Valve Drops the Hammer On Infringing Dota 2 Mace

[bafrali]

This was plain theft and i think punishment was fair. If you don't respect intellectual property, you don't deserve it.

 

[The Preened Mr. Fust]

As others have said, Plagiarism in real life contains MUCH harsher penalties.

Good grief people, this man abused the trust of Valve and 24,000+ other people.

 

[Owyn_Merrilin]

I don't know how much money the guy made off the mace (and will thus lose) but the part that really stings is the ban from Steam, which means the loss of all the games in his library. I would never condone plagiarism, but that's an awfully harsh punishment and one that I don't think necessarily speaks well of Steam. Transgressions must be punished, but stripping someone of games he's rightfully paid for is a little too heavy-handed for my liking.

Um, how does it not speak well of Steam? It shows that Steam will ban you if you violate their Terms of Service and open them up to potential legal liability and/or lawsuits. That's an admirable trait, not one deserving of scorn.

It's also actually pretty common policy. I know of at least one or two companies that have open suggestions submissions for their games....and they will ban you from their forums entirely (and sometimes from the game as well if the incident is bad enough) if you present suggestions for game content that infringe on the copyrights of others, whether art or otherwise. The obvious reason being that it opens the company up to a lawsuit. Most companies that employ an individual who violates another company's copyright will be quick to fire that employee to free themselves from liability. It's not unusual at all.

So no, I don't think it's heavy-handed in the slightest. If you're stupid enough to steal someone else's work, pose it as your own, and then attempt to make money off of it using Steam's marketplace, you deserve the strictest of penalties. You're breaking Steam's Terms of Service, and you deserve to be punished for that. You can whine about how it's heavy-handed all you like, but I'll bet you he learned his lesson and won't do it again.

An eye for an eye makes the world blind. You infringe on someone's intellectual property, your property gets stolen. Makes perfect sense. And that's what "banning" someone from a single player game does. Software is a product, not a service. EULAs are nothing but shiny baubles for overpaid lawyers to dangle in front of aging judges.

An eye for an eye may make the world go blind, but standing around letting guys stab you in the eye unpunished is a much stupider option. What else could valve have done? Sure they could have just taken the money back, but that doesn't punish anything, it just sets the things back to how he started. He deserves some actual punishment for doing this. Think about all the people who bought that axe because they thought it looked cool, now they're left with some random replacement, that's hardly fair.

As an aside, could news reporters on the escapist please keep their opinions out of news articles? I'm not saying you can't have them, just maybe leave them as a comment or something? I rather think news reporting should be done as bias free as possible, and shouldn't tell us what to think.

I don't think you're getting it. They could prevent him from ever buying new games from their store, and that would be fine. But taking away the games he had already bought and paid for? If we weren't dealing in digital land, where consumer law essentially does not exist, Valve would be the ones in hot water, not him. And they would deserve it, too.

 

[Andy Chalk]

Call me old-fashioned, but I equate this with, say, EA sending a guy over to your house to take away all the games you legally paid for because it caught you making copies of one you didn't. I don't think any of us would stand for that, so why is it okay for Valve to take away legitimately-purchased Steam titles for an unrelated matter?

 

[Itsthefuzz]

Call me old-fashioned, but I equate this with, say, EA sending a guy over to your house to take away all the games you legally paid for because it caught you making copies of one you didn't. I don't think any of us would stand for that, so why is it okay for Valve to take away legitimately-purchased Steam titles for an unrelated matter?

If I was caught making money off a stolen idea from a large company, I'd be much happier loosing my games then possibly getting sued for thousands.

 

[gigastar]

Broke terms of service, (possibly) knowingly committed copyright infringement, had it coming.

Now next week we will hear of this banned person coming out and saying that they have never heard of Aion and that they made the mace skin on thier own.

anc[is]Hold on, not only does DOTA2 have crates, they're already selling keys for them. And the game isn't even out yet. Damn it Valve just cut the nonsense and just ask for money.

There needs to be nonsense for the right to ask money, thats how the games market has worked for a long time now.

 

[gigastar]

Call me old-fashioned, but I equate this with, say, EA sending a guy over to your house to take away all the games you legally paid for because it caught you making copies of one you didn't. I don't think any of us would stand for that, so why is it okay for Valve to take away legitimately-purchased Steam titles for an unrelated matter?

Since you brought it up im pretty sure the UELA states that a breach of the UELA by the user will result in a ban where you will lose all your Steam purchases.

If you ask me thats a pretty big incentive to not break the UELA. Especially if youve been a long term Steam customer.

 

[Do4600]

Wonderful, glad to know me not supporting steam anymore is valid. He does something as small as this and gets banned for it and loses access to all the games he paid for.

Um...as small as this? The steam workshop is basically a place where steam customers are allowed to enter into a business partnership with Valve. It allows people to become part time developers and be published by Valve. This is not a small infringement, a key in DOTA 2 costs US$2.50. This mace is a matter of US$61,507.50, that's hardly small and as the developer behind the item he is entitled to a portion of the proceeds. This isn't a skin in minecraft, this is real business with real money behind it and that person straight up copied and pasted something that's not theirs to control. Firstly this person violated the terms of an agreement with Valve by using something that was not their property, secondly this person used somebody else's intellectual property for the purpose of earning money and dragged Valve into infringing on that property. How is this exactly a small matter?

