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Fortnite Publisher suing Aimbot Service claiming Copyright Infringement

WMGroomAK

Epic Games, publisher of Fortnite, is suing two associates of Addicted Cheats for Copyright Infringement saying that they would have had to reverse engineer and modify the source code for Fortnite to create their aimbots.  

 

https://www.rollingstone.com/glixel/news/fortnite-publisher-epic-is-suing-two-alleged-cheaters-w508644

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Epic filed civil complaints Tuesday against two alleged associates of Addicted Cheats, a website that provides aimbotting services to players. An "aimbot" gives an unfair advantage in competitive online shooters by automatically targeting opponents. The two defendants apparently used this service to kill Twitch streamers (a.k.a. "stream sniping") during matches in Fortnite's new PvP mode, Battle Royale. Epic Games claims they had to reverse-engineer and modify Fortnite's source code to do this, creating an unauthorized derivative work that's in violation of the Copyright Act.

One defendant was banned from Fortnite nine times, according to the complaint, but he registered other accounts under different names to continue playing. When asked why he stream snipes other players, he allegedly said, "Because its [sic] fun to rage and see streamers cry about how loaded they are and then get them stomped anyways."

In a statement to Kotaku, Epic Games says, "When cheaters use aimbots or other cheat technologies to gain an unfair advantage, they ruin games for people who are playing fairly. We take cheating seriously, and we’ll pursue all available options to make sure our games are fun, fair, and competitive for players."

Honestly, I wish them the best of luck with this case as it should prove to be interesting on whether people who use aimbots in competitive titles can be not only banned, but sued for using Copyright infringing material...  Doubt that it will prevent these kinds of activities from happening, but it should hopefully get some people to think twice about it if there are some stiff economic penalties involved.

 

First saw this on HardOCP:  https://www.hardocp.com/news/2017/10/12/fortnite_publisher_epic_suing_two_alleged_cheaters

 

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Agree these types have hurt a great many good titles, they’re going to have a [sic] court date /s

I have a cue light I can use to show you when I’m joking, if you like.

 

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The defense could claim that reverse engineering was used to obtain interoperability between the game and aimbot. Evidence may or may not kill this defense.

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33 minutes ago, Misanthrope said:

I don't like cheaters but I don't support this action: This would set a big precedent against modding. More over reverse engineering shouldn't be infringement since you don't necessarily end up with the same source code. 

But reverse engineering and changing the code is, this would be akin to cracking the game.

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23 minutes ago, Sauron said:

But reverse engineering and changing the code is, this would be akin to cracking the game.

Not really unless they sell the tool or something like an alternative server. And even such things as fan servers have been tolerated in the past so it's not open-and-shut if that's the case.

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28 minutes ago, Misanthrope said:

Not really unless they sell the tool

That's exactly what they do as far as I can tell. "AddictedCheats" sells cheats for various games. Fan servers are different in principle although I suppose that, depending on implementation, you could make the same claim about those.

 

If I grab a game, modify parts of it with hex tools to allow for cheating, then sell the modified version, I'm probably infringing on some sort of copyright law. Granted, I don't particularly like the closed source approach to begin with, but I can forgive them if the objective is to crack down on cheaters.

Don't ask to ask, just ask... please 🤨

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15 hours ago, WMGroomAK said:

Epic Games, publisher of Fortnite, is suing two associates of Addicted Cheats for Copyright Infringement saying that they would have had to reverse engineer and modify the source code for Fortnite to create their aimbots.

In other news, water is wet, the sun is bright, and the moon is not made of cheese.

 

I'm not sure why they think legal action will stop people from making aimbots. So they go down, there's a ton still out there I'm sure.

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1 hour ago, HarryNyquist said:

I'm not sure why they think legal action will stop people from making aimbots. So they go down, there's a ton still out there I'm sure.

The last thing modders and hackers need is legal trouble at their door, court orders are powerful things not to be trifled with. Epic have the money, let them fuck people who hack. 

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If they can prove proper evidence that they used the game's source code to modify the game in a way that isn't allowed by the game's EULA (or ToS or whatever) then Epic has a genuine case against them.

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17 hours ago, HarryNyquist said:

In other news, water is wet, the sun is bright, and the moon is not made of cheese.

 

I'm not sure why they think legal action will stop people from making aimbots. So they go down, there's a ton still out there I'm sure.

May not make people stop making aimbots in games but people would think twice of someone else was sued for doing so in the game they are thinking about doing it in. 

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This has happened before a few times, the cheat providers lost. Epic will more than likely win this.

