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Top EU Court’s Advisor Explains Why Video Game Cheats Are Not Copyright Infringement
(www.techdirt.com)
this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2024
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That is an interesting distinction, the code to generate your health total is copyright but the actual health value you modify with cheats is not.
I mean, this is a pretty normal distinction afaik (human vs non-human creations; afaik non-human creations almost always have any human copyright claims voided when challenged).
Imo what makes this special is how precise he's being. If I understand correctly, he's basically saying that the code for the health bar is a human creation and protected by copyright, but while the code to change the health value might be human-made, the actual values are machine-made and not under copyright (there's probably a lot of nuance I'm skipping over, but my understanding is that's the gist of it).
What if the health values are human creations like special symbols or works of creative art?
The symbols would be copyrighted, but the actual behind-the-scenes value (i.e. 20/100, 62.5/1200, etc) isn't. That's what they're referring to.
I mean what if you didn’t use 20/100 for the value, you used a symbol (in the code as the value). Would it still apply?
...yes? Changing the language or the way it's presented doesn't change the math behind the scenes. That's not how computers work.
I’m not explaining it properly. Imagine instead of 100 hp, there is apple bananas. That isn’t really a mathematic representation in the same way that the cheat code can change. It would be a copyrighted work of art. It wouldn’t be trivial to build an hp system to do this (in fact it would be a large undertaking), but I am not asking about practicality, just what the law would find.
No, no it wouldn't. You're still using math, you're just using a different language. If apple bananas becomes apple pears after being hit by a bullet, you've changed the value. That is what math describes. You cannot avoid this. This is how computers work, and math is just another language to describe things. Even if every health value is a string, you still need to keep track of which string is currently in use so that you know when to kill the player. That requires math. That is what they're talking about. It is not the in-game health indicator that is public domain, it is the actual health value in RAM that is generated and modified during gameplay.
It is better this way. Copyright is already abused to hell and back, if they expanded copyright to cover this kinda stuff then it would potentially destroy things like right-to-repair as companies could claim copyright infringement on anything that modifies their code.
Computers work with 1s and 0s. We have decided as a society that certain combinations of those equate to being copywritable. This ruling seems to be saying the result of a calculation cannot be copywritable? Wouldn’t creative tools like movie editor or photoeditor disagree? So then is the ruling actually saying these specific values used in this instance are not copywritable, changing the health to 100 for e.g., because there is no human creativity in the result of that value?
So if a programmer used an original work of art to define the state of health in the actual code, and verified the value matches the 1s and 0s that represent that work of art (thus it only ever comes down to boolean check in the logic side, and the value of the variable is never set to something simple like 0 to 100, it was using a huge amount of RAM and a very slow comparator operator.
Yea, I went there.