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Legality of memory editing flash games?
Since I can't figure this out from research definitely enough I'll take 2 scenarios to elaborate what I know or believe I know and what I don't know.
Constant things in all scenarios:
a. The game is on a website.
b. The game is a flash game.
c. Playing the game and your score affects your points/tokens for your account.
d. You are always only editing stored values in memory that reside on your own machine, NOT hacking the server etc.
Scenario 1: Not illegal I believe.
The game is on a website where the virtual currency is points, and there is no money associated with these points. Having 100,000 points is worth the same monetarily as 1 point. You play a flash game and use memory editing tools to change a memory value stored on your own machine to change your score to a very high level. End result: 100,000 more points.
Scenario 2: Unsure of legality
The game has two virtual currencies, we'll call them points and gold. Points can not be bought or sold, gold can only be bought from the company through payment or taking surveys on their site's partners. Playing a flash game online only gives you points unless you add one gold to play. If you pay one gold then you can win other people's gold that they put into the pot if you have the highest score of all of them. So you load up the flash game on their website, and use a memory editor to change your score before submitting your win. If you play for free, you can win points, if you play for gold, you can only win if you have the highest score of the people in the pot. Either way, using a memory editor to get the high score or more points.
What is important I believe is that you are not gaining access to their server, are not reverse engineering their software, and are not editing packets of data being sent to their server. What is being edited is values stored in your computer's memory.
So, is the first scenario legal as I assume, and is the second scenario illegal or legal in the United States?
3 Answers
- Joe FinkleLv 71 decade agoFavorite Answer
Without having researched this, and with the express disclaimer that this is not legal advice and my only advice is that if you want legal advice, you should contact an IP or internet lawyer, here is my gut reaction:
Unauthorized accessing of a server is illegal. Implicitly, the authors of the game are giving people permission to access their servers for the purpose of submitting scores from legitimate game plays. By submitting a score from an illigitimate game play, even if the alteration was done on your machine and the submission was done through their authorized system, you have still accessed their server outside of the confines of their clear intent to allow you to do so and hence you have committed a crime.
If you're using the memory editor to steal people's money, it's likely fraud in any State. They agreed (and this is probably illegal anyway since it's gambling) to bet against you head to head to see who can get the highest score. What you're doing here is no different from cheating in a poker game, which is illegal.
Again, I haven't researched the crime of unauthorized accessing of a server and I do not know the elements. I believe it is a federal offense in the United States, but I'm not sure. It might be against State law and then you have a fairly complex jurisdictional question depending on where you are, where their server is, and possibly where players who have been injured are located, then a further question of whether or not injured pride is sufficient to consider other players injuries. So obviously, it gets more complex. But certainly, by submitting illegitimate scores, you have diminished the value of their high scoring system and cost them some, probably a very hard to calculate amount and perhaps quite small, but definitely some amount of money. And even without costing them money, it still may or may not constitute a crime.
- PfoLv 71 decade ago
I don't see why manipulating your machine's memory would ever be illegal, but if it was done to modify how an existing program works it might violate their terms of service. Most vendors will have a terms of service saying you can't mess with their data. Which brings me to another point, how could something edit the memory of another application? This is not normally allowed, and can only be accomplished by techniques like buffer overflows (which is hacking). The flash game designer most likely designed their game so that your client only works with the values the server provides, the server decides who is awarded points or gold and this process is controlled so that someone can't externally manipulate it.