The Development of China Court’s Judgment over Criminal Offence of Online Game Cheating Programs, III

Today, our website will introduce the most recent crime adopted by courts in some regions of China to combat online game cheating programs: the crime of damaging computer information systems.

III. The crime of damaging computer information systems

Although there problems with all of the crimes previously discussed for combating cheating programs, with the strengthening of legislation, the online game industry finally found a suitable crime in 2011. According to Article 286 of the Criminal Law:

“Those who violate the law by deleting, modifying, adding, or interfering with the function of computer information systems so that information systems are unable to run normally, which leads to severe consequences, may be sentenced to imprisonment of no more than five years of detention; when the consequences are especially severe, the violator may be sentenced to imprisonment of more than five years. Those who violate the law by deleting, modifying, or adding data or applicable procedures to the storage, processing, or transmission programs in computer information systems, which leads to severe consequences, may be punished as per the preceding paragraph.”

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The Development of China Court’s Judgment over Criminal Offence of Online Game Cheating Programs, II

Today, we will introduce the second crime adopted in China to combat cheating programs in online games: criminal copyright infringement.

II. The state of criminal copyright infringement

After years of combating cheating programs using the crime of illegal operation, the judicial organs in some regions tried to use criminal copyright infringement from Article 217 of the Criminal Law to combat cheating programs. The subjective aspect of criminal copyright infringement requires the unlicensed copying and distribution of the copyrighted work of another for profit.

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The Development of China Court’s Judgment over Criminal Offence of Online Game Cheating Programs, I

(By You Yunting) Since Shanda imported the massively popular online game, MIR, from South Korea in 2001, the online game industry has gradually become one of the most profitable businesses in China, and has made a fortune for tycoons such as Chen Tianqiao and Ding Lei. On the other hand, all kinds of illicit activities have arisen with the development of the online game business, among which cheating programs to assist players is the most troublesome for the game companies.

According to information acquired by the writer while working in a game company, cheating programs are software that run with the game software, thus giving them their name as game cheating programs. Cheating programs have several harms. First, they incur Gresham’s Law (bad money chases out good money), which makes rules-obeying players easily defeated and thereby damages the fairness of the game. Second they put more burden on the server and force the operator to purchase more servers and the bandwidth, which undoubtedly increases costs and decreases the stability of the server. Third, they enable players to fulfill game objective more quickly, which abnormally speeds up the progress of the game and could force the game company invest more human resources into developing new game content or elements. Although it is possible that some cheating programs are used to make up for the defects in the game, most have harmed the gaming experience, added costs of the company’s development and operation, and could jeopardize stable running of the game.

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