 

I'm pretty sure they base their case around trademarked and/or copyrighted assets used in the cheats and on the sites selling them because I don't see how a 100% user created aimbot is infringing on Copyright at all.

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23 minutes ago, Master Disaster said:

 because I don't see how a 100% user created aimbot is infringing on Copyright at all.

 

I believe that would be more in the same realm as those who are modifying car computers.  I am not sure how that has all panned out but I am pretty sure it is still feeling it's way through various whitepapers and legal threats.    They are not copying existing code but writing their own that changes the behavior of the product.

Grammar and spelling is not indicative of intelligence/knowledge.  Not having the same opinion does not always mean lack of understanding.  

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16 minutes ago, mr moose said:

 

I believe that would be more in the same realm as those who are modifying car computers.  I am not sure how that has all panned out but I am pretty sure it is still feeling it's way through various whitepapers and legal threats.    They are not copying existing code but writing their own that changes the behavior of the product.

This is entirely different, to "chip" an EMU you have to plug in to the chip, decode the firmware and change it on the fly, to even have the ability to do that some form of reverse engineering has to have happened. 

 

An aimbot simply uses a code injector to hook onto a process resident in memory and change it. They never expose copyrighted code or indeed change any code, they change a value in a memory address in your RAM (or in the case of an aimbot read values and forward the data on to another process). 

 

Heck even if the aimbot is reading actual code, so what. It's not like it's not doing anything that Windows isn't already doing anyway and AFAIK it's already fairly well established that the contents of my HDD are mine to do with as I choose. As long as the coders haven't used any copyrighted code in the hack it's fair game.

 

Like I said, I don't get how 100% original code using an open source injector classes as copyright at all. Are they arguing the coders reversed engineered the game to create the hack? The burden of proof is on the accuser and that's not something they can prove due to the by proxy nature of how hacks work, it's possible to create your own tools to decrypt memory addresses and expose the required data with reverse engineering any code.

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4 hours ago, Master Disaster said:

This is entirely different, to "chip" an EMU you have to plug in to the chip, decode the firmware and change it on the fly, to even have the ability to do that some form of reverse engineering has to have happened. 

 

 

Not really, it seems to be exactly the same from a legal point of view.

 

4 hours ago, Master Disaster said:

 Are they arguing the coders reversed engineered the game to create the hack?

Yes they are claiming that,  they are saying there is no way you can make the cheat without knowing the code which you can't get unless you reverse engineer the game.

Grammar and spelling is not indicative of intelligence/knowledge.  Not having the same opinion does not always mean lack of understanding.  

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39 minutes ago, mr moose said:

Not really, it seems to be exactly the same from a legal point of view.

 

Yes they are claiming that,  they are saying there is no way you can make the cheat without knowing the code which you can't get unless you reverse engineer the game.

No its not. For a device to be able to decode an EMU it must first understand the firmware its interfacing with and the protocols needed to do this can only be obtained by reverse engineering or brute forcing until you get lucky.

 

Everything used by a hack to cheat is contained in RAM, how RAM works is well documented and there are many existing tools available to decrypt, read and alter memory addresses. This requires no reverse engineering at all, just time enough to work out the memory pointers.

 

I'm not saying hack creators don't reverse engineer games, only that its not strictly necessary and its almost impossible to prove that they have.

 

Of course its entirely possible these guys did reverse engineer and straight up used code from the game in the hack, in which case RIP, sucks to be you.

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8 hours ago, Master Disaster said:

No its not. For a device to be able to decode an EMU it must first understand the firmware its interfacing with and the protocols needed to do this can only be obtained by reverse engineering or brute forcing until you get lucky.

 

Everything used by a hack to cheat is contained in RAM, how RAM works is well documented and there are many existing tools available to decrypt, read and alter memory addresses. This requires no reverse engineering at all, just time enough to work out the memory pointers.

 

I'm not saying hack creators don't reverse engineer games, only that its not strictly necessary and its almost impossible to prove that they have.

 

Of course its entirely possible these guys did reverse engineer and straight up used code from the game in the hack, in which case RIP, sucks to be you.

Two issues here, one is that the Automotive industry issue I was referring to did not specifically include decompiling or reverse engineering the ECU in any way shape or form, it was purely using existing tools (most of which are legal tools) to remap and reconfigure the ECU.  The second is that I said from a "legal" point of view.  By this I mean if the aimbot was made without decompiling but still modifies or injects it's own code into the working of the game then it is the same as the ECU debate.   One without a current answer as far as I am concerned.

