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This past week, the United States District Court of the Central District of California granted Activision a legal victory over EngineOwning. EngineOwning is a group that sells cheats for a myriad of video games including Counter-Strike, Battlefield, Titanfall, and Call of Duty.
The District Court granted Activision's motion for default judgement in their civil case against EngineOwning. This judgement amount came out to be $14,465,600 in statutory damages and $292,912 in attorneys' fees. The court also issued a permanent injunction against EngineOwning and they were ordered to transfer their domain over to Activision.
Though ordered to transfer over the domain and pay those millions of dollars to Activision, EngineOwning has no intention to do any of that. According to a statement on the very website they were ordered to hand over to Activision (hence why I'm not linking it here), EngineOwning say they don't agree with the ruling, have no intention to pay Activision, have no plans to give Activision the domain, and say that they plan to release a new cheat for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 and Warzone.
The cheat maker claims they paused distribution of its Modern Warfare 3 cheat as they worked on getting around Activision's anti-cheat update. They threatened to release it again later once they were confident they were able to bypass the anti-cheat measures. They even threatened to release a free version of its cheat once the paid version returned.
EngineOwning claims that members of their group that were targeted by Activision in their lawsuit were "inactive and have been for a long time." They continue on to say that ownership of the cheat maker changed hands "years ago." They also say that they have made several backup domains in case their domain registrar hands over the main domain to Activision.
While EngineOwning's domain is registered at CloudFlare, a company based in the United States, EngineOwning is reportedly not operating within the United States. This could make enforcing the court's ruling a bit difficult.
We hope and think that our domain registrar will not defer to this bogus claim, that would not have been approved by any clear headed judge with even basic democratic values in a proper jurisdiction.
