Nobody likes cheaters. No matter the game or genre, cheaters have the massive potential to utterly ruin the fun of any skill-based game on a competitive level. It's one of the few things that the gaming community at large can agree on, and apparently the developers over at Epic are fully aware of this fact and decided to take a hard stance on cheating right out of the gate by taking the fight to the source.

Rather than waiting for the inevitable wave of hackers and cheaters to make their way down the tracks to the permaban metro, Epic went ahead and filed a full-on lawsuit against a German hacker named Robin Kreibich for copyright infringement, contributing to copyright infringement, violating Paragon's EULA, and for violating California's unfair competition statute.

Stepping out of Bounds

The defendant Kreibich advertised his hack as “the world's most powerful Paragon hack,” claiming it featured everything from aimbot to 3D radar, and that it would be available to anyone and everyone for a reasonable and only slightly morally ambiguous monthly subscription fee. Once the developers of the up and coming Early Access MOBA found out about it they dropped the entire might of their legal department on his doorstep...although not before taking the time to walk Kreibich into the trap of legal loopholes that is the current state of YouTube's DMCA takedown policy.

Normally, a case like this would be tried in the defendant's home country, which in this case would be Germany. And although we aren't experts on Germanic legal statutes, the chance of a German citizen feeling the full brunt of the legal system while being sued by an American company seems a little unlikely – not impossible, just unlikely.

Instead the case is taking place in California, because before pursuing official legal action against Kreibich, Epic issued a series of take down requests on the German hacker's official YouTube channel where he was advertising and demonstrating the effectiveness of his hacks. When Kreibich attempted to dispute the claim he checked a small box, remarkably similar to the Paragon EULA check box that he willfully violated. The difference, of course, is that this check box acknowledges that if he lives outside of the United States any legal repercussions will be tried in the state that YouTube as a company is located, which is California. This means that Epic will have the home court advantage in a state that has, in the past, consistently ruled favorably on both copyright claims as well as specific cases where game developers sued players developing and selling hacks.

Discouraging Would-be Hackers

Epic's aggressive stance on the issue is hopefully an effective move that make it less beneficial in the long run for dedicated (and undeniably talented) programmers to develop hacks for games. The developers will still have to deal with the plethora of free hacks floating about, but if there's a very real chance that someone developing hacks for games could get hit with a seven million dollar lawsuit, odds are that the bulk of hackers will move on to other, less dangerous waters.

Epic is currently pursuing both restitution and damages from Kreibich, and requiring that he destroy all copies of Paragon within his possession as well as any research, data, and other derivative content created in relation to the hack. It might seem a little excessive for a company to go after a lone wolf like this, but there's ample evidence that hacking and cheating at large can do a lot to destroy or diminish a game's success. Looking back over the last six months, it's not a far stretch to say that hackers played a large part in The Division dropping out of public favor, and the only real solution seems to be investing heavily in anti-hacking technology and issuing out permabans like it's a really weird version of Christmas.

Hacking is one of those things that's both infectious and dangerous to a game's community as a whole, so seeing Epic take such a strong stance against it this early on gives us hope that Paragon might succeed where so many others have failed. We can only hope it pans out in the long run.