As highlighted dozens of times before, companies making these accusations rely on weak IP address-only evidence and use their legal teams to intimidate their targets into paying up – guilty or not.

CD Projekt wisely moved to protect their hard-earned image and relationships with both the gaming press and their customer base, but quite rightly noted a few weeks ago that they were not the only companies sending out these letters demanding cash.

So, addressing concerns that CD Projekt might have been unfairly singled out, TorrentFreak decided to dig deep into the archives of various resources including legal firms, campaign groups and the account holders themselves, to find out which other games companies – either directly or through local distributors – have been generating revenue from cash settlement schemes in recent years.

We discovered that not only are new games being targeted but older ones too, possibly to bring in extra cash from games well past their sell-by date when it comes to generating profit from more conventional sources.

Atari, the distributor of the original The Witcher, pulled out of chasing alleged file-sharers in the UK several years ago, but like many of their competitors simply transferred their settlement businesses to Germany. Atari has been sending settlement demands of several hundred euros for several of its titles including Alone in the Dark, Test Drive Unlimited and 2011′s Test Drive Unlimited 2.

Survival horror fans might be interested to know that distributor Koch Media has been sucking the blood from alleged sharers of the Techland game Dead Island. Tales of Monkey Island distributor DAEDALIC Entertainment are doing the same for publisher Lucas Arts.

Those who prefer a good stealthy RPG might be surprised to know that alleged sharers of Eidos/Square Enix’s Deus Ex: Human Revolution are being crept up on and told to pay-up-or-else to the tune of 800 euros by local distributor Koch Media, as are those accused of obtaining Dungeon Siege III (800 euros on this baby) and Final Fantasy games for free.

Codemasters, another company that first tried the UK and then took their settlement work elsewhere, originally pursued alleged file-sharers over their Colin McRae Dirt game.

But having gotten bored with sending out letters for F1 2010, they are currently sending cash demands of 800 euros over their latest off-road installment, DiRT 3.

Ending the racing theme, RaceOn (BitComposer) and Nail’d (Techland) complete the grid.

Holy settlement letter Batman! The Eidos/Square Enix/Warner title Batman: Arkham Asylum has been the subject of an unknown number of cash settlement letters sent out in Germany.

If you like your adventures a little more open, Eidos/Square are back again, asking for several hundred euros from ISP account holders connected to Just Cause 2 downloads. The duo come in again on the 3rd person settlement front with Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days, closely followed by the Prison Break: The Conspiracy action/adventure from Koch Media (yet again).

Tactical shooter fans might be concerned by the scattergun approach taken by (and here they are again) Codemasters when they ask for 800 euros in connection with their game Operation Flashpoint Red River. The same goes for Ubisoft when they send out letters to claimed Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six:Vegas downloaders.

First person shooters are always enjoyable, but being put in the crosshairs for allegedly sharing Painkiller addons Painkiller:Resurrection and Painkiller:Redemption can’t be much fun, especially when there’s a 300 euro headshot at the end of it destined for local distributor Koch Media.

Finally, if simulators are more your thing, stand by for a realism overload. Airline Tycoon 2 and Tropico 3 and 4 (Kalypso Media), Cities XL 2012 (dtp entertainment), City Bus Simulator/Simulator Gold (Aerosoft), Airbus X (Aerosoft), and Agrar Simulator 2011 (Koch Media), are all keeping it super-real with multi-hundred euro settlement demands.

The bad news is that the above sample is just the tip of the iceberg – dozens of devs and distributors of lesser known games are sending out these letters demanding anything from 300 to more than 1000 euros to make cases go away. But despite there being many games companies at the end of these settlement chains, three local names – Koch Media, dtp entertainment AG and Kalypso Media GmbH – appear more than any other.

It would be great if the companies listed above followed CD Projekt’s example and reconsidered their support for these horrible settlement letters. If any gaming publications would like to see the full list of games companies engaged in these schemes, feel free to contact us and we’ll happily send them over.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

At the end of May 2011 a leaked copy of Deus Ex: Human Revolution turned up online. As downloaders quickly discovered, it wasn’t the full game and was marked up on torrent sites as a ‘beta’ version. Nevertheless, a good time was being had by all.

