SoatDev IT Consulting
SoatDev IT Consulting
  • About us
  • Expertise
  • Services
  • How it works
  • Contact Us
  • News
  • May 29, 2024
  • Rss Fetcher
A screenshot taken from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3
Image: Activision

Activision notched a second victory in an ongoing legal case against EngineOwning, a cheat maker that the company sued in 2022. Yesterday, District Judge Michael Fitzgerald ordered several defendants, including EngineOwning itself, to pay the company $14.465,600 for their creation and distribution of Call of Duty cheats.

In addition, the judge ordered EngineOwning to turn over its website, stop making and selling cheats, and pay $292,912 in attorney fees to Activision. You can find a PDF of the ruling here. The site, engineowning.to, is apparently still operating today, offering cheats like an “Aimbot” that automatically aims and fires or the ability to see other players through walls for many games, including several in the CoD series.

Activision had previously won $3 million in a pair of settlements with two of the people — Ignacio Gayduchenko and Manuel Santiago — involved with EngineOwning, as IGN notes. But it had originally sued many more people who never responded to the lawsuit.

Yesterday’s filing named EngineOwning itself and its founders, Valentin Rick and Leon Risch, in addition to several others, including people involved in managing and marketing, site moderation, and an authorized EngineOwning reseller named Pascal Classen. Because they didn’t respond, the company finally asked the court in April to make a call, leading to yesterday’s default judgment.

The judge found EngineOwning and its many associated defendants guilty of violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. He also found them guilty of “intentionally” inducing players to buy and use cheats, despite knowing that the Call of Duty terms of use forbid it.

Gaming companies are increasingly turning to the courts to deal with cheat creators. In 2022, Bungie settled with Destiny 2 cheat makers for $13.5 million. Bungie also won a much smaller sum of $63,000, but it was also likely the first time a jury had ruled in such a case. AimJunkies, the defendant in that case, had taken the extraordinary approach of fighting the case, rather than ignoring it or settling.

Previous Post
Next Post

Recent Posts

  • TechCrunch Week in Review: Coinbase gets hacked
  • Epic Games asks judge to force Apple to approve Fortnite
  • Y Combinator startup Firecrawl is ready to pay $1M to hire three AI agents as employees
  • Build, don’t bind: Accel’s Sonali De Rycker on Europe’s AI crossroads
  • OpenAI’s planned data center in Abu Dhabi would be bigger than Monaco

Categories

  • Industry News
  • Programming
  • RSS Fetched Articles
  • Uncategorized

Archives

  • May 2025
  • April 2025
  • February 2025
  • January 2025
  • December 2024
  • November 2024
  • October 2024
  • September 2024
  • August 2024
  • July 2024
  • June 2024
  • May 2024
  • April 2024
  • March 2024
  • February 2024
  • January 2024
  • December 2023
  • November 2023
  • October 2023
  • September 2023
  • August 2023
  • July 2023
  • June 2023
  • May 2023
  • April 2023

Tap into the power of Microservices, MVC Architecture, Cloud, Containers, UML, and Scrum methodologies to bolster your project planning, execution, and application development processes.

Solutions

  • IT Consultation
  • Agile Transformation
  • Software Development
  • DevOps & CI/CD

Regions Covered

  • Montreal
  • New York
  • Paris
  • Mauritius
  • Abidjan
  • Dakar

Subscribe to Newsletter

Join our monthly newsletter subscribers to get the latest news and insights.

© Copyright 2023. All Rights Reserved by Soatdev IT Consulting Inc.