League Of Legends Cheat Service Fined $10 Million

A site that offered help to cheat at League of Legends has been ordered to shut down and pay $10 million to developers Riot Games. A court ruled LeagueSharp had violated digital copyright laws.

The website charged would-be cheats $15 a month to run one account and $50 a month to automate multiple accounts. It worked by running scripts that adjusted game code to automate complex action combinations to win. The result was summed up as “press Space bar to win” and, while effective, was unconvincing as it simply wasn’t plausible a human player could carry out such combinations so quickly.

Those paying for the cheating service weren’t just trying to gain unfair personal glory. It also seems many were using it to build up player accounts to high levels before selling them on to other players.

Riot Games sued under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. That’s the law that makes it illegal to produce and distribute software or devices that can overcome digital copyright protection measures, whether or not the creators or users actually infringe copyright.

In this case, the court agreed with Riot’s interpretation of the act. Riot said that players are only meant to be able to access game content if they are playing fairly. If they do so by cheating, they are accessing copyrighted content without permission.

The court also agreed with a secondary argument, namely that LeagueSharp were interfering with the contractual relationship between Riot and players. Riot argued that LeagueSharp marketed its service despite knowing that anyone using it would be breaching the anti-cheating rules in the game’s terms and conditions.

The $10 million award appears to be a combination of a financial punishment and deterrent, and compensation for the extra costs Riot had to pay to update its software to try to combat the cheating.