What you need to know
- EngineOwning was founded in 2014 and produced cheat software for popular franchises including Call of Duty, Titanfall and Battlefield, as well as cheat software to allow players to bypass hardware bans.
- Activision Publishing, Inc. filed a lawsuit against the Germany-based fraud distributor in the Central District of California in 2022.
- Activision sought damages based on 72,328 downloads of EngineOwning cheats in the United States alone.
- US District Judge Michael Fitzgerald awarded Activision $14,465,600 in statutory damages, $292,912 in attorney fees and ordered EngineOwning to surrender its domain to Activision Publishing, Inc.
Activision is taking home a legal victory after a US district judge granted a default judgment in the publisher’s case against Germany-based cheat distributor EngineOwning. District Judge Michael Fitzgerald awarded Activision $14,465,600 in damages, with another $292,912 in attorneys’ fees, as compensation for lost profits caused by access to EngineOwning’s fraudulent software.
EngineOwning was founded in 2014 and offers a subscription-based model for player access to its extensive library of cheat software for a host of Call of Duty titles, as well as EA’s multiplayer properties Battlefield and Titanfall. Activision’s lawsuit alleged that the popularity of Call of Duty had led to the creation of a secondary market for cheats. Thus, the use of cheats led to a ruined gaming experience for non-cheating players, who would give up or turn to competing products that weren’t plagued by cheats. Activision also claimed that the existence of fraudulent software from EngineOwning damaged Call of Duty’s reputation and ultimately cost Activision millions of dollars.
The case was filed by Activision in 2022 in the Central District of California, with the default judgment granted by US District Judge Michael Fitzgerald. Multiple claims of violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), and violations of the Federal Civil Influence and Racketeer Influenced (RICO) statute were lobbed at EngineOwning. The ten listed defendants, including EngineOwning’s co-founders, did not appear at the hearing, and the court must decide how to divide the resulting fines among them.
The $14.4 million judgment was determined by multiplying the known number of users of EngineOwning’s fraudulent software by a default penalty for each DMCA violation. Activision asked the court only to order EngineOwning the minimum statutory damages, which amounted to $200. More than 72,000 instances of players using EngineOwning cheats were listed, bringing the total judgment for DMCA violations to $14,465,600. Activision was also entitled to $5,600 in attorneys’ fees, plus an additional 2% fee for each $100,000 awarded, for a total of $292,912 in attorneys’ fees.
The damages are also accompanied by a decision by the court to grant a permanent injunction against EngineOwning that will require the defendants to transfer the company’s domain name, www.EngineOwning.to to Activision.
Activision has continued its commitment to rooting out cheaters in its annual premium Call of Duty titles and its free-to-play battle royale, Warzone. The publisher and its development studios formed a dedicated anti-cheat team, Team RICOCHET, which has created various anti-cheat tactics to attack third-party cheating software and devices. Activision Blizzard’s Blizzard arm is similarly bent on banning cheats in Overwatch 2.