Internet Law News

Cracking The Code Online IP Theft Is Not A Game

It must have seemed like the perfect scheme—buy the stolen source code of a popular online game, rent some servers to run the game as your own, and then hang a shingle on the web inviting gamers to come play at a steep discount.

A California man who followed that path must have thought he’d never get caught. He was even warned once by the game’s rightful owner, a large South Korean company, to shut down. He didn’t.

“They don’t think that a company is going to come after them at any point,” says Christopher Thompson, a special agent on a cyber squad in the FBI’s office in Austin, Texas. “He said he was going to stop doing it and he didn’t.”

So the company, which has offices in Austin, called the FBI. The suspect was apparently lining his own pockets from “donations” and ads on his site while his pirated version of the game, “Lineage II,” was siphoning $750,000 a month in potential revenues from the company.

According to Agent Thompson, here’s how the scheme evolved:

In 2003, a computer user in China obtained the “Lineage” source code from an unprotected website. The proprietary code was then placed on the underground market, where a Texas man, among others, bought it in 2004. He then passed it along to his business partner in California, who set up a website, to offer the “Lineage” game at a discount. Gamers arrived in droves—as many as 50,000 active users by 2006—which pinched the legitimate game’s bottom line.

“It’s comparable to the music-downloading and file-sharing problem in the late ‘90s—thousands of people engaging in activity that is inherently illegal,” Agent Thompson said. Read more at fbi.gov.

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	Did You Know?
	About computer trespass or hacking Or known as hacking, any person who uses a computer or computer network with knowledge that such use is without authority and with the intention of: Deleting or in any way removing, either temporarily or permanently, any computer program or data from a computer or computer network; (2) Obstructing, interrupting, or in any way interfering with the use of a computer program or data; or (3) Altering, damaging, or in any way causing the malfunction of a computer, computer network, or computer program, regardless of how long the alteration, damage, or malfunction persists