequent copying into RAM was infringing. (In general, in the US, the owner of a copy of software copying it into RAM for the purposes of running it is not an infringement).
That case is apparently waiting to be considered for an appeal, so if it is granted one, it will be very interesting to see how the higher courts treat this argument.
18/10/2010 at 13:48 VelvetFistIronGlove says:
Further searching shows the appeal for that case began in June this year, but as far as I can see there has been no decision yet. But it is fundamental to the role of the purchaser as owner or mere licensor, and the extent to which an EULA can restrict them, and the outcome is certainly going to affect how “valid” EULAs are.
18/10/2010 at 13:41 Delusibeta says:
As I understand it, Blizzard is suing people who sold their hacks, which makes a bit more sense. The language used is still nutty, however.
18/10/2010 at 13:44 Starky says:
Exactly, Blizz are suing people who are making money of their trademark and copyright, perfectly understandable thing to do.
Just the same as they would sue someone selling Starcraft 2 T-shirts using their IP.
18/10/2010 at 13:41 Starky says:
They are NOT suing the single player trainer hack makers, they are suing the multiplayer map hacker makers… you know the ones that make available cheats for online competitive play… and sure they are using any legal bullshit they can to do so.
Exactly the same as they sued, and successfully at that, one of the bot creators for WoW. They also sued some people running 3rd party WoW servers.
And I say good on Blizzard. Diablo 2 was almost, and to a large degree was ruined by map hackers, dupers, and botters… and I for one am glad that blizzard are taking a hardline stance.
They don’t need to win, they just need to make these multiplayer cheat makers understand that they risk getting sued.
Just like the bans that happened over the “singleplayer” those guy were using cheats that are basically exactly the same as the multiplayer cheats – memory hacks. They were using them while signed into battlenet, and in their accounts – they were stupid and Blizzard was right to ban them.
You can go “It’s only achievements” but those achievements mean a lot to a large chunk of the SC2 playerbase (not me, I do them for fun sometimes but otherwise could not care).
Blizzard is right, banning people for hacking achievements lowers the quality of the experience for the hundreds of thousands of players who care about them. Many of them take a lot of skill and dedication to earn, and so have some boasting worth at least – they are not just fluff.
Memory altering hacks should result in a ban if anyone is dumb enough to use them when signed into battlenet – if you want to screw around with such things that is what the 100% and totally offline guest mode is for. Which will NOT get you banned.
18/10/2010 at 13:52 zipdrive says:
I disagree.
I think Blizzard have no business if (for example) I’m a bloody worthless RTS player and need cheats to help me finish the campaign. To do that (I’m guessing) I can’t be in Guest mode, right?
I have a lot of respect for Blizzrd, but doing stuff like this, while claiming “The harm to Blizzard from Defendants’ conduct is immediate, massive and irreparable” is just ridiculous and they’re burning their credit with me.
18/10/2010 at 14:02 pkt-zer0 says:
“I think Blizzard have no business if (for example) I’m a bloody worthless RTS player and need cheats to help me finish the campaign. To do that (I’m guessing) I can’t be in Guest mode, right?”
You guessed wrong. You can be online as well, and use the invincibility and insta-win cheat codes to go through the campaign. What you can’t do is load up map/drophacks and connect to their servers.
18/10/2010 at 14:03 Starky says:
You can play the ENTIRE single player campaign in guest mode – you just don’t get achievements or anything else for it.
18/10/2010 at 14:19 kikito says:
@zipdrive: the campaign in ‘casual’ mode is really piece of cake. I’m sure that my cat would be able to go through it, just by running over the keyboard and gently touching the mouse.
And I don’t have a cat.
And even if you are so “worthless”, there are legal cheat codes that allow you to skip the parts that are too difficult, or get invincible, etc. These codes are provided by blizzard and you can use it at any moment, without having to pay for or install any sort of cheat thingie.
18/10/2010 at 14:59 zipdrive says:
Ok, then. Thanks for Clearing that up.
18/10/2010 at 21:02 jsdn says:
Maybe I don’t want to be invincible. Maybe I want to use nothing but ghosts across the whole campaign. Sounds fun right? Well, there’s no cheat for that. Should I be downloading a hack for that? Should people be sued for making a hack for that?
18/10/2010 at 21:05 jsdn says:
Should I be banned for downloading a hack for that?*
CAPTCHA: ssue
Totally worth it.
19/10/2010 at 01:55 Starky says:
Or just learn to use the map editor and do all of the above.
18/10/2010 at 13:41 rocketman71 says:
Even more ridiculous than banning players for cheating in single player.
Fuck you, Kotick. You destroyed one of the best companies in the world. I hope someday you pay for it.
18/10/2010 at 13:57 pkt-zer0 says:
Yes, how dare they try to go after people who charge money for hacks that ruin online play! The bastards!
18/10/2010 at 13:43 Max says:
Is it really that far-fetched to believe Blizzard will pursue legal action against programs that clearly violate the modification clauses in the terms of use, single player or otherwise?
18/10/2010 at 13:47 bill says:
These days, it’s not far-fetched to assume any company will pursue legal action over anything. Unfortunately.
18/10/2010 at 13:47 Jockie says:
The single player thing is completely mental and a big company suing some guy for tinkering with a program is downight mean.
On the otherhand, many a multi-player game has been ruined by people using hacks and the like and i’d quite like to see the guys using them get shafted.
18/10/2010 at 13:50 Starky says:
It is the guys making and SELLING those multiplayer hacks that Blizz are going after, not single player trainer makers.
18/10/2010 at 13:54 Jockie says:
I see, well that’s not so bad then. The lines on who exactly they were going after sounded a little broader than that in most of the comments above. But I have no problem at all with a company aggressively trying to stamp out hack-makers and cheats as long as no innocent players get caught in the crossfire.
18/10/2010 at 13:49 Anthony says:
That has to be hands-down one of the strangest bits of lawyer-speak I’ve ever seen.
And apparently has precedence. I bet the guy who came up with that one the first time around is a very wealthy bastard right about now.
18/10/2010 at 13:54 Max says:
Goodness, just in the time it took me to write that last comment already what seems like dozens of people have chimed in with their “disappointment” that Blizzard was preserving the integrity of their online game. Were people this upset when Warden/VAC were introduced? (That’s rhetorical, I’m sure they were.)
I did just want to point out that the lawsuits are targeting people who SOLD these programs, and thus profited by native use of Blizzard’s copyrighted material. I’ll leave the ethical debate for others.
18/10/2010 at 13:55 Po0py says:
Seems a bit inaccurate to not point out that the creators of the hacks are trying to make money from it. Which is an entirely different thing altogether. If it were simply a modder, modding the game for the sake of it and then releasing it for free who was getting sued, then I would have issues with that. But it is not.
18/10/2010 at 13:56 Navagon says:
Whatever your perspective, this is still a mess of Blizzard’s own creation. They tried to play Big Brother and now it seems they’re having to resort to this kind of bullshit just to hold their totalitarian ground.
18/10/2010 at 13:58 Skusey says:
When did Blizzard go crazy?
18/10/2010 at 14:34 Navagon says:
They might have always been like this. But you can’t exercise this level of control if people won’t put up with it. It’s only now that people are willing to buy their games no matter what that they’re able to act like this with impunity.
Give a person a sense of authority and control and you start to see their true nature. That’s what Blizzard fans are giving them right now. That’s what we’re seeing.
18/10/2010 at 14:44 John Peat says:
Nah – this is definately the Activision effect…
It was visible almost the moment those grasping leeches stepped in – WoW Ringtones, Pay to change faction, Pay to change Race etc. etc. – screw the game, GIVE US THE MONEY.
Now they want to leverage total control of their community – well good luck with that one because it’s impossible and the harder you try, the stupider you will look.
18/10/2010 at 16:49 Navagon says:
Activision may have honed Blizzard’s greed and assisted in directing it. But it was very much evident before those two merged.
18/10/2010 at 20:57 DrGonzo says:
I got the impression they were always crazy. If you mean ‘evil’ crazy. They just copy and paste their games with shinier graphics. Didn’t they also develop WoW before their merger with Activision? It just depends on what you think are dodgy business practices I suppose.
18/10/2010 at 13:59 mandrill says:
Bobby Kotick has a lot to answer for.”We are not making games to allow people to have fun, we are making games to make money” (paraphrased of course).
The sooner someone drops him off a cliff the better for the entire industry IMO. Blizztivision/Actitard has become what EA used to be. Swollen and lazy, generating no original content and relying on the popularity of their franchises for a living.
Much as it pains me I will not be buying Diablo 3. There are plenty of better games of a similar style out there and they’re not made by a company I find to be obnoxious
18/10/2010 at 14:05 pkt-zer0 says:
“We are not making games to allow people to have fun”
Amusingly enough, the point of this lawsuit is to cut down on cheaters ruining the online multiplayer. But if it has to do with Activision it is surely EVIL.
