Cheats and anti-cheat technologies in the context of copyright: issues of qualification and liability

Computer games have become an integral part of leisure activities for millions of people around the world. At the same time, the desire of players to gain a competitive advantage and the will to achieve immediate results often encourage the users to employ cheats, i.e., software tools enabling victories to be achieved dishonestly. The spread of cheats undermines the principles of fair play and creates unequal conditions for users. This, in turn, leads to a decrease in the gaming audience and, as a result, entails losses for publishers. In addition, cheats often infringe on the exclusive rights of copyright holders. In this regard, the legal issues of cheats, especially in the context of protecting the copyrights of video game copyright holders, represent a relevant research direction. This study aims to characterize cheats and anti-cheat technologies from the legal point of view, to determine their conformity with the provisions of copyright laws and with user agreements, to establish the type of responsibility of the creators of cheats, as well as to identify whether cheats are always deemed unacceptable from the legal point of view. The research was conducted using the methods of formal legal and comparative legal analysis. The former was used to assess the scope of copyright protection of video games and to discuss the capacity of individual norms to cover cheats. The latter was used to compare norms concerning technological means of copyright protection, the scope of copyright protection of video games, etc. As a result, several legal qualifications of cheats (from the point of view of criminal and civil law) were proposed. It was concluded that most modern online game cheats violate the exclusive rights of the authors as well as the provisions of user agreements. In this regard, there is a growing demand for anti-cheating technologies, which are in essence technological means of copyright protection, and in some jurisdictions, the very fact of their circumvention may result in liability.