GTA Online cheat program creator ordered to pay $150k in damages - Sensationalist Headlines

https://www.pcgamer.com/gta-online-cheater-ordered-to-pay-dollar150k-in-damages/?ns_campaign=article-feed&ns_mchannel=ref&ns_source=steam&ns_linkname=0&ns_fee=0 A man from Florida, Jhonny Perez, has been found guilty of copyright infringement after developing and distributing a cheat program for Grand Theft Auto Online. He has been ordered to pay $150,000 as well as legal costs. According to a report from Torrent Freak, Take-Two, Rockstar's parent company, contacted Perez to cease the distribution of Elusive, which was on sale for $10 - $30, depending on the package. While Perez did comply with the request, further attempts to contact him were met with silence, prompting Take-Two to take the case to court. Almost $70,000 of legal fees were also added.

I don't really have too much sympathy for cheat-makers who sell their cheats, but imagine if Take Two had given Rockstar the time and budget/resources to run convert the GTAO PC client to a dedicated server architecture instead of lazily porting the console P2P solution, this cheat probably wouldn't have existed or have been nearly as powerful. But money drop trainers hurt their Shark Card business so guess where all the effort goes...

The problem with this tactic is that when you shut down one, another pops in its place.

No actually quite the opposite. It shows T2/R* will actually go all the way and aren't making empty threats. It's an example and it's the best way to dissuade cheat makers. That guy was lucky, Blizzard landed way higher fines against OW cheat makers.

Trust me as a player, it doesn't stop new hacks from popping up. The fault is on the peer to peer networking, which has legendary low levels of security.

Can't help but find a lot of moral greyness in the fact people are cheering this on when GTAV is the best-selling media product ever and continues to make Rockstar several million. Haha, I love corporations destroying individuals through insurmountable legal fees! "He made a hack program" isn't an excuse for the guy to be weighed down with literally hundreds of thousands of legal fees he is never going to be able to repay.

In countries where R* has the capability to do so, perhaps, but what's to stop someone in Russia or China from making the next one? IIRC R* has very little ability to take those peeps to court like this.

yet they still somehow Cease and Desist OpenIV, which was made by a Russian.

Ik ive played GTA online for a few hours and all of them were just being spawn camped over and over, in every server. It's jut unplayable. My point is, legaly this is the best devs can do to detract people from doing it. I'll give it to you that it's not enough and that idiots are still willing to take the risk just to get a rise in a video game. But this is the best way to detract the most people from doing it.

Passive mode Although I do recall that they are able to remotely shut down the various hack programs when they legally take control of one. I don't know the specifics but back when I played a ton (mostly in 2017 and then more in 2018 for a good while) I remember this one that was C&D'd and shock of all shocks, that mod menu also stopped working at the same time.

They probably only when after him because you could cheat in money, so people didn't buy shark cards :^)

Shark cards Early usage of drip-feed content Deters players from the game and creates an atmosphere of hacks, thus looping back to point 1

He took source code that did not belong to him and created a cheat engine with it. He proceeded to charge for subscriptions for his cheat engine. It is a clear cut case of copyright infringement. Legal fees are not over the top, if you get sued and don't settle out of court you get slammed with fees. Maybe he should have tried to work shit out instead of ignoring letters he received.

Good. Cheating in a multiplayer game actively damages the product for every non-cheater.

Man fined 150000 for counterfeiting imaginary money. I don't like cheats either but goddamn thats insane.

Normally I'd agree, but I feel no shame for cheating some money in GTA Online, made my short time with it a lot more enjoyable.

Well deserved. Elusive was one of these pasted skiddy-oriented menus, used for ruining other people's experience.

And it only worked because the team making it arent criminals and/or douchecanoes. They chose to abide by the bullshit C&D even though they could have simply laughed in R*'s face like so many of their countrymen have done countless times over the years.