18/10/2010 at 14:00 John Peat says:
The point here is that not everyone who cheated in the offline game, did so in order to gain advantage in the online game.
An analogy would be banning you from the entire internet because you cheated in 1 game – slightly OTT…
Blizzard – under the guidance of Greedyvision I’m sure – are ploughing into new ground here in terms of the level of control they’d like to have over their game community (see the RealID farces too) and I’m afraid they’re going to come out of this looking as bad as Metallica did when they foolishly tried to defend their own greed and ignorance…
How long before someone starts a class action for their being locked-out of a game they bought and paid for?? (Bear in mind that the licence agreement has no legal value in many countries).
18/10/2010 at 14:06 Starky says:
No, the analogy would be banning you from every Source (valve) game because you cheated in one of them…
Oh wait… that is exactly what happens (near enough)…
18/10/2010 at 14:16 CMaster says:
No it isn’t Starky.
Blizzard lock you out of playing the game, SP or MP entirely.
Valve stop you from playing that game or ones of the same engine, in multiplayer, on cheat protected servers. You can still log in to Steam and play all you like – you’ll just get dropped from cheat protected servers.
18/10/2010 at 14:21 EALouise says:
I think the problem is that single-player trainers work in a similar way to the multiplayer hacks, as well as cracked copies. They either have a running process that modifies the program in memory or they modify the game executable itself. So, to the Warden system, there’s no discernible difference.
I would think Blizzard regret bringing up the achievements thing, I don’t think it’s something worth arguing over, it’s just a bit of PR noise.
18/10/2010 at 14:27 Starky says:
That’s true, but it is my understanding that most of the single player trainer users only got a 14 day suspension not a full ban.
That the full ban went to those using online multiplayer map hacks.
But because they happened at the same time, people are lying and trying to claim they only used the SP trainer, or just ignorant (perhaps they used the maphack in single player only – but how can Blizz tell the difference?) – and the issue got all muddied and confused – and all the piss poor reporting of it sweeping the internet blogs didn’t help – even here at RPS just regurgitating incorrect “facts” from other sites.
So maybe there are a few hundred people who got banned when they should have only gotten suspended – but given there is near zero difference between a trainer for the SP campaign that works when signed into B.net and a trainer that works for multiplayer games (it’s just the bytes of memory you alter) – Blizzard probably can’t tell exactly what was modified, just that it was modified by a 3rd part program.
Personally I’d rather them have a hard-line stance on this and discourage any future cheating, because I don’t want Sc2 to be filled with maphackers ruining my online experience – just like I don’t want FPS games to be filled with aimbotters (and it is basically the same thing).
If a few “innocent” single player cheaters are banned as collateral, then it is a price that I think is worth it.
18/10/2010 at 14:02 Nevard says:
This isn’t really a case of them messing the game up, unless you are only able to play SCII by hacking.
Unless you planned to hack your way to glory instead of playing it properly this news shouldn’t make you worry about Diablo 3 at all.
18/10/2010 at 14:05 Starky says:
For the record here are the offical cheats you may freely use in game whenever you like and never fear getting bannd (you just won’t earn achievements)…
* terribleterribledamage – God Mode
* moredotsmoredots – Free Units (no resources needed)
* realmendrilldeep – 5,000 Gas
* whysoserious – 5,000,000 Credits
* jaynestown – Resources granted
* tyuhasleftthegame – Disable victory conditions
* sosayweall – Disable tech requirements
* eyeofsauron – Open cutscene menu
* iamironman – Upgrade Weapons, Armor and Shields by 1
* overengineeredcodpiece – Plays the Level 80 Elite Tauren Chieftain (Blizzard employee band) song “Terran up the Night”
* hanshotfirst – Disable Ability Cooldown
* stroaksmolts – 5,000 Minerals
* smoldersbolds – 5,000 Minerals and Gas
* ypoonsvoicemail – Disable defeat conditions
* mintmansoperator – Disable food requirements
* nevergiveupneversurrender – Disable defeat conditions
* reversingnazaire / basestarsprimative – Fast building
* fsbcomunicacion – Fast Heal
* sawnoutofmemory – Fog of War disabled
* cadeasygoin – Lose the current game
* lyingpect – Mission Select
* furabranchery – Opensthe UNN broadcast menu
* wapboinkers – Research points
* cmethodfeedback – Win current game
* qrotero – Disable time of day
* dzmhairspring – 5000 Custom resources
* = – Re-enter the last cheat
18/10/2010 at 17:01 bildo says:
wow. i honestly didn’t know these existed. i take back my previous post of making a new game mode where you unlock cheats by completing certian goals – similar to achievements – but in this mode you are not able to gain achievements.
Still. these are the silly problems we are going to have to deal with now that games are becomming more intertwined with being persistently online. It’s a shame that the future is leading to a time when you can’t do as you wish, esp. while playing a single player game – achievements or not.
18/10/2010 at 14:13 DrZ says:
@Daz:
Be aware that in the larger parts of the world, creating those kinds of hacks can’t be subject to legal prosecution, simply because EULAs don’t constitute legally binding forms of contracts there. E.g. this holds for all countries within the EU. That’s probably also the reason why Blizzard are trying to pull this off as a ‘copyright infringement’ now. And even for this the legal basis isn’t exactly solid. It’s an open question if modifying contents of memory outside of your own code really constitutes a ‘derivative work’. In the case of dynamically binding other peoples libraries (.dlls etc.), there is some legal precedent in the OSS community that this won’t constitute ‘derivative works’.
Perhaps it would be saner to keep in mind that cheats don’t cheat, but people do.
18/10/2010 at 14:13 pkt-zer0 says:
“Blizzard are claiming that copying elements of the game into your computer’s RAM is copyright violation.”
…if it’s outside the scope of the EULA. Such as using a hacked client.
“I’m a bit frightened that id will be suing me because I used to type IDSPISPOPD into Doom.”
That’s not even remotely the same thing as maphacking/drophacking. SC2 also has cheat codes, btw.
18/10/2010 at 14:23 DrZ says:
@pkt-zer0:
EULAs aren’t legally binding contracts in most parts of the world. In Germany, and afaik in the whole EU, the situation is the following: Any kind of contract can only be made at the moment of purchase, which means that any contractual text you get while installing the software is void and nil, and if your only way of installing is clicking the “accept” button, than the button click will be void and nil, also. EULAs can only be valid if they are printed on the box, and even then, massive restrictions apply as to what EULAs can legally ask of the customer.
18/10/2010 at 14:28 pkt-zer0 says:
I didn’t comment on the legality of EULAs. Just pointing out that Blizzard aren’t suing people for copying SC2 data into memory (like the article implies), but for using a hacked client.
18/10/2010 at 15:48 Ginger Yellow says:
“Blizzard are claiming that copying elements of the game into your computer’s RAM is copyright violation. It’s so brazened that you sort of have to respect their moxie. ”
Actually, this bit will probably stand up in court – there is precedent. What’s interesting to me is that Blizzard (and by extension Activision) are risking a court ruling on the enforceability of EULAs. I’m guessing they think the hackers will settle, and they’re probably right. But this could backfire on them pretty badly.
18/10/2010 at 19:10 DrZ says:
@ Ginger:
I can’t speak for the situation in the US, but the situation regarding EULAs is pretty much clear in the EU. In German law EULA are only binding if they were made clear at the point of sale; if they are shown only during installation, they are void. And even in the case that they are printed on the carton the game is sold in, massive legal restrictions apply as to what can be demanded of the customer. I’m pretty certain that this pertains to the other EU countries as well, as copyright laws have largely been unified by Brussels nowadays.
18/10/2010 at 22:07 Matt says:
Two of the three being sued were from Canada, I believe. I can’t remember where the other hacker lives, but I seem to recall he/she wasn’t living in the States, either.
I just wanted to add this to the conversation, since while pkt-zer0 wasn’t talking about the legality of EULAs in different countries, it somehow drifted there.
18/10/2010 at 14:16 Metal_circus says:
The reason why I don’t want to play PC games anymore.
Piss off, Blizzard.
18/10/2010 at 14:22 kikito says:
When did Destructoid become a FUD-based blog?
18/10/2010 at 14:25 Nallen says:
Odd article John, it’s like you understand what they’re doing and why but giving it a bit of Daily Mail spin to enrage the masses. Which worked.
(Seriously, did anyone making the ‘what happened to you, Blizzard’ comments understand what is actually going on here?)
18/10/2010 at 14:35 Rii says:
When you pair it with Quinn’s article below, and RPS’ earlier article on the SC2 cheats affair, it begins to look less ‘odd’ and more part of a consistent pattern of anti-Blizzard propaganda.
18/10/2010 at 15:10 panther says:
cool story bro.
18/10/2010 at 16:15 Joe says:
@ Rei
“it begins to look less ‘odd’ and more part of a consistent pattern of anti-Blizzard propaganda.”
Sure, if you cross your eyes really really hard.
