Top EU Court’s Advisor Explains Why Video Game Cheats Are Not Copyright Infringement
Top EU Court’s Advisor Explains Why Video Game Cheats Are Not Copyright Infringement
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Top EU Court’s Advisor Explains Why Video Game Cheats Are Not Copyright Infringement
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.
The music on the CD is copyrighted, but you're free to use the Bass Boost feature or whatever on the thing you're playing the music from
Yeah honestly this makes a lot of sense to me.
This makes sense to me, and is in line with recent interpretations about AI-generated artwork. Basically, if a human directly creates something, it's protected by copyright. But if someone makes a thing that itself creates something, that secondary work is not protected by copyright. AI-generated artwork is an extreme example of this, but if that's the framework, applying it to data newly generated by any code seems reasonable.
This wouldn't/shouldn't apply to something like compression, where you start with a work directly created by someone, apply an algorithm to transform it into a compressed state, and then apply another algorithm to transform the data back into the original work. That original work was still created by someone and so should be protected by copyright. But a novel generation of data, like the game state in memory during the execution of the game's programming, was never directly created by someone, and so isn't protected.
This raises a rather sticky situation for the coming years. I have been seeing more and more posts about developers using GPT generated code in various projects. If a game is made and it is found that GPT was used for some parts of the core code, does the whole project lose its copyright?
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?
Well, I think both are human creation, you are using the machine and the game to create something new. In that sense, a save game file could also be under the players copyright. Lets say a Minecraft world for instance.