PlayStation has lost a lawsuit against Datel, a company behind popular video game cheats. The legal showdown between Sony and the Action Replay manufacturer dragged on for 10+ years, with the European Court of Justice siding with Datel in a ruling published yesterday.
Third-party PlayStation cheats and add-ons don’t necessarily break EU law
The lawsuit stemmed from Datel selling cheats for 2009’s PSP game MotorStorm Arctic Edge (also released on the PS2). The cheat in question enabled players to use unlimited boosts/turbo by bypassing restrictions placed by the game.
Here’s the problem: Sony argued that its copyright was being infringed and that the cheat “latches on like a parasite” to the software, as reported by Euro News. In reality, however, Datel’s cheat didn’t actually modify software, it fiddled with code stored within PSP’s memory, as explained by TorrentFreak back in 2023.
A court had originally ruled in Sony’s favor but Datel appealed, following which the ruling was overturned because the cheat in question ran “parallel commands on the variables stored in the main memory.” Understandably unhappy with the decision, Sony went all the way to the European Court of Justice, which ultimately decided in Datel’s favor (read the decision on InfoCuria).
To be clear, Sony can legally ban players for using cheats both offline and online. This ruling is strictly related to cheat manufacturers, and the issue is that what Datel was doing was a form of modding without meddling with the software itself. That doesn’t violate EU copyright laws.
Multiplayer-only games are a different story, however, because cheats are designed to ruin the experience for those playing legitimately. In this particular case, an advocate likened players using offline boosts to someone picking up a book and skipping pages.
“The author of a detective novel cannot prevent the reader from skipping to the end of the novel to find out who the killer is, even if that would spoil the pleasure of reading and ruin the author’s efforts to maintain suspense,” Advocate General Maciej Szpunar opined.
Neither Sony nor Datel have commented on the ruling.