18/10/2010 at 19:14 Stu says:
ROCK PAPER HATCHET JOB, MORE LIKE
18/10/2010 at 22:21 Sarkhan Lol says:
WHY DO YOU HATE FREEDOM??
18/10/2010 at 14:27 RaveTurned says:
Presumably the hack makers need access to a copy of the game to develop and test the hack, which implies violating the EULA in the process. Perhaps if they could provide evidence that you somehow don’t need knowledge of the game code to make a hack for it, they could convince a judge that there’s not enough proof that they have violated the EULA themselves? Not sure how they could do that though.
18/10/2010 at 14:27 Gosh says:
im glad im hurting the industry by not paying for games at all. bought minecraft tough ^^
18/10/2010 at 17:20 bildo says:
I stand by your comment. Less control is better for everyone. Some control is nessecary but stuff like this is nuts. Yes, I know, they are suing the guys who made multiplayer hacks only.
Some will say, “BUT DIABLO AND THE REST ARE UNPLAYABLE B/C OF HACKS AND BOTS AND WHATEVER.” Who cares. They are older than sin. Let’s focus on the current and future games, not look back.
First of all, Battle.net as it stands today is a sign of the grim future we will all face. It won’t stop pirating nor will it limit it. The minority that wants to pirate will find a way. Private servers on WoW for example. These people will always be in the minority and they will always find a way. Also, they will never stop a title from being a smash success, ever. If a game is great and has minimal copy protection, you’re going to do well.
However, being consistently online, under the watchful eye of Blizz or any other company is absurd. It will lead to more incidents like this. Look at SC1 for instance. I have played with Koreans for a long time now, fairly consistently. By the current standards, money maps would be forbidden in SC2 because they will allow for easier achievement farming. On the otherhand, in SC1 money maps or hacked maps that have one mineral and vespene source are played by a large number of people here and they love it! Why should they not be able to play this way on SC2? Why is it, that you can be forbidden to play a game the way you want to play it?
This is just another form of control about something that really dosen’t matter. Blizz: pull a Valve and instead of punishing your players for playing in their own style, find a more constructive way to allow them to play as they wish – such that no rules are broken and everyone can have fun doing their own thing.
Maybe I’m out of touch. Please tell me if I am. Persistent online games that aren’t MMOs scare me.
18/10/2010 at 17:22 bildo says:
tl;dr
SC1 money maps are still played by thousands of people. Why can’t people like them play in the way they want to?
18/10/2010 at 17:39 pkt-zer0 says:
I’ll just skip right to the tl;dr version:
What the hell do maphacks/drophacks have to do with custom maps?
18/10/2010 at 19:06 bildo says:
@pkt-zer0
this goes beyond maphacks. you cant have money maps in SC2. if you did it would be against TOS under cheating.
18/10/2010 at 19:19 bildo says:
edit:
nvm. i suppose you can have money maps in custom game. massivly overlooked that point. ’nuff said. there is something about being forced to be online for a single player game that bothers me.
18/10/2010 at 20:05 pkt-zer0 says:
You’re not forced to go online for single player, either. It’s called guest mode, works just fine. Unless you feel forced online by achievements not getting recorded on your profile, I guess.
18/10/2010 at 21:54 ScubaMonster says:
Wouldn’t playing a custom map not let you get achievements? I would think the game would only record achievements while playing official Blizzard maps. Otherwise people could farm achievements which would be ridiculous. I don’t own the game so I can’t confirm one way or the other.
18/10/2010 at 14:27 Tei says:
Blizzard has tied singleplayer with online, so theres not such thing as offline singleplayer (theres a offline mode, but don’t support the same savegames, so is not full )
As a side effect, Blizzard can’t tell the difference a singleplayer game against bots, from a multiplayer one. Blizzard has soon detect memory modifications, trigger all the alarms, and call wolf. Here, the false positive has not ben rejected, but enforced. Something that sould have ben ignored ( cheating in singleplayer ), has not ben ignored.
Is not totally insane, theres the achievements things. But that insanity is opinionable, maybe you think achievements are personal perfomance, and not a multiplayer thing, so cheating your achievements is not important. Maybe you disagree, and think achievements is a multiplayer game, then you kind of have a point on banning singleplayer chaters.
Blizzard created this problem wen made singleplayer a online activity. And by making achiements cheating a offense, is making the problem worse.
This can only end in tears.
18/10/2010 at 14:36 pkt-zer0 says:
“Blizzard has tied singleplayer with online, so theres not such thing as offline singleplayer (theres a offline mode, but don’t support the same savegames, so is not full )”
Uhh, yeah, it does support savegames. You don’t get to upload them to the cloud, nor do you get achievements, but you can save your game offline perfectly fine. Well, it worked normally for me, anyway.
18/10/2010 at 14:42 JKjoker says:
they can tell the difference, they log every mouse movement, every keystroke, they know which mode you are playing in, they keep track of everything you do for marketing reasons, they just dont give a crap
im sad so many ppl are dismissing this as “they were a bunch of cheaters” or “there are built in cheats already” without realizing that this is killing any possibility of modding outside of the corporate approved ones
older Blizzard games had a TON of non official mods/maps that CANNOT BE MADE today for SC2 thx to bnet2, yes this can only end on tears
18/10/2010 at 15:04 Starky says:
They only log IN GAME stuff – 3rd party hacks by their nature are OUTSIDE the game, and due to restrictions in law Blizzard can’t scan your PC, or memory (except the memory the game itself uses) – so no they cannot tell.
They cannot tell if you use a 3rd party program to intercepts the unit position data that the game sends (and then hides based on where you can see in game or not in the fog of war), then renders that date to a utterly external program – which is a system most maphackers are moving too because it is almost undetectable by an automated system – and would require a human to view every single replay in order to make a judgement call on if that person was map hacking.
That is the problem with these hacks, they are usually almost totally client side – and often only READ memory, not alter it.
Which is why they are so much harder to detect than say an aimbot – but then the smart aimbots do the same and emulate physical mouse movement and only ever read game memory, never alter it.
So any time blizzard detects memory altering, they can’t know what else that 3rd party software does – what other capabilities it has. perhaps it only alters 1 byte of memory, which allows it to display a full maphack overlay in game.
18/10/2010 at 15:12 Tei says:
Detecting if the current game is singleplayer with bots, or with more than one human players is whitin what Blizzard can do. So can’t claim that is tecnically posible tell one from another. If is not implemented at the time, maybe Blizzard is on the wrong, banning the wrong people.
18/10/2010 at 15:24 Starky says:
That they probably can do, but what if the 3rd party program has functionality for both online and single player? But the user is only using them in singleplayer?
Do they ban or not?
Do they risk a player who clearly has access to hacks getting online?
Still, it seems that the people who used the Single player cheat programs got a 14 day suspension rather than a permanent ban.
It is a grey area I agree, the whole online/offline issue – but Blizz have been fairly clear from the start, from early beta even. 3rd party apps of ANY kind are not allowed to be used when signed into battlenet.
I remember several warnings issues by Blizz and their community team about it. For example some people were using 3rd party apps to change the keyboard shortcuts (before they could be edited in a settings file) and Blizz said that they could not guarantee that Warden would not detect that as hacking and ban them, because similar methods could be used to automate in game activities (macro scripts and such).
If people ignore that or are ignorant, then it’s really their own fault.
18/10/2010 at 18:00 TenjouUtena says:
older Blizzard games had a TON of non official mods/maps that CANNOT BE MADE today for SC2 thx to bnet2, yes this can only end on tears
Er…. what? SC2 has a full map editor included with the game. I have seen Diplomacy, Nexus Wars, and a Mario-Party clone done in this map editor done with provided tools. Blizzard provides and even encourages those who make custom Maps (as they are known). The Patch notes from 1.1.2 included several custom map programming fixes. It’s more advanced than anything I’ve seen from any other strategy game.
While I don’t really like the legal precedent, I can’t really say anything bad. These are cheaters, they are thrying to cheat at the game in a way that is unfair to others playing the game legitimately. This isn’t ‘I made a nifty mod’ or whatever. Phenty of those poeple are out there, doing things the right way.
tl;dr: Hack cheaters have basically no leg to stand on here.
18/10/2010 at 19:39 Tei says:
“That they probably can do, but what if the 3rd party program has functionality for both online and single player? But the user is only using them in singleplayer?”
Is easy.
Banning people for singleplayer cheats is WRONG. No videogame has the right to rule how I pass my time in a computer. If i want to “ruin” my gameplay, is my problem.
Now we have a problem, that Blizzard has created, .. is singleplayer + achievements still singleplayer? or is some sort of multiplayer competition where you submits your scored to challenge other users?, if is the later, then is right to ban these poor souls.
Maybe theres not right or wrong here, since some things are not as well defined as we would love to. Blizzard has blurred the difference from online to offline, singleplayer to multiplayer, so have created this problems.
18/10/2010 at 20:03 pkt-zer0 says:
“Banning people for singleplayer cheats is WRONG. No videogame has the right to rule how I pass my time in a computer. If i want to “ruin” my gameplay, is my problem.”
