More than a year after Destiny 2 studio Bungie won a $4.4 million fraud case against AimJunkies, two U.S. courts have successfully secured a victory: one ruling affirmed the damages, which AimJunkies appealed, while the other dismissed the company’s request for a novel trial.
Bungie’s case against AimJunkies was one of several brought against scam creators, including PerfectAim, GatorCheats, and Ring-1, but it stumbled a bit early on. In May 2022, a judge dismissed part of Bungie’s copyright infringement claim, a tiny but surprising victory for AimJunkies. Ultimately, it didn’t amount to much: most of the remaining claim was sent to arbitration, which ended with a ruling in Bungie’s favor for just under $4.4 million, most of which was for DMCA violations.
As reported TorrentFreakAimJunkies filed a motion to vacate the jury’s decision as a matter of law because Bungie failed to prove copyright infringement — essentially saying the jury clearly made the wrong decision — and seeking a different verdict or a novel trial. ruling In a ruling issued on August 30, the court dismissed the claim, finding that “substantial” direct and circumstantial evidence supported the jury’s findings.
An engaging point in the appeal and ruling was the comparison to the eminent Game Genie cheat cartridges. AimJunkies used a cartridge from 1992. legal battle between Galoob Toys and Nintendo to bolster its claim that its software did not create derivative works and therefore did not infringe copyright. However, the Game Genie was a “dumb” device because it only locked away a single byte of data, which users could then replace with any other data they wanted; the AimJunkies software, the court ruled, “was not dumb and acted as little more than a window for programming Destiny 2.”
“In addition to allowing the end user to edit values in computer code generated from valid source without modifying the underlying source, Cheat Software’s computer code is “injected” into the Destiny 2 code, creating a substantially new and altered copy of the game. Additionally, Cheat Software has added red boxes around some characters, creating a modified audiovisual display of Destiny 2, i.e., a derivative work.”
End result: there will be no novel trial, the verdict remains in force.
The $4.4 million judgment also stands. AimJunkies argued in its appeal that the arbitrator erred by refusing to admit previously filed “significant evidence” to support its claim, but the court He rejected the accusationbasically saying that AimJunkie’s lawyer did not fulfill his duty.
“AimJunkies’ attorneys did not attempt to do that. Instead, they abandoned the line of questioning entirely. That is not in any way a mistake, especially not a mistake that was ‘bad faith or so egregious as to constitute clear misconduct.'”
All told, this seems to be the end of the AimJunkies case, though further appeals are possible. For now, the AimJunkies website remains operational, albeit without any Destiny 2 cheats, of course. I’ve reached out to AimJunkies for comment and will update if I hear back.
