![]() A work consisting of editorial revisions, annotations, elaborations, or other modifications which, as a whole, represent an original work of authorship, is a “derivative work”. The definition of a derivative work is here:Ī “derivative work” is a work based upon one or more preexisting works, such as a translation, musical arrangement, dramatization, fictionalization, motion picture version, sound recording, art reproduction, abridgment, condensation, or any other form in which a work may be recast, transformed, or adapted. (2) to prepare derivative works based upon the copyrighted work Subject to sections 107 through 122, the owner of copyright under this title has the exclusive rights to do and to authorize any of the following: Code § 106 - Exclusive rights in copyrighted works says: I'm going to try to point to the places in the law that make this illegal, step by step.ġ7 U.S. This appears to be criminal infringement. Putting aside the illegalities, cheats are unethical and ruin the game experience for hundreds of thousands of people who don't use cheats. Not to mention that in the US, a criminal conviction will preclude you from many jobs, including, naturally, any with access to company computer systems. This puts you in breach of the CFFA - breaking this carries serious jail time penalties. Therefore you are in breach of the Copyright Act and subject to additional civil and criminal sanctions.įinally, your "cheats" access their servers in a way that the ToS doesn't authorize. ![]() You are allowed to copy their software provided you comply with the ToS. Which brings us to the copyright violation. They will also ask the court to impose punitive damages to discourage this sort of thing. They will no doubt argue that the prevalence of cheat routines developed by people like you reduce the number of people willing to play the game - say 100,000 users x $10/month * 12 months = $12,000,000. If you breach those terms of service then you have broken a contract - that is what allows them to sue you. All modern ToS will not allow you to reverse engineer the software. No, you didn't you bought a licence to use the software in accordance with the terms of service (licence) that you freely agreed to. You are liable to be sued by the people affected for damages and/or be prosecuted by the government for the felony under either or both laws. The relevant legal concepts are copyright, contract law and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. If I take information from an executable given to me since I bought a game, and make a game cheat based on the information then sell, is this illegal? As a cheat developer, you have to bypass these counter measures, and sometimes these counter measures are present in the executable in the form of packing / obfuscation which just makes it harder to analyze. Most games have an "anti-cheat" which try to detect people who use cheats and ban them from the game. I've only read some stuff on the DMCA, but I am unsure if this qualifies for it. Reverse engineering involves taking an executable you get when you buy the game, and seeing where the code stores information.īased on this information, you can make a program to access the information you found while reversing, and modify it to give you an advantage. Most of you probably haven't heard of this, but there are people like me who reverse engineer games, and make software that exploit the games code and memory in order to gain an advantage.īasically, we have to reverse games to know where the game stores different information, like your players health, position, and weapon. ![]() I sell game hacks for a living, but wanted to learn more about the laws regarding what I do. ![]()
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