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Japan student held for making Puzzle and Dragons hack
11–20 of 52 posts
Re: Japan student held for making Puzzle and Dragons hack
#12Is this a single-player game, or multiplayer? (Also, I was sure I remembered a game by the same name from the '90s, which I thought was a trivia quiz game with a D&D-ish theme. A brief search hasn't turned up any evidence, though. Anyone else remember that?)
Until about a year ago it was single-player with a tacked-on social component, but there's now co-op and a competitive ranking mode with prizes for the top 1% of players (and mostly irrelevant prizes for lower buckets).
If you stay out of the ranking dungeons it's hard to argue that a hack negatively impacts other players, but making the game easier does means you're less likely to pay them money to progress faster.
Re: Japan student held for making Puzzle and Dragons hack
#13Is this a single-player game, or multiplayer? (Also, I was sure I remembered a game by the same name from the '90s, which I thought was a trivia quiz game with a D&D-ish theme. A brief search hasn't turned up any evidence, though. Anyone else remember that?)
Single player, although it probably leaderboards. More importantly it has pay-to-progress options, which these cheats would make redundant (which is probably what the company is angry about).
Re: Japan student held for making Puzzle and Dragons hack
#14How is this defined as breaking copyright law? Did the cheat contain code from the original game?
It probably has something to do with the tampering of copy protection, which companies would very much like to be illegal. An arrest does not equate to a conviction; there's a chance the charges may not stick, but I don't know Japanese law.
[deleted]
Re: Japan student held for making Puzzle and Dragons hack
#15How is this defined as breaking copyright law? Did the cheat contain code from the original game?
IANAL, but I wonder if there is a case to be made that the cheat is a derivative work of the game.
Re: Japan student held for making Puzzle and Dragons hack
#16If someone did this in the US, can they get in trouble? When exactly does "hacking" a game become illegal? What about people doing it for research like the machine learning mario guy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qv6UVOQ0F44 . Or tool-assisted speedruns? Or the starcraft broodwar ai? Is it only when you breach the TOS or copyrights? Just curious since it never even occurred to me that such things are punishable.
There are multiple cases in the United States regarding game hacks. Some of the more famous involve Blizzard, with the biggest example being a suit against the creators of WowGlider, a bot for World of Warcraft ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MDY_Industries,_LLC_v._Blizzar... )
Fascinating:
The Court of Appeals ruled that for a software licensee's
violation of a contract to constitute copyright infringement,
there must be a nexus between the license condition and the
licensor’s exclusive rights of copyright. However ... that a
finding of circumvention under the Digital Millennium
Copyright Act does not require a nexus between circumvention
and actual copyright infringement.
The DMCA's anti-circumvention section appears to be the only thing that preserved parts of the original finding. Perhaps the next time this law is up for review, some less onerous terms can be placed for reverse engineering for the purpose of interoperability.
Re: Japan student held for making Puzzle and Dragons hack
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
It probably has something to do with the tampering of copy protection, which companies would very much like to be illegal. An arrest does not equate to a conviction; there's a chance the charges may not stick, but I don't know Japanese law.
While an arrest doesn't equate to prosecution, in Japan, prosecution almost equates conviction (somewhere around 99.9%).
DA's have a reputation to keep.
Re: Japan student held for making Puzzle and Dragons hack
#18Re: Japan student held for making Puzzle and Dragons hack
#19How is this defined as breaking copyright law? Did the cheat contain code from the original game?
IANAL, but I wonder if there is a case to be made that the cheat is a derivative work of the game.
Its hard to say, but I would imagine that you agree to a license to play the game, and that license would disallow derivative works.
Re: Japan student held for making Puzzle and Dragons hack
#20Is this a single-player game, or multiplayer? (Also, I was sure I remembered a game by the same name from the '90s, which I thought was a trivia quiz game with a D&D-ish theme. A brief search hasn't turned up any evidence, though. Anyone else remember that?)
Until about a year ago it was single-player with a tacked-on social component, but there's now co-op and a competitive ranking mode with prizes for the top 1% of players (and mostly irrelevant prizes for lower buckets). If you stay out of the ranking dungeons it's hard to argue that a hack negatively impacts other players, but making the game easier does means you're less likely to pay them money to progress faster.
Imo this is what they should have expected by having game state on the client side.