DMCA being over used?

[Ancient]

Evony has hired a bunch of lawyers to throw the DMCA at some bot developers for the game Evony.

Such bots include:
Evobot
AutoEvony (Evobot conitnuation)
Evony Blaster
EvonyAutoIt
etc...

In the letters the developers and site hosts recieved include the DMCA stating that the bots are using copyrighted material in their programs.
However, the bot developers responded by saying, there were no copyrighted material in their bots. None of the same images, nothing. The only thing that was similar was the program structure.

Evobot.com was shut down
Google took Evobot off of their open source code website
and SourceForge won't house the evobot program on their space.

How can any bot be safe if people are just gonna throw the DMCA around and scare everyone with it?

[Whistler]

AFAIK DMCA is not about whether copyrighted material is illegally used or not, but about whether something is able to circumvent "technological measure that effectively controls access to a work" which is what makes it bad.

still though, this Evobot seems to be some "cheat" program which does the tedious thing automatically in an online game rather than some AI opponents.

[Ancient]

So you also think Evobot is a cheat program, simply because it runs mundane tasks?

To me mundane tasks is what Admin Mod does.

My question is also about cracked .exe files that people sometimes use on their games (usually pirated versions).
Would the DMCA apply to that as well?

Could (for example) gameburnworld.com get slapped with a DMCA Warning that would make them delete all their links to cracked game files?

[Whistler]

well I'm not a lawyer but both are what DMCA applies to from what I understand.

for the cheat thing I think bots like this are about doing stuff in the actual gameplay, which may provide advantages over those who does not use it (I could be wrong though as I don't play such games)... still if a game requires a lot of boring work then it's not a good game anyways

[Ancient]

lol That's true.
It's interesting on what your opinion on this is. I'm glad I asked.

But what I'm wondering about is:
Since GameBurnWorld gives links to game fixes that are not hosted on their server, it still provides links to the files and should have the DMCA applied to it if anybody has the mind to and the time.

Since everyone but me seems to be able to get away with murder, I bet if I hosted a cracked exe or a game fix on my server, I'd get caught immediately and be forced to delete it.

[Whistler]

well I'm not a lawyer so not sure about that...