Court locks in Bungie's $4.4 million win against Destiny 2 cheat maker, refuses request for a new trial
More than a year after Destiny 2 studio Bungie won a $4.4 million award against cheat maker AimJunkies, two US courts have effectively locked in the victory: One ruling affirmed the amount of the award, which AimJunkies had appealed, while another denied the company's request for a new trial.
Bungie's case against AimJunkies was one of several it brought against cheat makers including PerfectAim, GatorCheats, and Ring-1, but it stumbled a bit out of the gate. In May 2022 a judge dismissed part of Bungie's claim related to copyright infringement, a small but surprising win for AimJunkies. It didn't add up to much in the end: The bulk of the remaining claim was sent to arbitration, which resulted in a ruling in favor of Bungie just shy of $4.4 million, most of it related to DMCA violations.
As reported by TorrentFreak, AimJunkies had filed a motion asking that the jury's decision be overturned as a matter of law because Bungie had not actually proven copyright violation—essentially saying the jury had clearly come to the wrong decision—and requesting either a different verdict or a new trial. In a ruling issued on August 30, however, the court rejected the claim, saying «substantial» direct and circumstantial evidence supports the jury's finding.
One interesting point in the appeal and ruling arose from a comparison with the famous Game Genie cheat cartridges. AimJunkies used the 1992 legal battle between Galoob Toys and Nintendo to bolster its claim that its software does not create derivative works and is thus not violating copyright. But the Game Genie was a «dumb» device because it only blocked a single byte of data, which users could then replace with any other data; the AimJunkies software, the court ruled, «was not dumb and functioned as more than a window into Destiny 2's programming.»
«Beyond just allowing the end user to edit a value in computer code generated from a valid source without modifying the underlying source, the Cheat Software's computer code is