People were banned for multiplayer cheats. If you go online while having those loaded into memory, betting on not getting flagged by Warden, yeah – your problem. The solution: stop being stupid and go offline.
18/10/2010 at 22:01 ScubaMonster says:
They should have just not connected single player to any sort of online system. Then the only cheats they need to worry about are multiplayer. When you start mixing your single player into the online it becomes harder to tell if they were using hacks only for single player, or for multiplayer as well. Maybe there is some way of monitoring, but then I’m sure hackers would just figure out a way to bypass that too. Nobody would be saying anything right now if it were only multiplayer hackers.
18/10/2010 at 14:28 Langman says:
This is a rather….extreme move from Blizzard, but to be honest I don’t really have anything against it in principle. It’s just surprising to see them actually go through with it.
18/10/2010 at 14:30 dvdz says:
Some quick google-fu shows that one of the cheats is donationware, another is free and another is open source.
18/10/2010 at 14:36 RaveTurned says:
Interesting. Presumably there’s still a case for suing the donationware hack as money has still changed hands (albeit voluntarily). I wonder how well the case of others profiting from their Intellectual Property stands up when the hack devs are giving it away? That said, I expect there’s still a case for copyright or EULA violation that’s not based on profit if Blizzard wanted to make it.
18/10/2010 at 14:39 Starky says:
That and damage to the “good” names of Blizzards trademarks…
I suspect though it’s not about the money – even if they are awarded millions Blizzard know they’ll never, ever see that money – the makers of these hacks cannot afford it.
It’s about sending a harsh and clear warning to any future hack makers.
18/10/2010 at 17:08 DrZ says:
@RaveTurned:
The question of whether intellectual property has actually been infringed is open to debate, because while the hacks may work with the Starcraft code that resides in your computer memory, that code isn’t distributed as an actual part of the hack. There is legal precedent that there is no ‘derivative work’ in such cases.
As to the issue of money: It shouldn’t make any difference whatsoever, and I believe this isn’t only true for the EU but also for the US. Infringement presupposes distribution, but it makes no difference if distribution is monetarized or not (unless it’s Fair Use, but in the case mentioned in the article this is obviously not an issue).
18/10/2010 at 14:32 JackShandy says:
Oh god, those poor bastards. Blizzard is going to hit them like a fucking ice age.
18/10/2010 at 14:32 DrZ says:
@Max:
Even when creators of hacks were to distribute them for money, it’s still massively dubious if any actual infringement is taking part, simply because (as I take it from the article) it seems that no actual Blizzard code was distributed with the hacks. As the situation presents itself, Blizzard are trying to extend their conception of infringement to every kind of manipulation of their code in your home computer’s memory, which by itself will appear as outright insane to some people. Blizzard are saying: If you create a program which modifies some byte at some position in memory, and that byte was created by the Starcraft II program, then you are stealing Blizzard. Blizzard in effect say: We don’t just own the abstract representation of the code/data, but we own the code/data *in each and every individual computer*. And this is what’s so bizarre about it..
18/10/2010 at 14:33 Tyler says:
This case has already been argued, and Nintendo lost. Lewis Galoob Toys, Inc. v. Nintendo of America, Inc established that things that modify in-game memory are fine, with respect to the derivative work and related claims.
It’s probably still a breach of the EULA, which is a separate issue.
18/10/2010 at 16:18 VelvetFistIronGlove says:
This case has already been argued, and Blizzard won, just last year. See my post on page 1 regarding MDY v. Blizzard.
18/10/2010 at 14:38 kincaid says:
i keep telling people that blizzard has a great reputation and that something has to happen that shall tarnish said reputation.
i thought it was going to be cataclysm. i guess i didn’t see this coming.
18/10/2010 at 14:41 Max says:
Poring over the comments, it seems there are two different viewpoints: that Blizzard either is doing this because they want to make lots of money from these lawsuits, or that they actually want to protect the integrity of the game. Now, I know which camp I fall in, and it’s partially because it seems silly to me to expect that a company with access to the money fountain that is World of Warcraft would pursue a lawsuit like this purely for financial gain, slavering over what clearly are those hacker’s fat sacks of delicious cash. I freely admit I could be wrong. This could be pure greed. But it doesn’t strike me as the same attitude expressed embracing the “rainbows, colors, and unicorns” outrage over the early diablo 3 screenshots by having their own line of shirts printed.
Even if it is true that they’ve gone mad in pursuit of every last shiny shilling, however, what really pushes me over the edge is that I WOULD have my gameplay experience ruined by hackers and exploiters and aimbots, and so I have no sympathy for those that would help enable such people.
18/10/2010 at 19:15 Dances to Podcasts says:
Even if they win, I doubt they’d get much out of these people and I get the feeling Blizzard’s lawyers aren’t the cheapest ones, so they’re probably not doing it for the money.
18/10/2010 at 14:43 Ovno says:
Regardless of whether these people have spoiled peoples online play or what ever and regardless of your or anyone elses opinion of cheating in games, sueing someone for writting a hack that they then distribute is beyond ridicullus…
18/10/2010 at 22:05 ScubaMonster says:
Yeah I’d have to agree. Ban the cheaters and leave it at that.
18/10/2010 at 14:45 Eamo says:
I can see the Onion headlines tomorrow “Cheat program creators victims of unfair system”. I hope the irony of the situation isn’t lost on the people who made this program. A harsh lesson in how much fun it is to lose to someone with an unfair advantage is about to be taught.
18/10/2010 at 14:48 John Peat says:
Dream On – people will ALWAYS cheat and there will always be ways of doing so…
Take XBOX Live – noted for banning people by the bucketload – and look at almost any high score table in any game and the top players will be clear and obvious cheats with scores which are impossible, massive gamerscores but no achievements to back them up etc. etc.
Cheating cannot be stopped – people will always do it – part of being an adult is dealing with it really, only kids think the world can be shaped to their own idea of ‘fairness’.
18/10/2010 at 17:04 bleeters says:
Yeh, and let’s disband law enforcement too. There’ll always be crime. Deal with it, you losers.
19/10/2010 at 07:52 Eamo says:
@John Peat
Just because people cheat does not make cheating acceptable. You may as well argue that just because people have always murdered murder should be acceptable. The reality is that many who break the law get away with it, you are basically arguing that we need to encode a chance of escape into out laws otherwise it is unfair to the lawbreaker which is patently untrue.
@bleeters
You are trying to equate an excessive invocation of the law with a lax invocation of the law. Enforcing the law is a good thing. The problem in this case is that Blizzard are attempting to apply criminal law to what many would describe as a civil offense. That I can appreciate the irony inherent in the situation does not mean I condone it.
The problem is one of durisdiction. The reality is that Blizzard invest a lot of money and effort into implementing an online game system. The cheat program, obviously, detracts both from the experience of the many legitimate users of that system and, by extension, reduces the number of legitimate users and the amount of money Blizzard will make from that system.
The wording of the Blizzard suit seems to be pretty clear that the problem is not what the program does, but that by distributing the program the creators have taken a deliberate and informed decision to negativily affect a commercial service. This seems like a reasonable argument to me.
18/10/2010 at 14:46 Max says:
@DrZ:
Unfortunately, this not a unique Blizzard, or even a new practice. ALL EULAs today essentially say you have no right to any of the code, but only a right to a license to UTILIZE that code.
18/10/2010 at 14:49 John Peat says:
Just to re-emphasise what’s been said many times, EULAs aren’t worth shit in the EU and in many other countries – they’re just words with no basis in law whatsoever…
18/10/2010 at 14:50 B-Boy says:
Hah! That’ll teach this damned cheaters! Give them hell boyz!
Although. I hope the average sheep is till independent enough to boycott Blizzard from here on and not buy anymore shit of them, unsubscribe to WoW and what not….
Make them do irreparable damages to themselfs by acting like shit, make them lose mass revenue, it’s time Blizzard, to die!
They’ve tried to fuck with us for long enough and if we don’t stop it now.. soon it’ll be too late!!!
Remember the real ID name change and all that BS! It will only go worse! Soon we will all be human zombies mind-controlled by blizzard… They’ve strayed to FAR from there origins and into big money commercialism, it’s time for them to go DOWN!
I mentioned in the beginning that this is what I HOPE to happen, HOPE, but really, I know better cause everyone is a stupid dumbass sheep.. except me..xD
18/10/2010 at 14:54 Starky says:
I hope for your sake that that is sarcasm, said in mocking of all the people who do indeed believe that crap.
:)
18/10/2010 at 14:57 Max says:
@John Peat (I really should bite the bullet and register!)
I live in the US, Blizzard is a US company, Blizzard has precedents for winning court cases in the US based on similar arguments (which I believe, as mentioned earlier, are in appeal, but don’t hold me to that)
18/10/2010 at 15:03 Leelad says:
Indeed, they raped “Glider” a clever botting program for WoW.