 

[bafrali]

Call me old-fashioned, but I equate this with, say, EA sending a guy over to your house to take away all the games you legally paid for because it caught you making copies of one you didn't. I don't think any of us would stand for that, so why is it okay for Valve to take away legitimately-purchased Steam titles for an unrelated matter?

Steam is a service, not a retail product. Man violated the service rules he accepted beforehand and is banned from the service accordingly, losing the related licences in the process. He knew the danger and suffered the consequences.

Wish i knew how to fit an "unforeseen consequences" joke there

 

[uncanny474]

First off--If he's banned from Steam, he can still start it in "offline mode" and have access to his games. He can't redownload them, but he still HAS them. Hell, you can run the .exes directly from your Program Files if you know where to look. I know, because I bought Fallout 3 and NV from Steam, use the Fallout Mod Manager launcher to launch them, and they still launch fine, Steam or no Steam.

Valve didn't "take away" his games. They took away his ability to redownload them. That's completely different, and it's something most DRM does just for trying to install it more than three times. If DRM like THAT is legal, what Valve did is totally legit.

I'm not sure that banning him from Steam was the right call, but he's definitely getting off easy. If we see him in jail and STILL banned from Steam, then I'll start calling it harsh. I'm not a fan of the current intellectual property laws, but there's a big difference between lawyers screwing you over and directly stealing content from another game.

 

[Nielas]

Besides, if you want to keep claiming that software is a "product", then it should follow the same rules as any other product....including laws regarding theft. You can't have it both ways. So either it's a product (and therefore he should be punished as if he stole a product, including jailtime and the fees incurred from the legal proceedings) or it's a service (in which case it's well within Steam's right to decide the proper punishment for a violation of its Terms of Service and Use). They're in the right in both cases.

I actually think that he should be both allowed to keep the games and charged with fraud.

 

[Zipa]

Was this a VAC ban ? If so he hasn't lost access to his games, just the multiplayer aspect of games that use VAC.

I have no sympathy for him though, he blatantly ripped off another game and made money off it not only breaking the steam workshop TOS but the law as well.

 

[scotth266]

I would never condone plagiarism, but that's an awfully harsh punishment and one that I don't think necessarily speaks well of Steam. Transgressions must be punished, but stripping someone of games he's rightfully paid for is a little too heavy-handed for my liking.

The guy stole assets from another game and used it to make money. Thus, he should suffer a monetary penalty: the loss of his Steam games is a tidy way to do it without dragging in an army of lawyers and trying to sue him for money he likely doesn't have.

If someone like, say, a writer were to plagiarize work in real life, the penalty for that would be getting blacklisted by publishing houses for the rest of your life. Even the accusation of plagiarism can be enough to ruin many people's careers in the creative arena. And that's BEFORE the lawyers get involved.

By comparison, the loss of this dude's Steam games is a slap on the wrist.

 

[NLS]

Wonderful, glad to know me not supporting steam anymore is valid. He does something as small as this and gets banned for it and loses access to all the games he paid for.

The guy profits off other people's hard work, and makes Valve look like a fool for letting this stumble into the hands of 25,000 paying customers. He's been wasting Valve's time, and risked their reputation. Had Valve not taken any action, this could have gotten a lot more ugly once AION's lawyers get involved.

He's lucky he "only" got a ban.

 

[Varil]

Dude committed plagiarism. When Zynga does it they're the devil, but when it's one dude punishing him makes *you* the bad guy? The hell sort of attitude is that?

I usually hate the idea of a universal ban over stupid crap, but usually that stupid crap is something relatively minor like "Talked smack" or "Made an angry forum post". Even cheating in a game, or modding a game can get you banned in a lot of these "services", but people usually just gloss it over with "lul he deserved it". But some guy actively breaks the law and now you have people running to his defense "Well he just lost a thousand dollars worth of games!" Nevermind the 24000 people he apparently ripped off, I guess. Or the trouble he cost Valve. Or the company he was plagiarizing. I mean, dude lost his video games. Harsh!

Could you imagine if he'd gotten into actual legal trouble(as he easily could have since plagiarism, and I can't stress this enough, is actually illegal)? The forums would explode into rage and fury and anon would probably hack Brazil or something.

 

[Covarr]

Let's not go throwing around the "ban" word, if we don't know what they banned him from. Was it a Steam ban, resulting in the loss of all his games? Was it a VAC ban so that he can no longer play DOTA 2 online? Was it a ban from adding things to Steam Workshop?

What VALV[sup]E[/sup] said was vague. I think we'd be wise not to jump to conclusions about what they meant.

P.S. Thanks

 

[5ilver]

This is why I would never use Steam, no matter how convenient it is. Just the thought of having hundreds of games you've payed for stolen/erased is enough to make my hands shake.

Also, LOL at "everybody loses". Pretty sure valve is going to keep ALL THAT MONEY, including what was supposed to go to the banned guy.