
Originally Posted by
Trent!
It doesn't matter if he profits or not, it's the fact that he is causing no significant (if any) harm from his product, and his product is 100% legal. Just because it breaks a rule in-game doesn't mean that it's illegal or opens him up to being sued. There is nothing illegal about an ease-of-use software, I'm pretty positive he's spoken with a lawyer at some point to make sure.
I'm currently staying with someone who is educated and trained in the world of legal nonsense. She said that the most Jagex could get him for is Breach of Contract (e.g. Terms of Service), and like I said above, legally it would be the equivalent of bringing a player to court who was banned for abusing a graphical bug in-game (she agreed with that example).
This would be the exact violation:
And it would only be this exact excerpt of their rules: Software that generates input to our game applets. This includes software that automatically moves the mouse pointer or generates mouse clicks or key presses.
AND, even then, the ToS say nothing about actually creating any software that breaks that rule (providing it doesn't violate any of the other sections in that ToS, which RiD does not), only using the software.
Basically this means that it's only a breach of contract to use the software; not to make it. She then explained to me that since this specific breach of contract doesn't break any real-life laws, only in-game rules, the most Jagex would do is ban the account, and that there would be no case for something like this in the court system. She said even if there was a court case, the judge would essentially just say to ban the account, because that's all the violation would call for.
Years ago Jagex actually threatened legal action against RiD for something as simple as having a copyrighted image on his site (iirc, it was a picture of Bandos). He handled it easily by just removing the images, but the fact of the matter is that Jagex went through all that trouble just for a little image. If Jagex was willing to go through that trouble for some stupid pictures, I don't doubt they'd be willing to try other legal measures if they had them as an option, which they don't.
RiD's bots work by having all of the decision making code stored on secure servers that he rents (costing him literally hundreds a month), and the bot users run the 'client' which must make authorized connections to the server in order to receive instructions for any kind of movements, clicks, keystrokes, etc. Imagine the server as the Brain, and the 'client' as the arms, hands, mouth, and eyes. The 'eyes' sends what it sees to the brain (server), then the Brain determines the next best action, then sends the commands back to the mouth(for talking)/arms(moving the mouse)/hands(clicking) for it to carry out the commands (mouth could technically count as hands for the keyboard :P). This means that every single hour someone bots with RiD, it costs him server resources, and in essence, money. That's why the bots are not a one-time payment; why he has to have a payment system like he does. When most bots are free (like they are now in 2.0 beta), or people aren't buying credits, it's easy for RiD to lose money.