They stand a good chance if all this is covered in the EULA. Which it will be. Would have been safer for folk to just use standard cheat codes it seems.
18/10/2010 at 15:46 DrZ says:
@ Max:
The question would rather be if the people who developed the hacks are US citizens. I’ve never heard of any extraditions based on civil law offenses, and even then extradition at least in most western countries presupposes that the extradited commited an offense punishable according to the native laws of the extraditing country.
18/10/2010 at 22:09 ScubaMonster says:
It would be humorous if people in countries where the law can’t be enforced start redistributing the hacks. Actually, I think that exact thing will happen.
18/10/2010 at 15:05 Zuni says:
I think many posters here are missing a few points:
1) We are not talking about single players cheats here. Yes single player hackers (one who downloaded / bought hacks) got banned with online hackers, most propably because the line between online and offline/single player is pretty nonexistant here. I don’t agree with that ban in principle, but I am certain that the amount of users who went through the effort to download or buy separate hacks (insted of using the allowed built-in ones) to ONLY play alone in single player is extremely low.
2) There are people making money by using Blizzards IP and creating these hacks. There are subscription systems and monthly payments to get the latest versions of the hacks, and it’s pretty much more organized and widespread than many might realize. The money involved is more than a dollar here and dollar there. To me, this makes for a pretty clear legal case
3) Blizzard is strongly pushing for SC2 to become a real e-sport, and has already succeeded in that to a large degree. There is a huge amount of tournaments, professional commentators, live streams and pay per season -channels. There are advertisers, subscribers and there are the players with hundreds of thousands of dollars at stake in the tournaments. There is a very strong incentive for blizzard to use all measures to keep online hacking at bay, and for once they are trying to go for the source. I totally support this. We all do know how easily a game can be ruined by excessive hackers.
That said, I think we can all agree that no amount hunting will get rid of hackers completely, especially not for the massive beast that is SC2. Keeping it down and rare, however, is possible and a noble goal to pursue.
18/10/2010 at 15:07 Starky says:
Very well said.
18/10/2010 at 15:59 DrZ says:
@Zuni:
Just because something is morally offensive and conducted in an organized fashion doesn’t make it unlawful. As to the legality of the whole thing, it isn’t so clear a case, at all, as long as the people distributing those hacks didn’t distribute Starcraft content in conjunction with the hacks. A strong indicator that this wasn’t so in the case at hand is Blizzard’s pulling stunts to construct a legal case with reference to “copyrighted portions of memory”. Another commenter has raised a law suit lost by Nintendo in similar circumstances [If I remember correctly they sued the manufacturers of a device which enables a user to make back-up copies of his cartridges]. There’s simply no derivative work when something isn’t derivative when distributed but only when used. It’s like sueing the manufacturers of paint because they enable a user to make a copy of a work of art.
18/10/2010 at 15:05 Norppa says:
… This is just stupid …
18/10/2010 at 15:06 Nevard says:
Those are built in features. Blizzard have their own cheats that they allow people to use.
They are banning people for hacking the game to beat other people online. That’s not really the same as using the built in vita-chambers in bioshock ;)
18/10/2010 at 15:18 Tei says:
Legal EXPLOITS:
Copyring to RAM is not Ok EXPLOIT.
Copying to RAM a copyrighted program is creating a copy, so is not OK., if you don’t have a licensse. But Blizzard seems talking about copying part of of a program. So Blizzard must prove that owns that part of program, and is not something created by scratch by the cheat’s authors.
Fonts are programs EXPLOIT.
The law is very retarded about what is a program, and what is not. Font’s are considereed programs. Probably the law consider programs things than for us are just data or binary noise, or the compiler initialization code, etc..
Copyright law just don’t make sense for the most part.
18/10/2010 at 16:17 JKjoker says:
soooo, since to RUN a program the computer needs to copy it to ram (and then to the cache in several levels down to the registers) just clicking the exe makes you guilty of several instances of copyright infringement ?, i wonder if we are legally allowed to browse the directory, those file names need to be protected!
18/10/2010 at 16:26 VelvetFistIronGlove says:
The categorisation of fonts as programs comes about because the hinting instructions in True Type fonts are literally compiled programs: bytecode instructions for a virtual machine to adjust the outline of a character to the pixel grid. In the US, the font outlines themselves are not protected by copyright, which is why you can trace the outlines and produce your own near-identical font without infringement, but copying the font file itself (with the hinting) is infringing.
18/10/2010 at 15:32 Ryan says:
I think they may be doing this to let it be known they’ll go after any and all hacks on battlenet. Which kills any chance of me trying to download a decent maphack once DIII comes out.
18/10/2010 at 16:03 utharda says:
Sorry, this is creepy as all get out. Especially the idea that blizztivision is logging all. Admittedly I have an odd perpective since I met my soon to be wife playing wow. (yeah I know, and she’s actually a she, its a miracle) The idea of blizztivision reading some of those chats is deeply disturbing.
Even if the aren’t logging everything, the fact that their going after single player players indicates a frightening amount of hubris.
18/10/2010 at 16:22 Joe says:
Anything like this? http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2006/1/23/
18/10/2010 at 16:06 Heynes says:
I believe Blizzard did try to preempt this by putting something that addresses this in the SC2 EULA, but how well that holds up in court will remain to be seen. Personally, I’m have little sympathy for the SC2 cheating community, having been the victim of both drop-hacks and map-hacks in my multi-player games previously. I do feel at least this attempt at targeting the problem at the “supplier/dealer” level will be somemore more effective than periodic mass bannings (which probably cause a number of false positives), though I wonder how the case will pan out do the location of some of the defendants(with one of the accused being in Canada and another in Peru).
It’s true that there’s always the chance that Blizzard, if successful in it’s case, might use the precedent to go after less justifiable targets, but I trust Starcraft 2 community to be able to call them on their bullshit, as they have during the various controversies in the pre-release period.
18/10/2010 at 16:08 Bascule42 says:
It’s all gone wrong since the Tories were voted in…
18/10/2010 at 18:42 Stu says:
#nickcleggsfault
18/10/2010 at 16:14 VelvetFistIronGlove says:
In the Glider bot case, the court ruled that the player had violated the EULA by using the bot, and so no longer had a licence to use the game and was committing copyright infringement by running the game (copying it into RAM), and thus the maker of the bot had committed both contributory copyright infringement (i.e. encouraging the player to commit copyright infringement) and vicarious copyright infringement (i.e. not taking steps to prevent the player committing an act of copyright infringement that they should have been aware of).
This is a convoluted argument, but means damages can relate to the number of instances of players committing infringement by using the bot (or in this case, the cheats), rather than just the relating to the single EULA violation by the bot/cheat-maker themself.
18/10/2010 at 16:22 Nethlem says:
I don’t understand the outrage about this…
If Valve would sue people that create multihacks/aimbots for source engine games like Counter Strike or TF2 people would kiss their feet as it’s something that has been demanded by players for nearly decades.
If blizzard does it it’s suddenly evil and greedy just because people can’t get their facts straight. They don’t sue the users, they don’t sue the hackers who made singleplayer cheats. They are sueing the hackers that made maphacks and drophacks, hacks that impact multiplayer gaming and give people an unfair advantage. Not only that, they even SOLD those hacks, they are basicly making money from giving people an unfair advantage in an multiplayer game.
And people get angry about blizzard taking them out? What is this? Did i end up in some kind of strange alternate reality where multiplayer cheating/hacking is suddenly something great that should happen and deserves to be protected?
18/10/2010 at 16:52 Dominic White says:
“If Valve would sue people that create multihacks/aimbots for source engine games like Counter Strike or TF2 people would kiss their feet as it’s something that has been demanded by players for nearly decades”
No, I’m fairly sure I’d immediately start hating Valve as a company if they started going around dropping life-ruining megacorp lawsuits on people who made cheats. I thnk cheating in online sucks, and am fully in favour of permanently banning those who do it, but financial ruin for the creators of cheats? That’s approximately five steps too far.
18/10/2010 at 16:26 Anonymous says:
“Blizzard are claiming that copying elements of the game into your computer’s RAM is copyright violation”
Unbealievable, really im shocked how can this be a proper case? Modifying RAM of my computer is my own right, no matter of the code inside. You can copyright the code on digital media (like CD/DVD), but how the hell you can define from where-to-where my RAM is actually owned by Blizzard. And one more thing… oo yeah FUCK YOU BLIZZARD, you may create amazing games,but fuck your user policy. Im not slave or a mindless zombie to just give you money and threat me like a stealer, prefer to not play the game, rather to expand you fortune. And FYI i never cheated in a game, but fucking the shit out of legal users is just, so patchetic.
18/10/2010 at 16:33 rebb says:
First Real-ID, now this…
Come on Blizzard, stop sniffing the Dollar Bills so much.
18/10/2010 at 16:34 Taillefer says:
I hope you have permission for that screenshot, sir.