 

 

Grammar and spelling is not indicative of intelligence/knowledge.  Not having the same opinion does not always mean lack of understanding.  

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I have actually written hacks for various games. And honestly this is BS. I don’t like when people are cheating but this is in no way copyright infringement. They aren’t “modifying the game and selling copies”.

 

What they do is reverse engineer the game to inject code into a running process. The hack is a separate .exe file that injects into the games process, not a modified version of the game. 

 

What if if you got sued for modding your case? For instance, say a company sells a 3rd party SSD cage kit for a specific case. Would that be copyright infringement? Because that’s akin to this situation.

 

The average person, and especially a judge, wouldn’t understand this. A hack does not modify any game source code, no source code is used, so how is it infringing on a copyright? It isn’t of course.

 

”reverse engineering” is actually an entire field of programming. And it’s not like you can actually read the “source code”. You can read the machine code, converted to assembly for readability and you can poke around in memory to find various function pointers. But it’s not “black magic” or anything. 

  

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On 10/12/2017 at 10:36 PM, WMGroomAK said:

"Because its [sic] fun to rage and see streamers cry about how loaded they are and then get them stomped anyways."

its just so gay...

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3 hours ago, Jito463 said:

I sincerely hope you mean single player games....

What is wrong with making cheats for games? Selling them or using them I get, that's bad. But why is the act of making them bad? They're fun to make and let you learn a lot of cool things + you get a cool way to show what you can do.

 

Second, can people please stop using "source code" or "code" here. While the latter is technically correct simply because the word code is so ambiguous it's not a programming language like C++ or Python it's machine code which is processed by the cpu and when reverse engineering we abstract that machine code and make educated guesses to turn it into asm which is an almost direct translation, closer to reading a binary file as ascii than decompiling a C++ program to get C++ from machine code.

 

The only case where there is copyright infringement is when you use the programs functions yourself. Which might seem like a slam dunk at first but it'd be like using a sheet from your bed as a table cloth. Depending on where you live the maker of the sheet may be allowed to dictate how you use it but that is what we are talking about here. The laws also often change if you charge people for turning the sheet into a cloth.

 

Also this is exactly what mods do, so if you're arguing that these actions should be illegal you are also arguing against mods being illegal.

 

Now we also have another argument here. Is reverse engineering illegal? Well that depends on where you live as well. In a lot of countries reverse engineering is illegal so the act of trying to understand what the program does is illegal. Please tell your representatives in whatever country you are in that you do not like this, that you don't feel like you should be restricted to reverse engineer. While it hasn't happened yet (to my knowledge) these laws could create a situation where malware creators could sue anti virus companies and cyber security firms for reverse engineering these programs to stop their effects and while most malware is illegal and can make the firms efforts legal in some places, there are situations where the user opts into malware where it can in same places be legal.

 

Then we get into territory of what do you get to control on your hardware. Recently the case with OnePlus storing user data that isn't anonymised, with these laws the person finding that would be given a jail sentence. Would you like a world where people trying to protect you online are given jail time? Where all of your data is out there and no one can hold companies accountable? Where white/grey hat hackers are jailed when without them we wouldn't have an internet because no one would use it when there's no security?

 

Reverse engineering to do something bad and malicious - that should be illegal.

Reverse engineering to do something bad but not malicious - that should be legal.

 

Do you want control of things running on your hardware? Go tell your representatives wherever you live.

Do you want to help move grey hat hacking out of legal ambiguity and give the good guys protection? Go tell your representatives wherever you live.

 

Do you want to learn about cyber security in more depth and without the formalities? There's this thing called Defcon, they have talks every year and there are often a lot of really interesting areas and presented by people who mostly know their stuff pretty well. Go search for the talks on youtube and have a watch, don't be scared if you can't understand phrases they're saying, just google them or keep watching and try to find context.

 

But at the end of the day, please please don't start calling for outlawing of any of this because you keep losing games to cheaters. There's a lot more at stake than a few people getting unfair advantages in games.

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8 minutes ago, valdyrgramr said:

Cheaters now DDOS, which is illegal.  I have had it happen in D1 durimg trials.  A guy was doing paid carries, and I kept killimg him.  Third round comes and I get booted then the two guys on my team still beat him.  I got no error codes stating my connection which means I was force kicked by this known cheater.

That was probably a game exploit and DDoSing is completely different from cheating and if anyone does both it's a complete coincidence.

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1 minute ago, valdyrgramr said:

No, it's a known issue in Destiny.  Bungie is aware of it.

So an exploit.

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