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Epic Games (Fortnite creators) sue a 14 year old for hacking video content

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  • Epic Games (Fortnite creators) sue a 14 year old for hacking video content

    Epic Games (Fortnite creators) sue a 14 year old for hacking video content. I don't think this will end well for Epic Games since they released the name of someone who is a minor.

    Epic Games makes the wildly successful multiplayer free-to-play game Fortnite, which is the locus of a pitched battle between players and publisher over game-mods, especially cheat-hacks that give unfair advantage to some players.

    A 14 year old boy named Caleb “Sky Orbit” Rogers made a video in which he demonstrated the use of one of these hacks. In response, the company sent Youtube a heavy-handed copyright takedown, claiming that capturing incidental footage of gameplay was a copyright violation, and that demonstrating the functionality of one of these aftermarket add-ons is also a copyright violation.

    Then Caleb Rogers correctly asserted that there was no copyright infringement here. Videos that capture small snippets of a videogame do not violate that game creator's copyrights, because they are fair use: they take a small part of the work (not the core of the work), for a critical purpose, without creating a substitute market for the work. No one who watches a 14 year old's screen capture of a videogame will decide that it's as much fun as playing the game.

    When Caleb Rogers filed a put-back notice with Youtube that reinstated his video, Epic responded by filing a lawsuit against him, repeating the incorrect claim that Rogers' video was a copyright infringing derivative work, and claiming that Rogers had formed, and then breached, a contract with Epic by playing their game and then talking about how to cheat in it.
    Sources:
    Epic Games makes the wildly successful multiplayer free-to-play game Fortnite, which is the locus of a pitched battle between players and publisher over game-mods, especially cheat-hacks that give unfair advantage…
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