Nice to see a court get it right for once, though I suppose they could ignore their advisor.
While the effects of cheat codes are not copyrighted, its probably still possible to patent them. But that would cost the company lot of legal fees and complications, for cheats. Also thankfully the cheat codes themselves are not copyrighted. But I feel like Konami could potentially trademark the “Konami Code” (which is even named and known like this). This EU court is only about Copyright, which is a good thing and is what everyone gets for free. But trademarks and patents could still be a problem if companies really want to be an ass (like Nintendo, Konami or Rockstar).
This doesn’t seem like it’s related to cheats included in the game itself. I’m sure the question of whether or not you can publish the Konami Code would be an interesting one, but the focus here is closer to modding.
Either way, patents probably wouldn’t be the way to go: you can’t patent anything that’s public knowledge and when you patent it it’s both publicly available and only protected for a limited amount of time. Anti-cheat measures would fall under trade secrets, for those reasons.
How do we keep having to have these legal discussions every decade or so?
