Bungie wins lawsuit considering Reverse Engineering as Copyright Violation

I was following this one for some time, but frankly, I didn't believed it would fructify.

But it did. :/ And this is terrible.

In a nutshell, Bungie (a Game Studio own by Sony, and makers of some heavy hitters in the market) sued a cheat maker and won.

I'm not siding with the cheat maker (besides there's nothing intrinsically illegal on it, and I don't see a problem when the cheats are not used on online PvP games), but what's making me excrements on my pants is in which grounds they won the lawsuit.

They are literally creating precedence to make (direct) Reverse Engineering illegal - i.e., anyone that had ever decompiled a copyrighted binary material would be infringing the Copyright, and so being liable to respond to the infringement as a Copyright Violation.

The relevant parts of the lawsuit were summarized by Game File as follows (emphasis are mine):

There is no law specifically against cheating in a video game, so both sides will be asking the jury in Seattle this week to consider something else, the thing that game companies commonly sue cheat-makers/sellers over: copyright.

Bungie’s position, like that of GTA-maker Take Two, World of Warcraft studio Blizzard and others before it, is that to make a tool to see through walls in a game or get instant kills, the cheat maker has to violate the game company’s copyright.

Bungie alleges that the creation of a cheat for Destiny 2 involves “accessing a local copy of the client software of Destiny 2 to reverse engineer it, copying code, and making derivative works.”

Dear sirs, these three paragraphs essentially summarised what modders do around here for some time already. This crap is going to bite our collective asses badly, be you the one that decompiled some code to understand what's happening, be you the one directly using this knowledge to do something.

WORST. This also make users liable. Also from the same article above:

(Bungie has also argued in its legal filings that these kinds of cheats cause the players using them to also breach copyright, but it has yet to sue a player who simply bought and used them.)

Every law will be (ab)used to its maximum extent. There's not a single exception from this rule - once the you open the gate, holding the flood is near impossible. Nintendo anyone?

To learn more (some links under paywall or registerwall):

From my best knowledge, the defendant's Attorney is called "Mann Law Group".

So, Fellow Kerbonauts, we may be in the verge of an inflection point. Having formally legal, authorized access to the Source Code is risking not being a question of convenience or even mutual assistance, but a matter of mere survival.

Direct Reverse Engineering is not a viable option anymore (IMHO, it was always risky), as this is not about only the EULA and the Forum Publishing Guidelines. Now, we have a AAA Game Studio, Bungie, paving the way to make illegal the very foundation of modding in general (besides not targeting modding in special), and this is the base for some important ones on this Scene (I prefer not to nominate them here).

Copyright Infringement is serious business, and this case have the potential to be enforced even on countries where Reverse Engineering is authorized by law - Copyright treaties as the Berne Convention establishes that Copyright works from foreign countries should have their home country Copyright respected. This also puts non USA citizens on a tight spot when dealing with USA's Intellectual Property.

Unless this court decision is reverted, we need the Source Code to prevent some serious disruption on the KSP¹ modding scene!

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