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Epic Games, the developer of Fortnite, has filed a lawsuit against a 14-year-old boy who used cheating software for Fortnite Battle Royale and uploaded a video to YouTube showing others how to use it. The boy filed a DMCA counterclaim after Epic Games tried (successfully) to take down his video, and then uploaded a second video doubling down on the cheating (here is a third intact video from the YouTuber explaining the situation, 7m16s). The original video was ultimately removed and resulted in a "strike" against the YouTuber's account. The boy's mother has filed a letter with the Eastern District Court of North Carolina blasting the lawsuit and asking for it to be dismissed. She says that Epic Games failed to bind underage users with the EULA for their free-to-play game and claims that she did not give parental consent for her son to play the game. She also points out that the software in question is easily obtainable online and that her son did not modify the game with his own code:
Epic Games, the game developer of the massively popular Fortnite survival shooter, now finds itself at the center of a heated debate around the ethics of punishing cheaters after filing a lawsuit against a 14-year-old boy. In response, the boy's mother filed a legal note tearing down Epic's lawsuit and calling for it to be thrown out. The ensuing debate has been fierce, with some praising Epic and others decrying the legal measures as excessive and heartless, suggesting this case could become a touchstone for how game developers of highly competitive online titles handle cheaters and licensing agreement violations in the future.
[...] Epic, which has banned cheaters only to see them develop more robust workarounds, has responded by suing both distributors of the software and, now it seems, at least one user of it. Suing an individual user instead of simply banning them is an unorthodox and controversial move because it echoes the misguided actions of the music recording industry in its attempt to crackdown on piracy. That parallel was only further cemented by the note submitted by the 14-year-old's mother in the Eastern District of North Carolina.
[...] "This particular lawsuit arose as a result of the defendant filing a DMCA counterclaim to a takedown notice on a YouTube video that exposed and promoted Fortnite Battle Royale cheats and exploits," Epic told The Verge in a statement. "Under these circumstances, the law requires that we file suit or drop the claim. Epic is not okay with ongoing cheating or copyright infringement from anyone at any age. As stated previously, we take cheating seriously, and we'll pursue all available options to make sure our games are fun, fair, and competitive for players."
Here's some analysis from a copyright attorney (10m53s, starts at 5m45s). He is not impressed with the mom's letter.
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Thursday November 30 2017, @04:19PM (2 children)
That depends on if you are using the term legally or morally, and what the rules are. Legally and relating it to TFA, what EULA is present when you play the game? If that EULA said you will not attempt to use any assistance in the game, then yeah, it's a legally defined cheat. But their EULA would have to specify that you can't do that, somehow.
Even if it is a legal cheat, to make it an actionable tort AFAIK the game makers would have to prove how they were damaged by your using it. That isn't terribly hard if they are making money or prestige by having the game out there. But it still must be proven.
Morally, is it a cheat? If you used it in praxis, for ethical grounds I won't detail because they seem obvious, yes. You injured everyone else trying to make a high score honestly. If you simply developed it but used it in a way nobody was harmed (for your intellectual development) then no.
In online chess play, something akin to your robot idea already exists. Many chess platforms (Internet Chess Club being the first to do so I think many many years ago) incorporate various mechanisms to make sure you're not running a chess program on the same platform that's running the interface. If they detect you're cheating that way, you're banned. BUT, the dodge now that computers are cheap is you run a second computer (or tablet, or phone, whatever) running a chess application. Your eyes and fingers but using a separate computer engine. And you're the robot. While there are still ways to investigate and detect such cheating, the primary response of the online chess community is that the vast vast majority of games run at time controls so fast (two minutes plus twelve seconds increment per move per side is common) that using an engine won't help you much. I have many high rated friends who refuse to play online because they believe they will be playing computers and not people.
A sideline of that is in correspondence play. Most correspondence play now takes place on servers over the internet, but others (prison is most common) still utilizes postcards. Some players don't consider it a cheat to use a computer engine to "blundercheck" - just make sure that the move they will play isn't an obvious blunder. They're wrong, and it is, but the belief persists. And there's a long history of determining what is and is not cheating. Like the start, it all depends on the house rules as to what all players agree to. General consensus is that you can use books, magazines, and databases of already-played games including probabilities, you just can't use an engine to actively analyze and report your game. But again, what are the established rules... that's what determines what is and is not cheating.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Thursday November 30 2017, @07:18PM
> I have many high rated friends who refuse to play online because they believe they will be playing computers and not people.
I was a professional chess player, made it to class A, but I moved on in large part because computers showed me the hopelessness of the all human approach to improving at that particular game. Also at that level, it becomes as much a game of mental stamina as mental cunning. A major way to win chess games at those levels is by being patient, trying to avoid mistakes, and waiting for your opponent screw up. To sustain the concentration for the hours necessary to pull that off gets harder as you age. If I were to take up chess again, I'd want to have computers helping me pick the moves. At the least, I'd like something to warn me against blunders. Music was the same. I was in grade school and had been subjected to piano lessons when I first heard an Apple II computer play a few ditties, note perfect every time, without practicing, and I realized a career in music based on being only a good player was a non-starter.
Most good board games are perfect fodder for computer analysis. Chess was one of the first to fall, because it had acquired a reputation for being _the_ thinking person's game, and therefore was in the AI community's crosshairs from the beginning. If we don't have it already, I expect to see a more general board game AI that can learn any board game so well that no person can beat it.
So a lot of this crying about "cheating", well, no. Computer chess players do not cheat, don't try to take one of your pieces off the board while your back is turned (as if you wouldn't notice that) or some such, yet they have what can only be called an unfair advantage over humans. So it is with shooters.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 01 2017, @12:39PM
That's easy, the EULA is a "contract after the fact" and thus void in any country with a sane legal system (i.e. any country with less than straight up corporatism).