However, what file-sharers didn’t know was that they were quietly being overlooked by a young anti-piracy outfit who had a most unorthodox plan up their collective sleeves. Founder of Vigilant Defender, James Grimshaw, who describes himself as “an illegal downloader” with connections to “the Scene”, told TorrentFreak that this particular leak of Deus Ex: HR gave his company the opportunity they’d been waiting for.

First, Vigilant obtained a copy of the leak and a crack that was made available from a Chinese file-sharing site known as ALI213. Using a combination of the pair and the addition of their own code, the company then re-uploaded their version of the release to various torrent sites, all mocked up to look like official releases from well-known piracy groups such as Skidrow and Reloaded. The modified beta was then distributed via rented seedboxes.

James told TorrentFreak that after the first couple of levels, gamers found themselves dumped out and directed to a website containing a questionnaire. It asked why people illegally download, which torrent and DDL sites they use, how much data they download per month, what content people download (with a focus on PC games) and what, if any, anonymity services they use.

A whole section of the questionnaire was dedicated to DRM systems such as SecuROM, Steam, and solutions from EA and Ubisoft. Vigilant also asked respondents if they were planning on buying the game when it came out officially and how much they would pay for it – the average (including nearly 24% of respondents who indicated they had already pre-ordered at the full price) was $28.00.

The whole point of the experiment, James says, was to get pirates to download a free trial of a game and then go on to buy the full product through a yet-to-be-created distribution system. He apologized for having to do that by tricking pirates into a ‘fake’ download and went out of his way to say that he wishes to embrace file-sharers, not treat them as enemies.

“Our intention was not to upset illegal downloaders, and we did hold back on the amount of images we created, uploaded, and to what sites we were on,” James told TorrentFreak.

“We love downloaders just as much as we love PC Games, but there has to come a time when you realize that the balance is no longer there, we just want to restore balance. Hopefully that will be enough to bring publishers back, to take more risks on the PC instead of shying away.”

Now, if an anti-piracy company admitting to seeding warez isn’t strange enough, consider this. James told TorrentFreak that while he has been speaking with games companies, none of them wanted to go first with an experiment. This means that Vigilant Defender were seeding leaked copies of Deus Ex: Human Revolution without the permission of developer Eidos Montreal or publisher Square Enix.

So, TorrentFreak asked, how do you think they’ll react when they find out?

“We believe that Square Enix and Eidos might be hurt, Eidos not so much,” James told us.

“But you have to remember that Square Enix is a business first and has a Japanese business culture. Thats how we will be approaching them, after they get over the hurt; we hope to make them understand that our experiment would not have affected their business. Until we owned up, no one knew what was happening!”

“But we do know that Square Enix, if approached correctly, could understand that illegal downloading is worse, and that in a different way we were trying to help.”

James says that the company was looking for a compromise between illegal downloaders and publishers, but red-tape was getting in the way.

“Sadly we were stuck in the water until a publisher gave us permission, while they liked the idea; they were leaving us hanging without an answer! We saw that if we didn’t take this chance, we might miss it altogether,” he explained.

“I think publishers are so upset with piracy of their media, that they believe nothing will ever work. But if you approach illegal downloaders, forgetting all transgressions, and tempting them as potential customer, it just might stand a good chance. We’d like to believe if you treat people as humans, they will do the right thing.”

When anti-piracy companies (and I’m not even sure that’s a good way to describe Vigilant Defender) try to do something innovative or daring to solve the piracy issue, that should be commended. However, the raw story behind this experiment was so complex we had to ask question after question and conduct hours of our own research. Even following that, some things still nag.

According to Vigilant Defender, between 22nd August and 12th September over 1 million people downloaded the ‘trial’ version of Deus Ex:HR resulting in 900,000 hits on the company’s questionnaire. However, TorrentFreak looked for live torrents relating to this release which might suggest this level of activity, but we were unsuccessful.

