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Riot Games has settled its lawsuit with League of Legends cheating service ‘Leaguesharp', which would take a monthly subscription fee from users in exchange for scripts and bots to help win matches or artificially level up. Leaguesharp would take anywhere between $15 and $50 a month depending on which cheats you wanted but it looks like all of that money generated is now going to Riot Games as the case was settled with a $10 million fine.
Aside from now owing Riot a massive $10 million, Leaguesharp is also due to relinquish control of its website and forums to Riot. Following this announcement, Leaguesharp left a message on its website (now removed) for users: “As some of you may know, Riot Games has filed a lawsuit against LeagueSharp and has made it clear to us that LeagueSharp violates their Terms of Use. As a result of our lawsuit with Riot, we have agreed to cease development and support for LeagueSharp and any other tools related to Riot Games”.
“You also should be aware that using third-party tools in League of Legends may result in the suspension or banning of your account by Riot Games. We apologize for any pain we've caused to players of League of Legends.”
Outside of running a cheats service, Riot's lawsuit (via law360) also alleged that Leaguesharp had engaged in attacks on Riot's servers and went as far as to leak the private information of one of the company's employees.
KitGuru Says: As popular as this service might have been, $10 million is an awful lot of money to owe and I doubt the full fine will ever be paid. Still, a massive figure like that will probably deter others from starting up similar cheating services.
As shit as cheating is, I don’t see how they could possibly owe Riot any money at all. Unless they stole code or something then breaching terms of service isn’t against the law nor leaving you open to a $10m lawsuit.
If it’s for loss of potential earnings than that’s ridiculous.
Because of the influence the cheating has on the service. The demoralisation of players who want to progress to a level where they can compete professionally is evident, while you could be the best player, a computer controlled player that’s programmed in avoidance and precision skill shots can wipe the floor with them. This results in people leaving the game, causing possible loss of revenue for the company.
The original claims were that of copyright infringement and making a profit from a service they had no right to make a profit from (i.e selling services). The copyright infringement comes off the back of claims that leaguesharps services were probably sophisticated enough that it must have required a reverse engineering of league of legends
Only the copyright infringement part carries any weight. Making money off someone elses service is legitimate enough. Riot might not like it, and can change their stuff as much as they want to avoid it, but they can’t sue based on that alone.
All that is shady as hell, but not grounds, at all, for a lawsuit. Riot were under the onus to change their code and service to avoid it.
However, as mentioned above, reverse engineering their code would’ve put Leaguesharp in fowl of the DMCA among other laws so that would’ve made sense to have them sued.
However, again, just writing scripts to automate the game, no matter how much it ruined the game for players, is not against the law or copyright.
In any case they won the court case so they must’ve had grounds somewhere
IIRC they settled out of court, so thankfully didn’t “win”.
A win against exploiting games would’ve been a loss for the legitmate modding community.
People actually paid for a cheating service? Seems about right that the company charging for the cheating service be charged a fine 10 mill is a bit steep mind you. If they violated the terms of service by making a profit by exploiting someone else work then I have to agree with how this turned out but 10 mill still seems like a bit much. I guess maybe in the future it might be a deterrent to stop others from doing this but most likely a slim chance of that since everyone thinks they will get away with it.
I think the ones that will end up paying by being banned are the people that hold accounts and used tis service. To be able to do this the company most likely had to reverse engineer the code code and that would have had to be proven in court which it looks like it was. The court would have treated as theft of intellectual property which to the best of my knowledge is against the law so a fine or jail time.