18/10/2010 at 16:42 Jeremy says:
Yeah, I have to say that I really am in support of this move by Blizzard. If you look through the legal/corporate-speak, all they’re really saying is… “We will not allow an outside company to make money by exploiting the code to allow users to cheat in multiplayer.” Obviously, that makes a ton of sense right? This isn’t a case of Blizzard going mad with power, people are cheating online, and ruining the experience of the legitimate users that some on here claim Blizzard is alienating by improving their experience.
Ignore all the RAM stuff, because they’re not trying to dictate how you “use” your RAM, as if you had control of how SC2 used it in the first place. It’s just fancy words that are attempting to back the creators of the hacks into an impossible hole, so that there is no way of escaping the legal action.
18/10/2010 at 16:53 Vodkarn says:
Why Helloooooo activision.
18/10/2010 at 16:59 Alaric says:
Wow, that is quite an idiotic move. I am still impressed with Blizzard’s games, but this situation is adding to my vast dissatisfaction with Blizzard’s tactics as a company.
18/10/2010 at 17:00 mondomau says:
Jesus fishfucking christ, when did the RPS comment section turn into a Kotaku-esque kneejerk ragefest?
RTFA. Properly. Then have a look at the source info.
Now the facts:
1. Cheating in Single-Player is not a bannable offense. Blizzard include home-grown codes for this very purpose.
2. Blizzard did not ban anyone for cheating, they banned them for using a hack.
3. The hack in question allowed people to bypass the disabled achievement element of cheating, thus had an effect on multi-player, even if you didn’t use it in online matches.
4. The SC2 online community are quite touchy about their achievements / rankings / epeens.
5. Blizzard like to look after these people, not least of all because they are a long term revenue source.
6. Blizzard are now suing the hack programmers to scare people off making these programs and bringing the game into disrepute and possibly upsetting their
cash cowcustomers, not because they want a slice of the (tiny) profits involved.The schtick about copying SC2 files to RAM being a copyright infringement is spurious bullshit, of course it is. But it’s also a proven method of shutting down people that are ruining a game community’s online experience. I don’t necessarily agree with their methods, and blizzard generally don’t impress me as a company but this is sound business rather than evil money grabbing.
18/10/2010 at 17:01 mondomau says:
doh, forgot the /
:p
18/10/2010 at 17:21 DrZ says:
I can’t speak for all commenters, but I’m mainly raging against point 6, as it is the key point of the article, as shown by the headline. EULAs are an entirely different matter, though no uncontroversial one, but at this point I think the foremost point of the whole affair is that Blizzard (as others have tried before) appear to intend policing what may or may not happen to their code/data once it’s in your computer’s memory, and given this it seems perfectly natural to me that some degree of public outrage occur. Indeed I’d be scared if it did not.
Do not misunderstand me on the word ‘policing’: Obviously they are not taking legal action against players using the hacks (as banning is no legal action), but by trying to portray it as unlawful to create programs manipulating their code on player’s computers, what they do, in effect, is the same thing — they are trying to extend the notion of copyright, claiming to own not just the abstract code/data they wrote, but also its individual manifestations in your computer’s memory. This is nothing which should be taken lightly, because it’s a fundamental legal game-changer.
18/10/2010 at 22:37 Anonymous says:
The problem in a nutshell is: you buy the game you legally are allowed to play, but thats about it, you actually dont own the game acording to most of the EULA’s of the games. You’re merely using the software for the time being. So one big WTF, when i pay for a TV i own it. When i pay for a game i want to own it in its full rights. For example i can dismount/dissassemble the TV sell it, brake it etc. With the PC games the most you can do is just play. Legal backups out of the question. No FUN. Plus Blizzard was always about the money (no you can’t proove wrong here), so baning accounts is in their interest i’m sure i didn’t cheat, but what if the fucking Warden flag me (cause its scanning the whole system memory and probably a conflict with another app could trigger it)? Then what? Do i have any rights here, no just quiet acception.
18/10/2010 at 17:04 skalpadda says:
“I’m a bit frightened that id will be suing me because I used to type IDSPISPOPD into Doom. (From memory, that.)”
John, I love you and all, but as others have pointed out here you’re perfectly free to use the built-in cheats in Starcraft 2. This is very different, although it seems that’s not clear to either you or a lot of the people posting here.
18/10/2010 at 17:37 Unaco says:
Fairly sure this isn’t a new tactic. I’m quite sure I’ve seen legal arguments previously being made that, by loading into RAM (and then making changes), it validates TOS etc, but it was the loading into RAM part that they pushed specifically as the ‘illegal’ act. Possibly the Copyright breach thing is new… but I (vaguely) think I may have seen a very similar argument before, but for commercial software, and not necessarily a game.
18/10/2010 at 17:54 pipman3000 says:
after the people who made those trainers are driven into debt, poverty, and finally homelessness we can finally rest easy knowing starcraft 2 is safe once again!
18/10/2010 at 17:55 pipman3000 says:
after they sue them they should kill them too just to make sure
18/10/2010 at 18:07 Jeremy says:
Maybe they can be driven to start making legitimate software.
18/10/2010 at 22:23 pipman3000 says:
its a bit too late for that.
you’re obviously some kind of expert on this subject, what do you think they should do?
19/10/2010 at 05:20 Jeremy says:
Make legitimate software.
18/10/2010 at 18:07 oatish says:
seriously fuck cheaters –
but, I absolutely agree with Dominic above saying that this will be massively destructive to the individuals brought to court. I mean, they will face complete financial ruin in the face of a large, professional team of lawyers. Because someone is attempting to create / maintain an “e-sport”, I do not believe they have the ethical grounds to push these cats into oblivion.
This situation is being, sadly, exploited by Blizz as they not only have the precedent but the will to enforce their corporate aims at the expense of a few shady coders. Yeah I’m sure the hackers have broken the EULA a 100 times and I think it is wrong for them to attempt to profit from distribution of hacks but this seems a tad like excessive force.
Also, the dudes in Canada (as a Canadian myself) are likely to be fully subject to American law. Take a look at our current governments change in alignment to a more “American” styled copyright system but also the recent extradition of a Canadian citizen to the US prison system for crimes not committed in the US. In fact, those “crimes” are not even illegal here in Canada were the acts occurred… I’m talking bout Marc Emery if you ain’t from BC…
18/10/2010 at 18:12 Nick says:
Seems to me a lot of people think they are suing the cheaters rather than the people making and (more importantly) SELLING the cheats.
I would love all the groups that profit off ruining other peoples games to get sued to oblivion. Fuck them.
18/10/2010 at 18:20 Mako says:
Oh well. If Blizzard wants to screw with how people play their games single player, they’re only hurting their own sales.
I miss the old days when you could mod, hack, and screw around with a game to your hearts content and no one had to get sued or banned. You don’t buy games anymore. You buy “limited licenses” to -play- those games. Do something the license doesn’t allow and no more game for you!
And with this kind of attitude towards their customers, they wonder why piracy is up.
18/10/2010 at 18:40 pkt-zer0 says:
“Oh well. If Blizzard wants to screw with how people play their games single player, they’re only hurting their own sales.”
In case you’ve missed it, maphacks and drophacks have nothing to do with single player.
18/10/2010 at 20:32 Jeremy says:
I don’t even know how someone can write that after reading the article… assuming of course you read the article?
18/10/2010 at 21:38 Mako says:
Yes, I read the article. Did you?
” Blizzard have taken the extremely peculiar decision to ban players from playing StarCraft II for using cheats in the single-player game. This meant that, despite cheating no one but themselves, they were locked out of playing the single-player game. Which is clearly bonkers.”
I realize that a large portion of the players banned were cheating in multiplayer. I don’t care about that. You cheat online, you should expect to be banned from official online play. But it’s not just online play that these kids are getting banned from, now is it?
19/10/2010 at 05:24 Jeremy says:
I did, but this article was about Blizzard suing the creators of the hacks, not banning people using the cheats for single player… which, let’s be honest, isn’t really what’s going on. Nobody downloads external hacks to dominate a single player campaign. People only say that when they get caught cheating.
19/10/2010 at 06:39 Mako says:
The original RPS article, the one before this one, was about people getting banned from single player for hacks. But, anyhow.
The thing I take issue with is that there’s no distinction as far as Blizzard is concerned. A trainer’s a trainer, and an account is an account. Someone hacks? Ban them. This used to be fine, but as far as I’m aware, a valid Battle.net account is required to play the single player campaign, isn’t it? Though, if one was careful I’m sure trainers and hacks could be used single player in offline mode or whatnot.
As for going after the folks who make the hacks and trainers, I think that’s a bit much. I use trainers for lots of games. Cheat codes don’t always cover everything. Sometimes there’s an annoying time limit to be halted, or something like movement speed or jump height. There shouldn’t be any precedent for making these sorts of programs illegal, or something that could bring a lawsuit down on the hack programmers.
I just think it’s overkill. Fix your anti-cheat programs to recognize these things, ban or suspend the offending accounts from online play, but leave the singleplayer game and all the trainer/hack programs be.
