Every penny is rightfully charged.
Since 2021, "Destiny 2" developer Bungie has begun to take resolute legal measures to crack down on plugins, not only suing the users of plugins - buyers, but also hitting many plug-in sellers and developers, and has made progress repeatedly.
In August 2021, Bungie filed a lawsuit against one of the plug-in sales platforms VeteranCheats.com. The site sells plugins that allow players to cheat or create perverse advantages in a variety of ways, such as assisted aiming, see-through through walls, predicting enemy moves, eliminating gun recoil, bullet tracking, etc.
Website homepage
Soon, Bungie identified one of the operators behind the site: a Romanian named Mihai Claudiu-Florentin. The case was followed up for more than a year, until February 2023, when Bungie filed a motion against the accused Mihai for a verdict in absentia.
According to the motion filed with the Federal District Court for the Western District of Washington, Bungie sought compensation from the defendant totaling US$12,059,912.98 (approximately RMB 83,395,504.25). This is not at the lion's mouth.
In August 2022, Bungie requested that Stripe, a payment service provider, be subpoenaed to investigate orders for plug-ins related to the defendants. Stripe provided data on thousands of sales, including 5,848 unique deals, involving "Destiny 2 plugins or premium add-on products that include Destiny 2 options."
Between November 2020 and July 2022, Mihai and the other defendants profited $146,662.28 from these transactions. The sale of plug-ins is an infringement, and the profits obtained belong to the losses caused to the copyright owner, that is, "actual damages". Bungie is entitled to recover those profits.
The vast majority of the claim amount, $1,1696,000, is also based on infringement claims for violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), calculated based on $2,000 per transaction, and is considered "statutory damages."
Bungie noted that while they can't accurately calculate more specific financial damages, they've spent more than $2 million on anti-cheat manpower and software since Mihai made the first deal to "combat VeteranCheats and other cheat software."
In August 2021, Destiny 2 launched the BattlEye anti-cheat system
Moreover, the transactions in the Stripe account alone are not sufficient to assess the damage caused by Mihai and the entire VeteranCheats website, and it does not count the infringement of Mihai and the website's customers using plugins in Destiny 2 to circumvent the ban.
As a result, Bungie believes that the amount of her claim is "perfectly appropriate." "If the actions of the defendant do not justify a large compensation award, it is difficult to imagine under what circumstances a large compensation should be awarded."
Finally, Bungie demanded that the defendants bear the costs of attorneys' fees and other costs they paid for the lawsuit, totaling $217,250.70.
Mihai and Bungie's legal team had a brief email exchange and tried to reach an out-of-court settlement, asking Bungie to withdraw the lawsuit on the condition that he no longer sell Destiny 2 plugins. He persuaded Bungie to target the actual developers of the plug-ins, not his "small sellers," and gave names to a series of plugins.
"I'm just a small seller trying to make a little money," the email came from TorrentFreak
This diversion of contradictory rhetoric did not help, and Bungie continued to ask the court for a ruling, and since the defendant consistently refused to appear in court, it was only a matter of time before the case was won.
On April 27, 2023, the court ruled in Bungie's favor and fully agreed to Bungie's request for the amount of the claim, not a penny. In addition, the court issued Mihai a permanent injunction in effect worldwide, which meant that he could no longer engage in any activity that might infringe Bungie's copyright, and that he would have to destroy any software that might interact with or be related to Bungie's intellectual property.
Bungie and the players scored a major victory like never before. Unfortunately, the anti-plug-in war has a long way to go, and it is far from a problem that can be solved by a single manufacturer's lawsuit against a single seller.
Bungie can use copyright law to solve the problems of its own games, but it can't afford to take the plugins of other games into one pot. As of this writing, the VeteranCheats website is still functional. There are no shadows of Destiny 2 plugins on the website, but the plugins of other games are not affected in the slightest and are still for sale. On the plug-in store page, the top two games are Call of Duty and Overwatch.
$12 million is indeed an astronomical amount, but for the external industry chain of the three caves of the rabbit, the penalty is not cruel enough.