Is creating and selling &quot;cheats&quot; or &quot;hacks&quot; for games illegal? I sell game hacks for a living, but wanted to learn more about the laws regarding what I do. Most of you probably haven't heard of this, but there are people like me who reverse engineer games, and make software that exploit the games code and memory in order to gain an advantage. Basically, we have to reverse games to know where the game stores different information, like your players health, position, and weapon. Reverse engineering involves taking an executable you get when you buy the game, and seeing where the code stores information. Based on this information, you can make a program to access the information you found while reversing, and modify it to give you an advantage. I've only read some stuff on the DMCA, but I am unsure if this qualifies for it. Most games have an "anti-cheat" which try to detect people who use cheats and ban them from the game. As a cheat developer, you have to bypass these counter measures, and sometimes these counter measures are present in the executable in the form of packing / obfuscation which just makes it harder to analyze. If I take information from an executable given to me since I bought a game, and make a game cheat based on the information then sell, is this illegal? If you have any questions, let me know. I live in the United States.
Yes The relevant legal concepts are copyright, contract law and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. You are liable to be sued by the people affected for damages and/or be prosecuted by the government for the felony under either or both laws. Let's start here: "I bought a game". No, you didn't; you bought a licence to use the software in accordance with the terms of service (licence) that you freely agreed to. All modern ToS will not allow you to reverse engineer the software. If you breach those terms of service then you have broken a contract - that is what allows them to sue you. They will no doubt argue that the prevalence of cheat routines developed by people like you reduce the number of people willing to play the game - say 100,000 users x $10/month * 12 months = $12,000,000. They will also ask the court to impose punitive damages to discourage this sort of thing. Which brings us to the copyright violation. You are allowed to copy their software provided you comply with the ToS. But you didn't. Therefore you are in breach of the Copyright Act and subject to additional civil and criminal sanctions. Finally, your "cheats" access their servers in a way that the ToS doesn't authorize. This puts you in breach of the CFFA - breaking this carries serious jail time penalties. Not to mention that in the US, a criminal conviction will preclude you from many jobs, including, naturally, any with access to company computer systems. Putting aside the illegalities, cheats are unethical and ruin the game experience for hundreds of thousands of people who don't use cheats. You are a criminal - stop being one!
It's possibe to cover auto-starting apps and cookies under the definition. I'm not convinced and could argue against that but I don't think it matters. The tiny extract you linked isn't a law. It is a definition. It does not say &quot;these things are illegal&quot;. For that, we have to zoom out a little. Section 43 includes the offense in question (emphasis mine): If any person without permission of the owner or any other person who is incharge of a computer, computer system or computer network... introduces or causes to be introduced any computer contaminant or computer virus... So back to the question. Could Steam be considered a virus? Maybe. Is it illegal? No. On the other hand, if I were to gain access to your computer and download Steam, yes that could be an example of breaking that law.
The image is almost surely protected by copyright. The model used in the game would probably be a derivative work of the original image. As such, permission from the copyright holder on the original image would be required. In the absence of such permission, the copyright holder could sue for infringement, and have a reasonable chance of winning. Whether such a holder would choose to sue cannot be predicted. It would depend on whether the holder ever learned of the infringement in the first place, whether it could be proven, and the degree of damages that might plausibly be claimed. It would also depend on the holder's attitude toward such circumstances. In addition, the gun makers might claim trademark infringement. This would depend on how recognizable the guns are, and what trademarks the makers have secured protection on. If a logo is visible and recognizable, that would strengthen a claim by the maker. On the conditions described in the question, trademark infringement seems a bit unlikely, but exact details will matter in such a case, so one cannot be confident in any generic answer on that point.
...due to the international registration of multiple domains to generate ad revenue by recycling stories across sock puppet networks, giving the impression of multiple, independent companies. None of that is illegal on its face. Internet domains are freely registerable by anyone, anywhere (with the exception of some laws in some nations that restrict such Internet-related activity), and registered privately or publicly, and websites can be hosted anywhere. Writing articles and "spinning" and copying articles (even if that writing is sales gibberish in broken English) among the same copyright owner is legal, and using the same design and layout for a network of sites is legal. The formation of multiple, related companies and shell companies to give the impression that companies are separate and independent is legal (again, with the exception of some business and corporate laws in some nations that restrict such activity). These are all common business practices. Some business practices may appear to be unethical - trying to fool customers in order to make money and get clicks and sell ads. And what you may be feeling is that such activity is unethical. And that's OK. But feeling that they are unethical doesn't make the practices illegal. Many common activities that are considered to be unethical are illegal; but not all. Buyer beware. One way some of that activity may be illegal is if those articles are factually incorrect and promote quack medical treatments, are financial scams requiring payments, are gambling sites or promote other clearly illegal things. But then you get into the complexity of exactly how they are illegal, which jurisdictions are involved, and on and on.