James says this is probably because the torrents have all been deleted having been discovered to be ‘fake’, but a million downloads is a hell of a lot and they must’ve stayed live for some time to achieve that. Furthermore, we expected to find comments on torrent sites at least mentioning the questionnaire, but we drew a blank there too. That doesn’t mean it didn’t happen, but we thought we should point that out. [See foot of article for update]

Furthermore, despite Vigilant Defender stating clearly that Eidos were not involved in their experiment, as reported on June 1st the games company clearly knew about the leak of the ‘beta’. Not only that, Eidos Community Manager Kyle Stallock was actually encouraging users to provide comments and feedback on it.

And we won’t even go into the several strangely coincidental emails we received from readers who wanted to know if there was any truth in the rumor that Skidrow had an agreement with Eidos not to crack Deus Ex: HR as soon as it came out. We laughed at the time, but quite unusually it did take Skidrow more than a month after the game’s release to deliver an official crack.

All in all this is a strange story from start to finish and what will come from it we just don’t know. If it was Vigilant Defender’s goal to attract the attention of games publishers, they have probably achieved that.

However, their overall goal, of monetizing the file-sharing space for PC games, is somewhat of a Holy Grail. If they can do that the whole world will listen, but at first view the model seems easily replicated. Any games developer can put a trial product out and then offer links to the full thing at a cheaper price. If they were prepared to do that, one might argue they would’ve done it already.

Update: Since publication Vigilant Defender have pointed TorrentFreak to some of the torrents they uploaded. Some have user comments which indicate that they were indeed directed to fill in a survey after the game ‘timed-out’.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Earlier, ACS:Law happily copied other people’s news reports and posted those on their site as their own material, but were found out and quickly took the content down. But later the infringer became the victim when it was revealed through the leaked emails from ACS:Law that lawyers Tilly, Bailey & Irvine were threatened by ACS boss Andrew Crossley when TBI ‘pirated’ some of his legal documents and used them to screw money out of alleged file-sharers.

Over the pond in the States, the makers of The Hurt Locker are in partnership with the U.S. Copyright Group (USCG) in order to get yet more worry money from file-sharers. Considering their position, them infringing on other people’s rights would look very bad. And it did when they were caught copying a competitors website. Furthermore, USCG are now being sued by rival Media Copyright Group over a trademark issue.

A trademarks issue you say? Read on…

Earlier this week, following a tip from reader Mr Piracy Reporter, Techdirt reported that another new operation called the Copyright Defense Agency had created a very similar website to the one owned by the Copyright Enforcement Agency – the same company that USCG were accused of copying earlier. Please try to keep up….

However, while the sites do indeed look very similar, with their tech-styled graphics on the right and their official looking emblems on the left, it seems that the Copyright Defense Agency have been very naughty. Very naughty indeed. Here is their frontpage:

While the logo above does indeed look proud and regal, that hardly comes as a surprise when one discovers it was actually issued by Queen Elizabeth I. In the year 1600. However, since the Copyright Defense Agency (CDA) weren’t threatening file-sharers more than 400 years ago, they couldn’t have been the lucky recipients.

It turns out that Queen Elizabeth I gave this Coat of Arms to the famous East India Company which was set up by the English to trade with India. The original sketch can be seen below (image credit).

“The East India Company was granted a Coat of Arms under the direct instructions from Queen Elizabeth I to William Camden alias Clarencieux, Garter Principal of the King of Arms,” explains the company website.

The company exists in new form today as a luxury brand, so when one begins to understand a little about the history its perhaps no surprise that they currently use a different logo. Nevertheless, the company is very clear about who owns the emblem.

“Today the coat of arms is a trademark of The East India Company,” they explain.

The Coat of Arms as displayed on the CDA site is, however, very slightly modified. The text as ordered by Queen Elizabeth I has been erased from the bottom scrolls.

It did say Deus Indicat. Deo Ducente Nil Nocet. (God is our leader. When God leads, nothing can harm.)

