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Impacts of weaponizing copyright legislation against cheat devs


jubjub

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Something that's become incredibly common for game publishers dealing with cheating problems is to invest money in civil courts targeting cheat developers that are selling their cheats. The way the story normally goes is the cheat developers are taking payments using Paypal or hosting their website behind Cloudflare. What happens is the publisher will go to a court with evidence of a cheat website and claim the software involved is infringing on their copyright. They then request a subpoena for the Paypal account listed on the website or the Cloudflare account associated with the domain in order to get the account owners details. These details lead to more subpoenas on different services and serving the person or persons involved with an often hefty ($500k+) lawsuit alleging copyright infringement. How these cases end varies but generally they either settle for a lower amount or in some cases they win the large life restricting amounts for often low income defendants. The goal with these lawsuits isn't actually to win however, the idea involved is that the civil legal process especially for copyright is so expensive that defendants simply can't afford to defend themselves and will instead take a punitive settlement in the $50k-$150k range.

Now that you've got some context for what's happening I want to talk about the impact these lawsuits are having on the cheat industry. Due to the lack of ability for defendants to afford the legal process involved this has lead to a don't get caught mentality. Previously these people were happy to use their own names and leave this activity in the open because they often didn't believe they were doing anything wrong. However now what's happening is hosting and ddos protection is being bought under fake names and payment is being done in cryptocurrencies or distributed payment structures. This move to secrecy has lead to money laundering and fraud becoming not just common place but often a requirement to operate. What used to be a somewhat open and diverse environment has quickly turned into organised crime and monopolies. Before this all happened lots of people were willing to sell the work they did for fun to people, now that process requires extensive work to safely operate drastically thinning the supply. In theory this sounds like a better situation to be in, less people are selling cheats and it's now much harder to safely sell cheats. However the demand for cheats has been completely unaffected by this and what it instead creates is a more lucrative market for those who put in the effort required. In recent times the profits for successful cheat developers in a single game are in the $100k to $6m a year range in games where publishers make use of copyright law to attack cheat developers, potentially a lot higher for some markets. This amount of money is enough to attract casual interest and interaction with established organised crime and seemingly further pushes things into their arms.

The thing I find profound about this situation is how similar it seems to the war on drugs. The current litigious "war" on cheats seems to have the exact same effect as the war on drugs has to drugs and similar strategies have awfully similar results. What thoughts do people have on potential solutions or other problems around this issue? I'm happy to discuss more specifics about the legal arguments used but it's pretty boring and infuriating at the same time the way courts view technical scenarios and how they don't match the way people in the programming industry think.

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I want to talk about the impact these lawsuits are having on the cheat industry. Due to the lack of ability for defendants to afford the legal process involved this has lead to a don't get caught mentality.

To be fair, this isn't isolated to the cheat industry. Large companies with endless sums of money they can throw at law firms has been weaponized against lower class citizens for quite a while.

At least in the US, the "justice system" is slow, convoluted to the point that you need to spend near a decade studying to be proficient enough in a single legal field, and it also heavily incentivizes settling, regardless of wrongdoing.

Without revealing too much PII, I've been involved in 3 lawsuits in my life. The first was small, local, and resolved within a year and a judge's ruling, no jury. The second lasted over 5 years, discovery turned up thousands of documents, court filing fees alone were in the thousands of dollars, the law firm representing me cost $30,000, the plaintiff demanded nearly a million dollars in damages, in the end it was settled for $80,000 and my liability insurance picked up the tab.

At no point during discovery, adr/mediation, etc, did I ever intend to settle, simply on principle, but since my insurance company was the one fronting the bill for my legal counsel, had I chosen to proceed to a jury trial, I would have been responsible for covering the additional fees for the attorneys, (estimated to be around $50,000 for jury trial) and I would have been responsible for covering any damages, the insurance company would essentially "opt-out" per their reservation of rights, and I would be on my own financially.

So in the end, I bite my tongue, I agreed to settle while also admitting no fault. (because that totally makes sense) 

And my third lawsuit is on-going, and has been for over a year and a half now, but this is the first time I've been the plaintiff. expecting the defendant will be advised to settle soon, because that's just how the cookie crumbles in this country.

 

Regarding the cheating topic, I prefer Valve's method, if you can't beat them, hire them. 😉

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Yeah the cost of participating in legal battles is a much wider issue. The bigger problem here is that it opens up opportunities for people to capture that demand which brings $$$ incentives.

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Cheat dev is one of the two common paths into malware analysis / reverse engineering. I'm not sure I like the idea of taking legal action against developers, but as a gamer cheaters are annoying AF lol. 

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Just now, MalwareTech said:

Cheat dev is one of the two common paths into malware analysis / reverse engineering. I'm not sure I like the idea of taking legal action against developers, but as a gamer cheaters are annoying AF lol. 

Depends on the game tbf. There are games where online cheating can be done without it being malicious. Competitive games are different obviously, it's basically unjustifiable there. But yeah reverse engineering a game engine is one of the hardest reverse engineering challenges possible and it leads to some insanely skilled people. But by pushing people towards organised crime it means talent can often end up in organised crime groups through getting introduced for money laundering purposes. These litigious publishers are literally helping fuel far worse organisations.

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Interesting, what you describe there (subpeona'ing Paypal as part of a lawsuit against cheat devs to then make use of the data for other purposes) was exactly the strategy the developer of the game I cheated used years ago - I didn't realise it was a common tactic, I just thought they'd hired some law firm with a fun idea to try!

My opinion on the 'war on cheats' has changed over the years to be honest. Like Marcus said its a route into this world, and for me the *big* route into this world, so I used to be defensive of it. But with some years on me and looking back with less rose tinted glasses... I can see why they were mad, at least. I had a weird moment where I watched a documentary of the game in question and there was a segment where the dev's talked about the cheating issues, and it actually got quite emotional when they talked about the damage done to the game, etc. It depends on the game, of course, but.

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quickly turned into organised crime

AFAIK one can buy domain names, as well as hosting, with cryptocurrency. Meaning there is no need to do credit card fraud.

 

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