Valve Drops the Hammer On Infringing Dota 2 Mace

[SoranMBane]

The guy violated the TOS, tried to make money by passing off someone else's work as their own, and opened Valve up to possible legal liability; any one of those things would have been worth a ban or even worse. But my disagreeing with you is not why I'm upset about that final comment in this article. I'd be upset with it even if I agreed with it, because it shouldn't be there at all. Is this a news article, or a personal blog post? If it's the former, keep your opinions out of it. If it's the latter, don't call it "news."

 

[SacremPyrobolum]

People are saying that being banned from games you paid for is justified because it is like being slapped with a legal fine for the infringement, and that is reasonable.

However, what if it was a infringement of a player made asset, or some other bannable infraction that did not have any influence over money? Surely then they would issue a ban on just forums and other community propelled functions. I mean, they already make you use a completely different account for the forums so I should not be that hard?

Locking them out of multiplier would be equally draconian, because while it is through Steam that multiplayer is directed, that specific multiplayer is the games and bans from multiplayer should be on a game by game basis.

Steam should be able to separate its commercial platform from its community.

 

[SachielOne]

Regardless of whether or not Valve was too heavy handed with this, I don't see that they had much choice. This seems to me to be more about making an example of this one infringer in order to discourage other people from doing the same.

 

[MonkeyPunch]

Harsh punishment? I dunno.
Steal from others and have your stuff "stolen"(or taken away) in return. Seems about right.

 

[IamLEAM1983]

Full on plagiarism and you think being locked out of steam is too heavy? If you were caught doing this at university you'd be banned from graduating. There are many cases in the real world where you get charged thousands of dollars for this sort of willful infringement. I think he got off lightly really.

I'd agree with you on that. Some folks at my campus got fingered for using premade and paid-for book reports and assignments. I remember the campus paper carried a pretty epic story around September 2005. Some guy faked his doctorate's thesis, and the revision committee didn't notice anything until months after the fact. The argument used is always lack of time, along with the usual case of "I really fucking need this grade but I didn't study for shit, fuuuuuuu-".

It also reminds me of the pretty endemic plagiarism on art portals. I remember a few DevART and Elfwood users who got the shaft after submitting dodgy recolors of other works and claiming them as their own. The deeper you go in any DevART search, the crappier the results turn out to be. The crappier they get, the more you start seeing generic Anime crap taken from the same five or six sources and copy-pasted ad nauseam.

On the other hand, I can sort of understand why it is that people copy. The only way a crappy artist can absorb more styles and techniques is if he relentlessly apes them until they become second nature. Only then can he hope to break them down and end with an original approach. Some people just take refuge in that fact and assume that simply reproducing something popular makes artists out of them.

 

[Akisa]

If you're going to make fan man mods, don't upload them to the company's website, use a third party website.

 

[SacremPyrobolum]

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.

Well, there is a difference between being fired and being fired and then stolen from.

The person in question presumably had a library full of games that he paid for taken away. Now, in this case you could justify it slightly by saying that the money he lost was the equivalent of what he earned with the weapon and with some other fines put in but that depends on the value of his library.

In the case of the forum you mentioned that is completely out of hand. From what I gather if I was to refer to a games existing art and say that something like this would go well in your game, I could be banned and have the game which I payed for taken away. Not for actually doing something, mind you, but for posting a suggestions which the company might and might not (probably not) use. Art is usually inspired by similar art and sometimes people mix things up and do not realize that that awesome sword you saw on deviant art actually belongs to an obscure South Korean MMO. For example, the Beatles tasked Ringo to create a song. He comes back and shows him his idea only to find out that it is actually a real song by another musician. I should not be held accountable for the company not checking on whether my ideas are original or not.

 

[Deathfish15]

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.

Small? He stole another person/company's Intellectual Property and passed it off as his own for SALE in a different game product. That's not small, that's HUGE! He deserved his ban.

Yeah and he spent who knows how much off games on Steam. Ban him from ever playing the game again and prevent him from making money off the item , but losing 1000s of dollars worth of games is not fair. I'm never replacing my discs if getting banned is this easy.

