Gaming IndustryPlayStation loses fight in EU courts to stop sale of ‘parasite’ mods because, among other reasons, a book author can’t stop ‘the reader from skipping to the end’When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
Gaming IndustryPlayStation loses fight in EU courts to stop sale of ‘parasite’ mods because, among other reasons, a book author can’t stop ‘the reader from skipping to the end’When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
(Image credit: Santa Monica Studio)
PlayStation’s just lost a landmark court case that could set some precedent for cheating software in the EU—which is probably better for the consumer than it sounds at first blush.
The case made it to the highest court in the EU, the Court of Justice, and has been thoroughly dismissed in Datel’s favour. Despite Sony’s argument that the software “latches on … like a parasite” to the console, the judges maintain that the software involved merely impacts its RAM rather than the program itself, so it’s all fair play:
In other words, the EU is completely fine with selling cheats, mods, and other software that only impact a game’s data in RAM—whether that’s on a computer or not.
In an opinion presented to the court back in April, Advocate General Maciej Szpunar also added: “The author of a detective novel cannot prevent the reader from skipping to the end of the novel to find out who the killer is, even if that would spoil the pleasure of reading and ruin the author’s efforts to maintain suspense.”
It should be noted that, naturally, this doesn’t stop Sony from banning players who violate their terms of service agreements—the EU isn’t giving you carte blanche to spawn infinite samples in Helldivers 2, or anything—merely, it’s simply not against the law to sell these things for use. The person buying them gets to make the judgement call on whether they’re likely to get their accounts in trouble or not.
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Cheating in multiplayer games sucks, obviously, but when it comes to single-player games, who rightly cares? Should Sony be able to legally punish someone for modifying a piece of hardware they own, or selling tools to do that? I don’t really think so. That’s not to mention that software like this also includes accessibility aids that disabled people use to play their videogames. These gamersuse softwarethat could (uncharitably) be considered cheats all the time.
Not to mention, accessibility options are growing more and more popular in mainstream gaming anyway, like high-contrast visuals, sound cues, and toggles that just straight-up stop you from dying. Even if some studios still haven’t figured out the whole colour-blind thing yet (I’m not still mad, Larian, I pinky promise), I don’t think any company should get a say in whether people do it themselves, as long as they’re being reasonable and not ruining online modes for others. Let ‘em play.
TOPICSPlayStation
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