Its probably best for CDA to erase the rest of the logo now, and buy one of their own. Then they should stop intimidating file-sharers for doing just the same but for non-commercial purposes. They can’t take the moral high-ground with moves like this – if they ever had it.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

p2pnet: Hi, Bram. I know you must be up to your ears in alligators and I really appreciate you taking the time out to answer these questions, particularly since I realise some of them are a little on the thorny side.

p2pnet: Did you ever think BitTorrent would take off in quite the way it has?

Cohen: I’ve run out of answers to give to that question. Yes? No? Maybe?

p2pnet: When was the very first time you actually saw what was to become BitTorrent as a workable application?

Cohen: It first had the current user interface in early 2002. It first transferred files with the current protocol format and not for testing in late 2002.

p2pnet: If you could travel back in time, is there anything you’d change about the BT technology?

Cohen: A few little things, for example some protocol extensions which we’re about to unveil which are the way things should really have been done to begin with, but in terms of what the pieces are and how they interact, I think I did it right.

p2pnet: How does it feel to realize that not perhaps, but definitely, your children will read about you in the history books as someone whose invention quite literally changed the face of the Net and world comunications?

Cohen: My children seem happy with me just as daddy.

p2pnet: What achievement, or achievements, are you most proud of?

Cohen: I’d say getting BitTorrent to be such a compelling tool that publishers started using it, despite massive political pressure not to. The Linux distro torrents were quite amusing until the Linux distros got sick of being humiliated and started doing them themselves.

p2pnet: What kind of computer equipment do you use?

Cohen: Currently, an IBM laptop running Ubuntu. It’s okay, but playing video files is quite busted.

p2pnet: What’s you favourite piece of software?

Cohen: That’s rather like asking what one’s favorite type of weld is. People use software to get stuff done, not for the sake of playing with software. The exception is games, but I haven’t had much time for game playing lately.

p2pnet: What’s your personal favourite piece of code?

Cohen: You mean of my own? I generally want to rewrite everything after it’s been around for a while, so it’s hard for me to get too excited about any one thing. The merge code I wrote recently is rather nice though, since it’s simple enough that people can experiment with it and try out variations, while historically merging has been so difficult that it’s almost unapproachable.

p2pnet: You use Ubuntu. So what do you like about it?

Cohen: Uh … it’s less likely to get hacked than windows?

p2pnet: Would you recommend Ubuntu to anyone (or everyone : ) ?

Cohen: Not until it plays all video properly out of the box and has a good working UI for selecting wireless networks. Both of those work poorly on windows too though.

p2pnet: If not, what would you recommend?

Cohen: Flint tools rarely have such problems.

p2pnet: What kind of music do you listen to, and where do you get it?

Cohen: I haven’t had much time for music lately. In my early 20′s I bought close to 1000 CDs, which are quite eclectic in style, but I did used to listen to a lot of industrial music.

p2pnet: What’s your favourite, and least favourite, movie?

Cohen: Someone asked me what my favorite movie was a few years ago, and I said Blade Runner, and she said Everybody says Blade Runner, and asked for a different movie, so I guess the right answer is Amadeus. As for least favorite, that’s hard to say, so many things are unwatchably bad.

p2pnet: What was the very first computer you ever had and where did it come from? And what did you use it for?

Cohen: A Timex Sinclair in 1980. I used to write little programs in basic to make it crash, for example by poking into random parts of memory or doing an infinite recursion.

p2pnet: How old were you?

Cohen: Five.

p2pnet: Can you remember the first program you ever wrote? And how old were you then as well?

Cohen: The first substantive program I even wrote was when I was 12, and it played connect 4, written in Promal on my Commodore 64. I wrote a simple board evaluation algorithm and alpha-beta pruning. It could stomp me quite thoroughly.

p2pnet: Putting BT to one side, which do you think is the most significant commercial p2p application out there at the moment?

Cohen: In terms of a commercial entity publishing their own content, there isn’t a significant competitor to BitTorrent protocol, nor is there a need for one. That problem has been solved.

Ap2pnet: And on the indie p2p side, what impresses you the most?

Cohen: There’s been some interesting work on DHTs.

p2pnet: What would you think about replacing BitTorrent trackers with virtual trackers in a DHT network?