I had a guy with a minigun that shot bags 50k give me 150,000,000$ saving me from the retardation of that games p2w

What I want to know is, if he took the hack down from sale thereby complying with the legal request what exactly are they suing him over?

I hate cheaters online, so if they all get a $200k fine I'm fine with it. People want to play a game for an hour or two in their busy lives and here comes asshole to say Nope, getting off and his fun at your expense, even though you paid $60+ Furthermore, I'd also slam Rockstar and Take2 if I were the judge telling them if they really cared about protecting the legitimate experience so much they should put more than 9 seconds of effort in to do so and have proper anti-cheat and servers

I think the real issue is that he was selling it. If he was providing a free download it wouldn't be a big deal but snice he was profiting off of it, it was definitely a valid issue even if Take Two's reasoning for all of this was pure greed.

This man got himself into this situation. He created a cheat engine that he then had users pay for, violating all sorts of terms of service with Take 2 as well as their copyright in the process. When they sued him, he didn't try to settle with them or work it out, but rather went to court over it. He lost. It's his responsibility to deal with the consequences. 220k is a drop in the bucket compared to what the court could have awarded Take 2. In the end he'll probably have to take out loans and either repay them over the course of his life or declare bankruptcy. And while neither are great options, he can recover from it. Normally I'm not so harsh, but this man flagrantly violated the law and his agreement with Take 2 in such a open and public manner. He deserves all he gets.

Well, it's not just money. Those cheats where people would randomly kill you no matter where you were would actively ruin the game.

As someone who knows many "pay 2 cheat" developers (the nice ones though), made my own private mod menu to protect myself from griefers and spent a long time reverse engineering GTA - I can tell you without a doubt you're 100% wrong. Elusive got sued, then Xen Menu appeared. Xen was closed and Evolve appeared. You kill 1 menu, and 2 (and sometimes even 3!) appear in its place thanks to this "mod menu vacuum". The devs just rebrand, use their old code and try and make a quick buck before T2 notices. There's examples of this across the board. Currently there's something like 8 - 10 menus out there off the top of my head when we really only started out with 3 (Jordan's, Menyoo and Force) back in 2014. Most likely rebranded/sold the code or joined another menu and coded for them. Happens surprisingly often (for example a modder called Chrome X Modz made one of the most notorious GTA:O menus on the 360 called "GTA Fucker". He was banned multiple times and was the first to receive a C&D letter. In 2017 (5 or so years after GTA V Fucker appeared) - he was sued again for being apart of another GTA O menu for the 360 (Jungle menu I believe) and for breaking his C&D agreement 5 years earlier). Since he used Natives (game engine functions and methods) I agree completely that it's copyright infringement. The grey zone starts when you use pointers and offsets (like how Cheat Engine works) to do the modding for you. It's entirely possible to do the same thing externally (reading and writing to memory) but then it's not a clear cut copyright case (they're not using your code, but supplying their own). It's a weird loophole.

As someone who actually knows a group of people running a very popular cheat site, it’s not this clear cut ever. If they are making cheats for 20 other games and pulling in insane amounts of money, they aren’t going to risk it all on 1 game where they could potentially get sued. Not to mention the suing tactic always works. Look at the story between Blizzard and Honorbuddy, they have been in a legal dispute for like a decade basically and it’s still going even though honorbuddy isn’t even around anymore afaik. No cheat site wants to touch blizzard games anymore. The only people that will are small independents who are likely throwing it together from public src code anyway.

I have had fun in the past activating passive mode and hiding under a bridge as people with really shitty mod menus try to kill my playercharacter. At which point I laugh at them for having one of the shittier 5-doller cheat menus. Sometimes I have even gotten modders to ragequit

Crime does pay.

creating a multiplayer game that requires an insanely tedious amount of grinding damages the product for every player

200,000 dollars is a life-ruining amount of money to have to pay. it's a fucking video game, dude, he's not driving through town throwing bricks in peoples' windows