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.


New Labyrinth Board Game Expansion: GOBLINS!

Riverhourse has just announced that they will soon release a “GOBLINS” expansion for their massively popular Labyrinth board game.

The Goblins! expansion for Jim Henson’s Labyrinth – The Board Game continues your collection of creatures from the movie and gives you optional rules to make more use of the goblin infantry, cavalry and artillery.

The expansion features:

-5 highly collectible Goblin figurines (3 x infantry, 1 x cavalry, 1 x artillery);
-5 new Labyrinth cards;
-1 rules leaflet.

For those interested, the new GOBLINS expansion can be pre-ordered right now from Amazon right here.

Yes, That Is Mojo on FX’s Legion (Update, Shadow King, I Was Wrong)

Legion is a new FX TV show based around the X-Men mutant who is basically the most powerful mutant in the Marvel U (really,) but his illness (which is schizophrenia by the way) keeps him from knowing what is real and what isn’t. His story alone is mature and twisted and surreal and quite unlike any Marvel material you have seen before. First off, I am here to ask those of you who are not watching it, why? From cast to budget to the mental breakdown scenes, everything is top shelf and handled exquisitely. But there is one other reason I wanted to write this, and it is more aimed at people already watching Legion.

Yes, the creepy-ass mutant with yellow eyes we always see in the shadows and darkness is X-Men baddie Mojo and I, for one, could not be more excited. What makes Mojo being on a TV show so spectacular is he is a “spineless one” in the comic (his lower half are robotic spider legs. Yup, I just said that) and in his world, what he calls the “Mojoverse”, he makes people fight to the death on TV shows that are more like gladiator battles than anything else. So what I am saying is, a mutant who is TV obsessed is on A TV show, and when they finally present him, he will think this is all a TV show. How meta is that?

Now I know a great many of you may not understand that fully, but trust me when I say, Marvel is hitting pure gold with Legion and you need to watch it ASAP.

Legion airs Wednesday nights on FX at 10 PM.

(Edit: Shadow King according to many readers, writer still thinks Shadow King does NOT look like this. Note the double chin, yellow skin and the fact that, on the show, we don’t see his bottom half because they don’t have the budget but you geeks are right, it is Shadow King as of the finale. I concur and apologize for my assumption).

~Remy of GeeksAreSexy~

Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back Gets an Epic Modern Trailer [Video]

Youtuber Tom F. used some footage from The Empire Strikes Back and created a modern trailer for the movie, and I have to say, It made me feel like watching the movie all over again, even though I’ve seen it countless time. For those who are curious, I’ll also include the original trailer below.

[Tom F]

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