Cohen: A tracker is both more reliable and lets you get statistics about distribution. The reasons to not use one are for (massive) scaling and reliability, which are rarely ever a problem. We do have a DHT protocol though, and it works quite well.

p2pnet: You’re the co-founder of CodeCon. Are you still involved?

Cohen: Yes, I still run the program committee and emcee parts of it.

p2pnet: If you could get the people who run BearShare, Blubster, eDonkey, LimeWire, Morpheus and Warez (in alphabetical order ; ) around a table, what would you say to them with respect to their ongoing troubles with the major labels and movies studios?

Cohen: Uh, stop running warez networks?

p2pnet: And if you could do the same with the Big Four record labels, Warner Music, EMI, Vivendi Universal and Sony BMG, and the Big Six studios, Time Warner, Viacom, Fox, Sony, NBC Universal and Disney, what would you say to them with respect to their apparent impasse with the p2p application developers?

Cohen: We’re already talking to all of those entities, and they’re being quite reasonable.

p2pnet: Do you think the current corporate wholesale pricing structure of, so I’m told, 60 to 85 cents for each digital file is reasonable?

Cohen: There are a lot of things which can be a ‘digital file’. We’re going to see considerable evolution of pricing models over time.

p2pnet: As a father, what do you think of the RIAA’s practice of naming children in p2p file sharing subpoenas?

Cohen: I’m not sure what you’re referring to, and of course am not involved in suing anybody.

p2pnet: Do you think people who share copyrighted files are criminals and thieves, as the RIAA and MPAA say they are?

Cohen: It certainly is illegal.

p2pnet: You’ve been very quiet about your brother’s departure from your company? Are you able to say what happened to make him leave?

Cohen: No.

p2pnet: Ashwin Navin is BitTorrent president. How, where and when, did you meet him?

Cohen: We had a friend in common, and met in 2004.

p2pnet: Whose idea was it for BitTorrent to move into the corporate world?

Cohen: I’d wanted to set up a commercial venture for a while.

p2pnet: Before you actually became involved with the entertainment industry, were you ever seriously threatened with court action?

Cohen: Nope.

p2pnet: Did you start the dialogue with the MPAA?

Cohen: They called me first.

p2pnet: If you were approached by the association rather than the other way around, who initially contacted you?

Cohen: Dean Garfield.

p2pnet: How much time have you actually spent with Dan Glickman?

Cohen: I’ve met him in person several times.

p2pnet: Do you and he still talk to each other?

Cohen: I don’t personally talk to him regularly, but people from BitTorrent talk to people from the MPAA on a routine basis.

p2pnet: What kind of discussions are you currently having with the RIAA?

Cohen: Take down processes and future online sales.

p2pnet: Do you believe a time will eventually come when a genuine accord will be reached between the major movie and music companies and their customers?

Cohen: Not sure what you mean. They’re quite happy with their paying customers.

p2pnet: What would you say to someone who’s contemplating launching a music/movie download site?

Cohen: Get licenses.

p2pnet: What would you say will be the three most significant developments for p2p between now and 2010?

Cohen: It’s hard to say what will happen in networking generally, but clearly everything will be dominated by bandwidth price plummeting and throughput going through the roof.

p2pnet: Do you have any new, personal projects in mind, and if you do, what are they?

Cohen: I’ve been working on a new generation of Codeville’s merge algorithms lately, and they’re going to be available for several other version control systems.

p2pnet: What does the future hold for BitTorrent?

Cohen: We’ve got our Allegro release of the client with tons of performance enhancements you can’t find anywhere else coming out, and are going to start making video available on the web site.

p2pnet: Finally, I’ve asked a lot of questions, but I’d also really appreciate it if you’d use this to express any thoughts or comment on topics which haven’t been covered here.

Cohen: We’re expanding BitTorrent.org to be a common meeting ground for all client developers, so there’s a coherent place where discussions of protocol development take place. A bunch of new documentation is going up there soon, and we’re getting other client developers involved.

p2pnet: Cheers! And thanks. And all the best …

P2Pnet

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.