Sony doesn’t like the fact that some companies sell cheats for their games, although even in the PS2 era there were plenty of games with cheats that could be triggered by button combinations…
Euronews reported that PlayStation has filed a lawsuit against Datel. The company sold software that could be used to cheat in games. The software in question gave you unlimited boosts in MotorStorm and you could control your car with motion controls (Sony didn’t like that either…?). The case went all the way to the EU’s highest court, where Datel’s argument (“the software is parasitically attached to the console”) was rejected in favor of Datel. The judges said that the software in question only affected the RAM memory, not the software itself, so that’s fair…
“The Directive on the legal protection of computer programs does not allow the holder of that protection to prohibit the marketing by a third party of software which merely modifies temporarily transferred variables… The Directive protects only the intellectual creation as reflected in the text of the source and object code of the computer program,” the ruling said. So the EU doesn’t mind selling cheats, mods or software if it only affects the game’s data in RAM, whether it’s on a console or a PC. In an opinion submitted to the court in April, Advocate General Maciej Szpunar also added: “The author of a detective novel cannot prevent the reader from skipping to the end of the novel to find out who the murderer is, even if this would spoil the pleasure of reading and ruin the author’s efforts to maintain suspense.”
That doesn’t mean Sony can ban us for cheating in Helldivers 2, for example, it’s just legal to sell the software to do so. In the case of single player titles, there should be no action against mods and cheating. If a game is buggy (part of MotoGP was like that, preventing proper development…), it is not a crime to fix it that way. In multiplayer titles, cracking down on cheating is understandable and justified.
So Sony fell on its face a bit.
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