**Mastery Loadouts**
Due to issues related to the release of Mastery Loadouts, the "free swap" period will be extended.
The new end date will be May 1st.
Due to issues related to the release of Mastery Loadouts, the "free swap" period will be extended.
The new end date will be May 1st.
Comments
And if I'm correct, then the discussion should revolve around ethics and not hypothetical legal consequences.
And then there's the separate question of whether you can state publicly what you extract. In the US, you can own expression through copyright, or you can control the disclosure of information through trade secret protection. But copyright protects expression not content: you can copyright the specific form the game takes, but you cannot copyright protect actual facts. I can say that Colossus has, or will have, some increased critical damage and that's completely legal because I'm stating a fact. Conversely, trade secret protection requires the facts be kept secret. The very fact that Colossus exhibits directly the data he comprises makes claiming his data a trade secret impossible (can you argue legally it is a trade secret prior to public release? I don't think that's been tested in court).
Whether data diving is "ethical" is a nuanced discussion I don't think public forums really are capable of doing justice. I used to be a data diver of online games, and at times I operated in plain sight of the game's developers, but the context of that activity was much more cooperative than adversarial. It was technically prohibited, but unofficially tolerated. The bottom line is that you're at the mercy of the game operator, and so long as you're harmless they probably won't spend a lot of money hunting you down. If they decide you're more trouble than it is worth, they will find a way to shut you down.
My personal stance on the ethics of data diving is that I believe it is ethical (but to be clear, still technically prohibited and the game operator has the right to terminate your access to the game if you do this) to release information about the game that players should have about the game and would be able to determine for themselves in theory by simply observing the game (even if this would be incredibly difficult to do in practice). I don't think it is ethical to use data diving to release information explicitly intended to be opaque to or temporarily withheld from the players. For example, things like how the champion abilities work is something there's general agreement players should know, and it is theoretically possible to determine this through testing but that would take extremely exhaustive coordinated work. I have no problem with a data diver telling players this information. But telling players what the map layouts will be for next month's events well in advance of release would be unethical in my opinion.