IF part of your code and data is non-open-source, you can't release this software under the MIT license. However, from what I know, CS:GO uses real-life weapons, and their names aren't protected by copyright. Weapon stats aren't copyrightable either. With skin names, you should be safe as well, since there isn't enough (or any) lore around them to establish them as literary works. However, if you are using any in-game descriptions or images, they are copyrighted content and can't be legally copied without permission from Valve. Which might be easy to obtain by writing them.
Legally, yes, if you get a license from Blizzard (unlikely, and if so, they'll probably want either money or a portion of your profits). Otherwise, not legally. This is exactly the situation that IP law (e.g. copyright and trademark) was created to address. Blizzard created the game and so they have rights to control and benefit from derivatives there of. There are some exceptions, but prints, buttons, and keychains are not likely to meet the requirements for those.
Laws against such actions are not stated in terms of popular and fluid concepts like "computer virus", they are stated in terms of clear concepts like "unauthorized access". There are federal and state laws against this. This web site lists and links to all of the state laws on the matter. There is also a federal law: a detailed legal analysis by DOJ is given here. There are some limits to federal jurisdiction, for example "protected computers" include "computers used in or affecting interstate or foreign commerce or communication". The term "affecting interstate or foreign commerce or communication" is widely used in federal law, and can be used to prohibit growing feed for your own animals. Anything that you "send" clearly affects interstate commerce (the internet is internationally connected). 18 USC 1030(a) says Whoever ... (2) intentionally accesses a computer without authorization or exceeds authorized access, and thereby obtains...(C) information from any protected computer Essentially, a computer connected to the outside world is protected. The key here is "without authorization". If you authorize MS to report back stuff about your computer, that is not unauthorized. It may not be possible to use their product without giving such authorization, in which case you can use a different product that doesn't require that you grant authorization. There is also the possibility that some software producer has technically violates the law because they think that it's okay for them to access the computer as long as they do no harm. Typically, people are not aware that they have granted software publishers access to their computer. The concept of "harm" is pretty much irrelevant to computer-crime criminal law. It would be relevant, though, if a plaintiff were to sue someone for sniffing around their computer: then you'd have to show that you were damaged.
Imagine if the answer was a simple yes: adding a disclaimer was enough to exempt you from any and all copyright and trademark law suits. If that was the case, there would be no point in copyright or trademark law at all, because everyone could just include this disclaimer and never be sued. That doesn't mean every disclaimer is useless, but it does mean that copying and pasting some vague wording without understanding what it means is very unlikely to help you very much. The example you give is a good example of doing just that; the terms it uses are real, but they've clearly been thrown together without real understanding: Copyright is the right to control and profit from a creative work. This is relevant because images of Pokemon characters created for games, manga, etc are copyrighted by their creator. Trademarks are words, symbols, images, etc exclusively associated with a particular company or product. Trademark law aims, among other things, to avoid customers thinking they are getting an official product when they are not. &quot;Nintendo&quot; and &quot;Pokemon&quot; are both themselves trademarks. They are also the names of different companies. My limited understanding is that &quot;The Pokemon Company&quot; will be the owner of all the copyrights and trademarks related to those games, manga, etc. Naming them is a way of showing that you have researched this and understood their rights. &quot;This app is not affiliated , endorsed or supported by Nintendo in any way&quot;. This is a disclaimer on the trademarks. Whether this is sufficient to protect against claims of counterfeiting depends on how prominent it is compared to other branding - you need to make it obvious to users that the product is unofficial, not bury this in small-print for the lawyers to find. &quot;also some images used in this app are ... supported under fair use&quot; - fair use is a US legal concept which allows copyrighted works to be used in certain specifically limited ways. Saying your use is covered does not make it true, you need to actually understand what provisions of the law allow your specific use. &quot;no copyright infringement intended&quot; This is a fluffy apology that has no legal standing. A more useful statement might be &quot;every care has been taken to adhere to copyright and trademark law, if you notice a violation please contact X&quot;; but you're still relying on goodwill, and it won't stop someone sending the lawyers in if they decide to. Which brings us back to the real question: The apps mentioned before are in the store since 2015 and they haven't been removed yet. The real reason for this has nothing to do with the poorly-written disclaimers, it is that Nintendo / Pokemon co haven't bothered. If an app is directly competing with an official app, or receiving a lot of attention (even if no money), the lawyers will descend; if it's a buggy image gallery with a dozen downloads, they might decide they have better things to do. If they do notice, they might just get Apple and Google to de-list the app, but not spend the time and money pursuing a legal case. On the other hand, at any time they might decide they need to tighten up control of their intellectual property, and make an example of a few authors picked at random. The only way to avoid that is to actually avoid violating their rights, rather than just saying so in a disclaimer.