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Epic Games found itself in a tough position last week, after news emerged that the studio was suing a 14 year-old for cheating in Fortnite. At the time, the boy's mother called out Epic's actions in a letter sent to the judge in charge of the case, asking that it be thrown out for using a minor as a scapegoat and for releasing a minor's name to the public, which is illegal. Since then, Epic Games has responded to the court with some arguments of its own.
As part of a legal letter sent to the court by Epic's lawyers (via TorrentFreak), the company said that while it did use a minor's legal name in their filings, they were unaware of the defendant's age: “We did not violate Rule 5.2(a) or Local Civil Rule 17.2 because we did not know when we filed the papers that Defendant is a minor”. However, going forward, the company will only be using the defendant's initials or will redact his name from all future filings with the court.
The fact that Epic is still considering future filings indicates that the studio's lawyers might not be done with this particular cheater just yet.
Elsewhere, Epic Games did settle its lawsuit with another cheater by the name of Charles Vraspir. Epic's lawsuit accused him of writing code for cheats. The two parties have agreed to a permanent injunction, which means Vraspir can't create, write, develop, advertise, promote or distribute anything that infringes on Epic's copyright now or in the future.
If Vraspir breaks this agreement, then he will have to pay a $5000 fine. Given how quickly the case against Vraspir was settled, it seems likely that a settlement will also be reached with the 14 year-old boy at some point too.
KitGuru Says: Epic doesn't want to bankrupt the cheaters it is suing, though the company still seems intent on sending a message in order to deter cheaters.
The kid shouldn’t have anything happen at all. If it does, it’s a perversion of “justice”. However, the guy writing DMCA violating code, enabling cheaters, should have the civll book thrown at him instead of the climb down that happened.
Cheating in videogames shouldn’t be against civil law.
It’s not the cheating that is the issue here. The kid denied Epic the DMCA takedown request, meaning the kid denies that his video is breaking any terms of the EULA that he signed up to when creating/logging into the Epic Launcher.
It’s not about the cheats, it’s literally about getting the video off Youtube as it violates Epics terms of use for the game which in my eyes is fair enough.