Action Replay cheat software is not illegal after all.
Since 2012, Sony has been fighting a legal battle in the European Union with Datel, the company behind the Action Replay cheating software. Sony argued that Datel had infringed its copyright, but the courtroom battle ended and the court ruled in Datel’s favor.
The European Court of Justice ruled that Datel’s cheating software does not modify the source code or internal structure of Sony’s games. Because Action Replay only temporarily alters content for cheat purposes, it does not infringe Sony’s intellectual property, which is protected by European law. That’s a win for Datel, but it probably won’t open the floodgates to a flood of cheating software.
Dr. Andreas Lober, partner of the international law firm ADVANT Beiten a GamesIndustry.biIn an interview with z, he said:
“Undoubtedly, the developers and publishers of cheating software will welcome this decision. But they should not be too enthusiastic about this decision. For procedural reasons, the Court made its decision based on only one principle: whether the simple change of variables in a computer program constitutes an unauthorized modification does it matter.”
Lober added that third-party software created for the purposes of cheats or mods can still be considered copyright infringement under other legal grounds. Any company that wants to do business by distributing such software is likely to face further lawsuits from Sony or other game publishers. So Sony has now lost this round, but it still has a number of legal options to take action against possible infringements by other companies.
Source: www.gsplus.hu
