In a precedent-setting move, a judge has issued a legal permaban to one Destiny 2 cheat creator, on top of ordering them to pay a whopping $500,000 in copyright damages. ArsTechnica reported on a recent consent judgment between Bungie and teenage cheater Luca Leone, wherein both parties agreed to the aforementioned court ruling. Bungie claimed that Leone’s leveraging of cheat software constitutes Destiny 2 copyright infringement via graphical overlays and injected code, and the court has provided an assessment that this does, indeed, make for “unauthorized derivative work.”
Following the court ruling, Leone is now officially and legally prohibited from “obtaining, downloading, copying, playing, streaming, or otherwise interacting with Bungie’s games” ever again. Leone has also been ordered to scuttle down any and all accounts and services under his control that could be used to promote or discuss his legal infringements, and though the cheater is free to use regular social media, he is fully prohibited from posting anything related to the “use and proliferation of cheating software.” A heck of a legal whammy for Bungie, that’s for sure.
A permaban of ages for Destiny 2 cheater
While it may seem strange that Bungie would rail so heavily against just one cheater, there’s some additional context to keep in mind about Luca Leone, specifically. On top of producing and disseminating a comprehensive cheating app for Destiny 2, Leone was also a known harasser and one of the reasons why Bungie reduced communication with the community. Leone threatened and stalked the beloved Destiny community manager Dylan “dmg04” Gafner, for example, with the harassment campaign being serious enough that the court also issued an order that the cheater wasn’t allowed to come within 1,000 feet of Bungie’s offices or any of the employees’ known addresses.
The slightly funny bit is that Leone, at one point, attempted to get around Bungie’s legal Destiny 2 agreements by opting out of them as a minor. Not only has the court decided that this made for unlicensed violations of Bungie’s copyright, but it also means that Leone received an extra $2,000 in damages for each and every one of his subsequent opted-out logins, of which there appears to have been at least 100.
