Comment on Top EU Court’s Advisor Explains Why Video Game Cheats Are Not Copyright Infringement
MossyFeathers@pawb.social 2 months agoThe symbols would be copyrighted, but the actual behind-the-scenes value (i.e. 20/100, 62.5/1200, etc) isn’t. That’s what they’re referring to.
notfromhere@lemmy.ml 2 months ago
I mean what if you didn’t use 20/100 for the value, you used a symbol (in the code as the value). Would it still apply?
MossyFeathers@pawb.social 2 months ago
…yes? Changing the language or the way it’s presented doesn’t change the math behind the scenes. That’s not how computers work.
notfromhere@lemmy.ml 2 months ago
I’m not explaining it properly. Imagine instead of 100 hp, there is apple bananas. That isn’t really a mathematic representation in the same way that the cheat code can change. It would be a copyrighted work of art. It wouldn’t be trivial to build an hp system to do this (in fact it would be a large undertaking), but I am not asking about practicality, just what the law would find.
MossyFeathers@pawb.social 2 months ago
No, no it wouldn’t. You’re still using math, you’re just using a different language. If apple bananas becomes apple pears after being hit by a bullet, you’ve changed the value. That is what math describes. You cannot avoid this. This is how computers work, and math is just another language to describe things. Even if every health value is a string, you still need to keep track of which string is currently in use so that you know when to kill the player. That requires math. That is what they’re talking about. It is not the in-game health indicator that is public domain, it is the actual health value in RAM that is generated and modified during gameplay.
It is better this way. Copyright is already abused to hell and back, if they expanded copyright to cover this kinda stuff then it would potentially destroy things like right-to-repair as companies could claim copyright infringement on anything that modifies their code.