How do you mean "if getting banned is this easy"? He plagiarized someone's product for his own personal gain. That's cheating, and against several state and federal laws. If you see cheating and illegal activities as easy things that are common place for you, ....well, I recommend reading a book on morality or going to church.

 

[SacremPyrobolum]

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.

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?

He stole someone else's work and used it to make thousands of dollars of profit for himself. Losing access to his inventory of Steam games is a small price to pay compared to the charges that could easily have been filed against him for what amounts to an actual criminal act. He could easily have faced jailtime and a lawsuit directly from Aion's lawyers that would have drained him of many thousands of dollars. >_>

Steam is a service, not a product. Steam is a marketplace that allows you to BUY products, but Steam itself is most definitely a service (like any physical store). In addition to giving you a virtual marketplace, they're offering you free social networking with other gamers and making it very easy for you to locate like-minded groups of players and play with them, often running multi-player connections through their services. And they're storing the game data you use to play the game as well as your save data via Cloud networking on their servers.

Ergo, they are actually offering you many services, and all of them are entirely free. You're paying for the ability to play a game on their servers, and you're getting these other things as extras. They have every right to say that you no longer deserve access to those services (including access to their game servers) if you don't play by their rules. Don't like it? Don't use Steam. The rest of us are perfectly happy with getting games at far cheaper price tags in exchange for following a few very simple instructions like "don't steal other people's stuff".

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.

Not necessarily eluding to the issue at hand, but I was interested at what you said about Steam being a service selling products. So the games he had were, in your opinion (and mine) a product, as in something that no one can tell you how to use or can ever be taken away involuntarily by the retailer(Steam).

 

[Bloodstain]

Full on plagiarism and you think being locked out of steam is too heavy? If you were caught doing this at university you'd be banned from graduating. There are many cases in the real world where you get charged thousands of dollars for this sort of willful infringement. I think he got off lightly really.

Indeed. I was expecting him to be sued.

 

[SacremPyrobolum]

Arent instances like this common on third party sites though? I know I've seen a few plugsuits in Fallout and even Oblivion and don't get me started on this.

Spoiler

[youtube] watch?v=WCP9Jn2Q0cQ[/youtube]

Fuck, I am really bad at tags...

Fine, here is the boring old link...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCP9Jn2Q0cQ

 

[Username Redacted]

Full on plagiarism and you think being locked out of steam is too heavy? If you were caught doing this at university you'd be banned from graduating. There are many cases in the real world where you get charged thousands of dollars for this sort of willful infringement. I think he got off lightly really.

Indeed. I was expecting him to be sued.

He's very lucky he hasn't been. I also really do really love the plagiarism apologists that we seem to have here in abundance.

 

[SacremPyrobolum]

Full on plagiarism and you think being locked out of steam is too heavy? If you were caught doing this at university you'd be banned from graduating. There are many cases in the real world where you get charged thousands of dollars for this sort of willful infringement. I think he got off lightly really.

Indeed. I was expecting him to be sued.

He's very lucky he hasn't been. I also really do really love the plagiarism apologists that we seem to have here in abundance.

I think people are slightly dazed by the last instances of being banned from content for far lesser offences, as was the case in being banned from Origins or more specifically Mass Effect 3 if you said something rude or modded the single player game.

It is a knee jerk reaction and in general people do not like the idea of their stuff being taken away for any reason.

 

[Twilight.falls]

I don't understand everybody saying that Valve is evil for banning the guy. He broke the rules, could have caused a lot of legal trouble for Valve, and of course was stealing another company's property to sell for a profit.

Why are people worried about losing all their Steam games? It takes an incredibly serious offense to ever be brought to that level. I doubt there are a ton of people making these serious offenses.

I'm sorry, but anyone who says the contributor is a "victim" rather than a criminal is condoning plagiarism, which is unnerving.

 

[RhombusHatesYou]

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.

It doesn't say whether this ban is just for DOTA 2, a VAC Ban (no steam based multiplayer) or has had their Steam account terminated, and only the last one means losing your entire Steam library.

No point of accusing Valve of 'stealing' people's stuff if that isn't what has happened.