19/10/2010 at 06:58 Mako says:
I just did a bit of checking up on my favorite trainer site, and it appears many people are in fact being banned for using trainers in single player game modes. You can read the article along with letters from Blizzard to the offending account owners.
http://www.cheathappens.com/article_blizzardbans.asp
18/10/2010 at 18:36 HeavyStorm says:
I think that’s probably how Nazism began.
Meaning, where is the o-so-called liberty that we had to create mods, TCs, etc.?
18/10/2010 at 18:45 pkt-zer0 says:
Godwin’s law, excellent!
But anyway, mods and TCs are still fine, always were. The “liberty” you claim to be missing here is using hacks to screw people over in online multiplayer. There’s another word for that sort of liberty: “anarchy”.
18/10/2010 at 18:55 DrZ says:
I wouldn’t say modding would be still fine if Blizzard were serious about their ‘integrity of program code in memory’ approach and had their way (which they probably won’t). At least, it would then be illegal to make a mod which relies on any form of patching or manipulating original content and redistribute it. And with some feat of imagination you could then extend the notion of intellectual property to the mechanisms by which content is loaded within the game. It would then not only be illegal to release a program which changes existing code and data, but also to release a program which replaces original code or data. And I don’t think this is a feat of imagination inconceivable in the mind of a copyright attorney. Of course in most cases a company would see no need to persecute creators of mods, but there would be no difference in principle. And I don’t think the case that some attorney is invoked to persecute makers of mods for some old game, driven by the belief that mods for an old game cannibalize on sales of the new game, is that far fetched really.
But after all, I still think it highly doubtful that this will hold up even in the US. For the EU I’m highly certain there is no case.
18/10/2010 at 18:59 DrZ says:
To add something: Indeed it seems highly natural from a legal standpoint to think of mods in terms of ‘derivative works’, once we admit the concept of ‘derivative work’ as Blizzard would have it.
18/10/2010 at 18:51 Stoned says:
Congrats Blizz, another costumer down the drain >_<
18/10/2010 at 20:32 Jeremy says:
But.. the costumes.. think of the children.
18/10/2010 at 19:30 Silence of the Clams says:
I’ve been watching this thread sorta unravel throughout the day in my breaks between actual work (talking textual politics at the uni where I work, mostly). Like a lot of these intellectual property violation cases, I think the real point at issue is a matter of control: Blizzard, in effect, want to control the ‘game experience’ that SC2 offers. This can be both positive and negative, in that on the one hand they want to avoid people developing the game into something that they feel their core user base wouldn’t want, but on the other they are attempting to quash a certain kind of development of their game which could potentially include many positive features.
My own interpretation of this would be that Blizzard (or whoever is ultimately responsible for this move) want to make it very clear that there are only certain ways their games should be played; it does very much feel like they are penning their users in so that they won’t stray too far from Blizzard’s, er, monetising structures. I’d compare it with, for example, Ministry of Sound’s recent declaration that they will now pursue legal action vs. people who download the music they publish. You could even characterise it as another skirmish in the ongoing battle between porprietary and popular distribution of media. Or not.
I’ll go back to lurking now methinks.
18/10/2010 at 19:36 skalpadda says:
Silence of the Clams:
Out of curiosity, what positive features? I’m not saying there aren’t any, but if you want to mess around with the game outside the scope of how it already works I can’t think of anything a third party program would do that you couldn’t do perfectly legitimately with the included editor.
18/10/2010 at 20:26 Silence of the Clams says:
I was thinking along the lines of, for example, people modifying Blizzard’s code to allow the game to be played outside of BattleNet, or building their own modding tools; but I don’t think they’re the best examples since the best examples would be, er, so creative I wouldn’t have thought of them.
18/10/2010 at 19:53 Tei says:
http://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/5544/starcraft-does-the-ai-cheat
“The SC1 AI knows where everything is. It will still need line of sight for things like siege tanks to fire, but it knows what’s there. If you’d like to confirm this yourself, play a 1v1 on an 8 player map and watch the replay after. The AI beelines all attacks for you without ever having scouted the other spawn points.”
The AI in Starcraft cheat. Use a maphack to see all the map.
18/10/2010 at 20:08 pkt-zer0 says:
The AI in Starcraft 2 no longer cheats, actually.
Also, “ha ha”, I guess.
18/10/2010 at 20:53 Steve says:
No, Dell do that already. THIS is like Dell suing the guy who sold you that screwdriver you used. Or Ford suing the people who sold you the petrol.
Since this they’re suing Cheat Happens who don’t make ANY multiplayer cheats, I’m not buying any singleplayer Battlenet games again. I only bought SC2 when I saw there was a trainer for it. 3 lost sales already. Which doesn’t mean I’m not going to play them. I use my money to reward developers. I’ve got two copies of Pathalogic and I’ve bought four each of Psychonauts and Uplink (once on disc, once on steam, and two Steam gifts.)
18/10/2010 at 21:03 pkt-zer0 says:
CraniX’s Starcraft 2 Beta MapHack v10
Looks pretty multiplayer to me.
18/10/2010 at 21:26 pkt-zer0 says:
And another:
Detected Hacks:
CraniX’s PUBLIC map hack
Perma’s Private Havok map hack
18/10/2010 at 21:22 idos says:
yea um simple thing here DONT HACK NOOBS LEARN TO SWIM
go blizz sue everyone that has to do with hacking an your games wish more games would do the same then maybe the asses makeing the hacks will die out finnaly
… ppl seriously just need to learn how to play
18/10/2010 at 21:33 sana says:
Not a single fuck was given by this reader, the only thing generated was annoyance at petty games journalism writing such sensationalist bullshit.
There are in-built single-player cheat codes for StarCraft 2. They allow you to cheat, but disable Achievement progression for obvious reasons. Those that were banned for “single-player cheating” were banned for deliberately using third-party software instead of the in-built SP cheats. Anti-cheat software does not discriminate between “good hackers” and “evil hackers”, so they got banned for using the software. They were well aware of the implications of using hacks in an Anti-Cheat enabled game and did it anyway.
They got what they deserved. Hacks get detected by anti-hack software, affected accounts get banned. For those who complain about being locked out from offline play: It was made clear from the VERY START that StarCraft 2 is heavily Battle.net-dependant. Those hackers that got banned have ample possibilities to acquire the single-player game without buying a new copy anyway (considering they already managed to track down cheat software), so they have even LESS to whine about.
18/10/2010 at 21:35 Caddrel says:
I’m really happy that part of the money I spent on Starcraft II is paying for this legal action.
Or not.
This move makes me consider whether I will continue buying Blizzard products. I don’t think the legal system should be used in this way. However, if other people want to continue funding Blizzard’s legal campaigns, they are welcome to do so.
18/10/2010 at 21:49 _Jackalope_ says:
I did think it was a bit silly, especially remembering the fun cheat codes in the Warcraft games. But Starcraft 2 has cheats for people who may need them and they deactivate the online achievements. If these hacks do affect online play then it’s fair enough to block them. i think suing is taking it a step too far though.
18/10/2010 at 21:55 jalf says:
How is it cheating? Who’s being cheated? Is it also cheating if I place all the pieces on a chess board and then move them randomly? It certainly doesn’t follow the rules of the game, but if I’m not playing against someone who’s being cheated, does it matter? Is it even cheating then?
If I “cheat” in a singleplayer game, where’s the loser? Is it cheating if no one is cheated?
18/10/2010 at 21:58 Klaus says:
Is it cheating if no one is cheated?
You’re cheating yourself!
18/10/2010 at 22:04 Cirno says:
Blizzard’s attention whore. No, srsly, fuck you blizzard. They should be busy working on D3, not wasting time on such damn horseshit.
18/10/2010 at 22:12 pkt-zer0 says:
Heh, lawyers developing Diablo 3. Now there’s a reason for fan outrage.
18/10/2010 at 22:25 geldonyetich says:
If they have this much money to hunt down people doing wrongful conduct in this game, I have to wonder why they haven’t hunted down and murdered the people who keep sending me phishing mails to recover my WoW account information.
18/10/2010 at 22:34 JimmyJames says:
I’d feel robbed if I was banned for using a cheat in single player but I completely understand the line of thought that cheating causes immediate irreparable damage to a competitive game. Most recently APB (I concede that this was only one of it’s many faults) did nothing about cheats in a visible way and the view of most people I talked to and many forum-goers was that cheating was the reason they stopped playing it.
I don’t know about the whole RAM argument–it sounds pretty weak, but I could see even going through the act of putting up a fuss about cheating could offset damage done by a negative perception of the cheating situation.
18/10/2010 at 22:59 rly? says:
I really hope these other companys start hopping on the wagon. I am tired of running into 2 or three hackers when I log into Counter-Strike: Source or even Left 4 Dead 2 and you have to admit that yes VAC does do its job in banning people that are caught using public cheats but what about these people that go to Organners website by a subscription to their private cheats and don’t get caught?
