PlayStation loses fight in EU courts to stop sale of 'parasite' mods because, among other reasons, a book author can't stop 'the reader from skipping to the end'

An image of Kratos from God of War Ragnarok sat in a frigid cave, while his son enters stage left with a deer.
(Image credit: Santa Monica Studio)

PlayStation's just lost a landmark court case that could set some precedent for cheating software in the EU—which is probably better for the consumer than it sounds at first blush.

As reported by EuroNews, PlayStation has recently been embroiled in a legal bout with Datel, who have been selling software that allows players to cheat at videogames. The software in question gave players infinite boosts in MotorStorm, but it also—in a less cheaty fashion—allowed them to control it using motion controls, which seems pretty benign to me.

The case made it to the highest court in the EU, the Court of Justice, and has been thoroughly dismissed in Datel's favour. Despite Sony's argument that the software "latches on … like a parasite" to the console, the judges maintain that the software involved merely impacts its RAM rather than the program itself, so it's all fair play:

"The Directive on the legal protection of computer programs does not allow the holder of that protection to prohibit the marketing by a third party of software which merely changes variables transferred temporarily … The directive protects only the intellectual creation as it is reflected in the text of the computer program’s source code and object code."

In other words, the EU is completely fine with selling cheats, mods, and other software that only impact a game's data in RAM—whether that's on a computer or not.

In an opinion presented to the court back in April, Advocate General Maciej Szpunar also added: "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."

It should be noted that, naturally, this doesn't stop Sony from banning players who violate their terms of service agreements—the EU isn't giving you carte blanche to spawn infinite samples in Helldivers 2, or anything—merely, it's simply not against the law to sell these things for use. The person buying them gets to make the judgement call on whether they're likely to get their accounts in trouble or not.

Honestly, there are a lot of reasons to cheer for this if you're into mods, or think that you should have control over the software and hardware you buy. While that detective novel comparison is pretty messy—games are obviously more complicated than that—I agree with the overall sentiment, and Sony's characterisation of these tools as parasites is far more wack by most metrics.

Cheating in multiplayer games sucks, obviously, but when it comes to single-player games, who rightly cares? Should Sony be able to legally punish someone for modifying a piece of hardware they own, or selling tools to do that? I don't really think so. That's not to mention that software like this also includes accessibility aids that disabled people use to play their videogames. These gamers use software that could (uncharitably) be considered cheats all the time.

Not to mention, accessibility options are growing more and more popular in mainstream gaming anyway, like high-contrast visuals, sound cues, and toggles that just straight-up stop you from dying. Even if some studios still haven't figured out the whole colour-blind thing yet (I'm not still mad, Larian, I pinky promise), I don't think any company should get a say in whether people do it themselves, as long as they're being reasonable and not ruining online modes for others. Let 'em play.

TOPICS
Harvey Randall
Staff Writer

Harvey's history with games started when he first begged his parents for a World of Warcraft subscription aged 12, though he's since been cursed with Final Fantasy 14-brain and a huge crush on G'raha Tia. He made his start as a freelancer, writing for websites like Techradar, The Escapist, Dicebreaker, The Gamer, Into the Spine—and of course, PC Gamer. He'll sink his teeth into anything that looks interesting, though he has a soft spot for RPGs, soulslikes, roguelikes, deckbuilders, MMOs, and weird indie titles. He also plays a shelf load of TTRPGs in his offline time. Don't ask him what his favourite system is, he has too many.

Read more
A picture of Bowser behind jail bars.
Nintendo wins major French piracy case with EU-wide consequences: 'Significant not only for Nintendo, but for the entire games industry'
BloodbornePSX - A hunter standing in front of a lantern
Sony enforcers execute a legal visceral attack on the BloodbornePSX demake, continuing its mission to eradicate all traces of FromSoft's beloved RPG on PC
knockout city, rumbleverse, and multiversus key art divided in thirds
UK government says it won't change the rules on publishers taking videogames offline after selling them: 'We have no plans to amend existing consumer law on digital obsolescence'
Bloodborne art
Sony bullies Bloodborne 60 fps mod off the internet with DMCA takedown as it continues to let the FromSoft classic gather dust on PS4
marvel rivals characters screenshots
'We will take measures to vanquish this nefarious behavior': Marvel Rivals will ban console players who use a mouse and keyboard
Aloy
Sony gets people scratching their heads after region-locking purchases of Horizon Forbidden West, 10 entire months after its initial release
Latest in Gaming Industry
Yoda Luke and R2 in Lego form.
Lego is going to make its videogames in-house from now on, says it would 'almost rather overinvest'
A masked man with an axe in the woods
Rebellion CEO seems kind of awed by major studios making massive videogames: 'How do you organize a game that has 2,000 people working on it?'
A computer screen with program code warning of a detected malware script program. 3d illustration
Coder faces 10 years' jailtime for creating a 'kill switch' that screwed-up his employers' systems when he was laid off
Atomfall screenshot
Rebellion CEO puts the studio's recent avoidance of layoffs down to control of scope and cost: 'Sometimes we say, guys, this game's too big'
Judge Dredd promotional image in Warzone
Half-a-dozen 2000AD games were in the works before fizzling out: 'The games you get to see are a tiny representative of the number that get started—sadly'
sniper elite 5 cover
Sniper Elite CEO reckons Swen Vincke is right to snarl at short-sighted publishers: 'You could argue that their business at senior level isn't making games… their business is managing their shareholders' perceptions'
Latest in News
Inzoi - A Zoi's face in three graphical presets showing a progression from a slightly blurry minimum specs to a higher fidelity recommended specs.
Oh great, the full Inzoi system requirements are posted and I'm barely above the minimum specs so I guess my Zois will be beautifully blurry
Mark Darrah
BioWare veteran says a big delay is better than lots of little ones, because sometimes you just gotta 'burn it down and take the other fork in the road'
Two rising ronin facing each other
Rise of the Ronin is another crappy PC port, performance patch coming 'soon'
Defiance players
A dead MMO that launched with a now-cancelled TV show in 2013 is coming back 4 years after servers were shut down
The OpenAI logo is being displayed on a smartphone with an AI brain visible in the background, in this photo illustration taken in Brussels, Belgium, on January 2, 2024. (Photo illustration by Jonathan Raa/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
OpenAI is working on a new AI model Sam Altman says is ‘good at creative writing’ but to me it reads like a 15-year-old's journal
Alma, the handler from Monster Hunter Wilds, closes her eyes and looks a little disappointed.
This impractical method of getting a 1-second capture time in Monster Hunter Wilds can make you the fastest hunter alive—on paper