18/10/2010 at 23:01 Barman1942 says:
StarCraft 2 sucks!
And now Blizzard will sue me for the lack of potential profits from the people who would have bought the game had they not seen my post. Uh-oooh.
18/10/2010 at 23:10 teo says:
They’re not suing people who cheat for achievements, they’re suing coders who write maphacks / drophacks and often actually sell these to people.
18/10/2010 at 23:13 teo says:
Also, guess what, most people in the SCII community approves of this. Cheating ruins the game
18/10/2010 at 23:36 Carra says:
From the statement it seems that there were some multiplayer hacks (“Defendants irreparably harm the ability of Blizzard’s legitimate customers (i.e. those who purchase and use unmodified games) to enjoy and participate in the competitive online experience.”).
And I’m glad to see them go after those hackers. No fun to play online against cheaters.
20/10/2010 at 12:45 Tei says:
I hate people that make cheats for multiplayer. And I hate the people that use cheats in multiplayer.
But you can’t put in jail a dude that sell knifes because maybe some people will use these knifes to kill. Thats wrong.
19/10/2010 at 02:09 Jordan says:
The single player bullshit is just legal ass covering… or an attempt at it.
The cheats being sold are available to use outside of single player. They will affect the multiplayer game if activated during it. The company selling it though, figured it’d be safe if they put up a disclaimer : Only use it in offline mode. These cheats are intended only for single player use.
This doesn’t work though because they’re simply being two faced. The people banned weren’t using these cheats in offline mode. They broke the agreement they made with blizzard when they bought the game. It sucks that games are becoming more of a software as a service market, but it’s these people that drove it to this point. Blizzard is only protecting their property and can’t play the same game they used to in the past.
Would you call someone living in the ghetto rude for putting bars on the window and three deadbolts on their door? No! It’s necessary for the environment they’re living in. You blame the gangstas on the street for it. Why are we blaming blizzard for doing essentially the same thing?
19/10/2010 at 17:12 THEREALSTOREY says:
Couldn’t have said it better. But I will add that Hacking is a Leach on the Gaming Community that hopefully will Respond Strongly to this Shot of Salt in the Eye. The Fact that they are Making Profits, Makes them an Economically Easier Target
19/10/2010 at 02:49 MOOncalF says:
*burns down house* There, let’s see that mouse survive this!
19/10/2010 at 03:44 Wulf says:
I… wow. Okay, am I the only one who wonders why Blizzard aren’t suing themselves, yet? I’ll make my case for you, here:
Blizzard Entertainment (henceforth known as the Douc–I mean, the Defendent) is causing harm to the customers of Blizzard Entertainment. By pursuing actions which are widely and wildly unpopular, Blizzard Entertainment is damaging Blizzard Entertainment’s reputation. By suing the creators of hacks for single-player games made by Blizzard Entertainment, Blizzard Entertainment is lowering the public esteem and opinion of Blizzard Entertainment, therefore, Blizzard Entertainment is damaging the potential of Blizzard Entertainment to sell future games and add-on packs. The damage caused to Blizzard Entertainment by Blizzard Entertainment by these unpopular activities is obvious. Therefore, Blizzard Entertainment is making a claim for damages to the amount of a bazillion damages, to be paid promptly by Blizzard Entertainment. Blizzard Entertainment must also make a public apology to Blizzard Entertainment for endeavouring to sabotage Blizzard Entertainment’s relationship with its fans.
19/10/2010 at 03:46 Wulf says:
Er, to the amount of a bazillion dollars, rather.
But yes, the point stands, they’ll do more harm doing this than the hacks would do to their reputation.
19/10/2010 at 06:29 pkt-zer0 says:
“By suing the creators of hacks for single-player games”
They’re suing the creators of multi-player hacks. People seem to ignore that. But hey, go with whatever sounds more dramatic!
19/10/2010 at 17:17 THEREALSTOREY says:
Grow-up, its not your product and you are destroying my experience period. Maybe once the rampant hacking is under control they can allow user-modified content. I can’t beleive you’re actually mad at the developed instead of the hackers, lol.
Grow some balls, pull that roll of quarters out of your drawers and talk to women instead of pretending your something you are not.
19/10/2010 at 07:07 ChrisMathers says:
Fuck you, Blizzard. I can’t even turn on god mode in singleplayer without getting sued? If I give you money, I own your game. I can legally wipe my ass with it and set it on fire. I hope you get successfully countersued and lose a shitload of money.
This is probably the biggest reason I’m a console gamer. If I ever met the programmer who invented DRM, I’d grab him, hold him down, and shove a dry-rotted wooden broom handle up his ass until he suffered a seizure.
19/10/2010 at 08:22 mondomau says:
Oh for christ sake.
READ. THE. ARTICLE.
Not god mode. Hacks. HACKS. Third party software bought and installed to bypass the disabled achievements when cheating. You can still cheat away to your heart’s content, you just won’t advance your online profile in any way. seems fairly reasonable to me.
19/10/2010 at 09:00 Mac says:
@mondomau
Unfortunately it’s hard to blame the readers when the actual article makes incredibly stupid comments like this.
“I’m a bit frightened that id will be suing me because I used to type IDSPISPOPD into Doom. (From memory, that.)”
I don’t know why RPS has started rewording articles to cause ridiculous vitriol to the extent that the articles themselves are false.
19/10/2010 at 09:40 pkt-zer0 says:
“Third party software bought and installed to bypass the disabled achievements when cheating.”
Actually, that’s not what they’re suing for, but maphacks and drophacks. As in, giving players full vision of the map in online multiplayer, and letting them make a server think a player has dropped from a game, giving the remaining people an automatic win.
MAPHACKS.
ONLINE.
CAPS LOCK!
19/10/2010 at 11:11 mondomau says:
@Mac: Granted, Walker did go a bit Gawker-network sensationalist with that last throwaway remark (and should be ashamed if himself) but really, how hard is it for people to click one link and read the gamespot article he sources – it makes it quite clear what’s going on.
But again, for shame RPS, for shame.
19/10/2010 at 08:23 Psychopomp says:
Oh, how dare Blizzard try to put a stop to people ruining my leisure time.
The rage I’m feeling is immense, let me tell you.
19/10/2010 at 09:49 Ben says:
IDDQD
IDKFA
(why do I still remember this shit after so long?)
19/10/2010 at 10:33 MadeOfWaaagggghhh says:
All the people thinking this is simply an anti-cheater subject(and I am all for burning online mad haxx0rs alive and publically) forget that what is really happening is a game having so much control and supervision over EVERYTHING YOU DO that you cannot even combine what you paid for and bought with whatever usermade content you fancy anymore and become a criminal just for wanting to play nilly-willy-what-ifs cheat-sessions locally for your own entertainment.
In short: IP holders want to control everything you do and are allowed to do from A-Z, and it is getting worse.
Solution: Buy only DRM free.
19/10/2010 at 13:10 sana says:
That’s great luv, now go and make me a cuppa tea wouldcha?
19/10/2010 at 11:58 soylentrobot says:
so, um…by this logic, they could sue reviewers for giving their game a bad review, as the readers would “have an experience that harms their appreciation of the game, and in turn they may speak negatively of the game to others”?
19/10/2010 at 16:58 THEREALSTOREY says:
That would fall under libel and you can’t sue for libel of a product. But Apple can stop you from modifying their product and go after people who profit from facilitating this.
20/10/2010 at 00:14 Jordan says:
That’s only if you are considering that a reader doesn’t make up his own mind and won’t enjoy the game if it’s given a bad review.
I will choose free will.
19/10/2010 at 16:56 THEREALSTOREY says:
They have a very valid point and, I beleive, case. Cheating destroys the average users on-line experience. Not only are they violating the end user license agreement they are costing the average user an enjoyable experience. This will translate into less sells (current and possibly future editions). This erosion of sales due to these “Hackers” ultimately costs Blizzard sales (current and future). I beleive then that Blizzard is well within their rights to sue these web-sites, especially since they are eroding legitimate profits from the company for personal gain. I personally have avoided certain games because of the rampant cheating and hacking with-in them.
19/10/2010 at 20:16 The Scarlet Mathematician says:
Furthermore, Blizzard has no problem with players making mods using the Galaxy editor. It’s the maphacks and such that are disruptive in multiplayer, and that’s what Blizzard is going after.
19/10/2010 at 20:27 FluffyM says:
Good for you Blizzard, companies should have started doing this sort of thing YEARS ago.
19/10/2010 at 23:51 Araxiel says:
Crapcrapcrapcrap…
I hope Garry is not sueing my for modding Garry’s Mod!
21/10/2010 at 08:33 Pyrogator says:
The only ones who really win in lawsuits are the lawyers.
21/10/2010 at 08:37 MrEvilGuy says:
and the winners
21/10/2010 at 19:39 Gvaz says:
I love achievements but I hate grinding for achievements. Just give me the achievements and let me feel like the big guy, okay?
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