Square Enix, Eidos & Other Game Giants All Demand Cash From Pirates

enigmax
January 15, 2012
156
CD Projekt,
extortion
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After it was revealed that games developer CD Projekt had been sending cash settlement letters to Internet users based on flimsy IP address-based anti-piracy evidence, this week the company decided to end their campaign. Today TorrentFreak reveals the names of many other famous games companies conducting almost identical operations – “Send us cash settlements,” they tell their targets, “…or else…”

The news this week that CD Projekt, the company behind The Witcher games, would cease their pay-up-or-else file-sharing settlement scheme against Internet account holders was welcome.

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.

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Mellum

Germany really needs to sort it’s copyright laws out to stop them being a haven for this “pay up or else schemes”
- Anonymous
  
  True enough when in Germany they treat copyright infringement as guilty until proven innocent. So if your IP comes up than it is all “he did it” and “no I did not” followed by “guilty, pay up”
  
  You sure can’t see the copyright industry rushing to modernize copyright laws here in “scamland” exploitation at its finest.
  - http://www.facebook.com/people/Alexi-Karas/100000552891436 Alexi Karas
    
    Hate to hijack the first comment, but it’s sort of important….
    Agrar Simulator 2011 (Koch Media)? They got a review with a rating of 1% over at 4players.de (and it’s also the first non-YT result googling “Agrar Simulator 2011 review”.
    
    I find it hard to believe anyone would actually want to buy the game, ever, and would seriously consider that it might have been released as such a shoddy game purely to try and make money off pirates.
    - Ogra
      
      Possible, but highly unlikely. A more likely explanation is that the game was developed as shovelware. This is a classification given to games that no work was put into and is intended to make money only off of the purchases of idiots. You say that you find it hard to believe that anyone would buy the game, but you’d be surprised at what foolish people will buy. Remember, they don’t need a high mass of customers; they only need a few who purchase it foolishly. Hell, they may even have liked that 1% review. They may be relying on people who purchase it because of how bad it is. The classic bad game Big Rigs made money off of this after the negative reviews started coming in. That may be their scheme. (That’s pure speculation, and not as important as the rest of the post).
      
      I’m not saying your interpretation is impossible, but the shovelware explanation fits more with what has happened in the past.
    - Royt00tslucas
      
      The real pirates are the downloaders that sell the copyrighted material on for financial gain…those that don’t sell or make any profit are simply thieves.. Anyone who says they download copyrighted material to “try before buy” probably won’t(bar a very tiny minority of one according to this thread) and wether they do or don’t pay really doesn’t alter the fact they “borrowed” the material without asking A.k.a stealing. If you disagree try looking at it like this, lets imagine you’re selling a car then some bloke just strolls over and takes it, two days later he decides its not for him really and gets it crushed…. How would you feel I’m sure you would want compensating wouldn’t you
    - Aussie Bob
      
      @royt00tslucas clear industry pay cow your analogies are as flawed as a car with no engine. Staying with cars pirating does not remove the car from the dealer as you say it does what happens is more like this:
      you are dealing cars, guy walks past looks at the car likes the look of it spends 20 mins pirating it drives off in it. after driving it for a bit decides its not as good as it looks so he crushes it.
      
      further more, “Anyone who says they download copyrighted material to “try before buy” probably won’t(bar a very tiny minority of one according to this thread) and wether they do or don’t pay really doesn’t alter the fact they “borrowed” the material without asking A.k.a stealing.” despite the fact that you can’t use the spell check incorporated is a load of crap. In Australia I am legally allowed to make back ups of any digital media I purchase. Therefore, if I buy the product then the copy I downloaded is perfectly legal.
- Predator
  
  FREE HANA BESHARA!!!
  
  or face the consequences.
  - Your Dad
    
    Die worm.
- Predator
  
  FREE HANA BESHARA!
Anonymous

They lost my respect. And my money.
- http://tinyurl.com/ANoiXioNA-personal-info ANoiXioNA
  
  They are true PiRATEPHOBE‘s
  
  Well done for not rewarding their intolerant piratephobia
- Guest
  
  I’ve pirated copies of Tropico 3 twice (distribution probs. in Australia) and bought Tropcio 1 (twice), Tropico 2, Tropico 3 (thrice) and now (thanks to Steam) Tropico 4 (twice).
  
  Two “illegal” downloads versus Seven sales.
  
  Kalypso, drop this bullshit or I will never buy (and promote) your fine games again. (And hey, can you redo Tropico 2? Love the pirate format as much as the dictator one.)
  
  Thanks!
  - Anonymous
    
    So because you paid for Tropico as well as torrented it that means that no-one’s pirating these games? That’s bullshit logic, followed by an equally bullshit conclusion. Not saying that legal blackmail is good either, mind.
    - Guest
      
      Learn to read, Axe99. He’s talking about nobody but himself/herself.
    - Anonymous
      
      @ Guest – not quite, as he’s calling what Kalypso’s doing as bullshit, in the context of his personal experience. Given that he’s presumably aware that Kalypso are not doing it solely because of him, it’s implicit in his argument that his example is in some way indicative of broader behaviour.
    - Guest
      
      Hi Axe99
      
      Piracy is a service problem, not a legal problem. I love the Tropico series of games and paid for them when I could. But I will often pirate first to make sure a game is good (so much crap on the market and when Kalypso got hold of the Tropico IP, they could have stuffed it up, thankfully they made it more awesome.)
      
      Shaking down IP addresses with pay-or-else schemes is not a legal problem, it’s a legal scam. I cannot in good conscience send money to a company that engages in that kind of behaviour.
      
      Thanks!
    - Anonymous
      
      Aye, I totally agree that what’s being done is wrong – I think it’s an atrocious approach. It’s just hard for either side (broadly – in your case when you’re buying the games after testing it’s different, but a whole lotta pirates don’t) to have any moral high ground. A good case of an eye for an eye making everyone blind.
    - OMGWTFBBQ
      
      Maybe they didn’t like it enough to buy it. Glad you think it is ok to pirate if you want to try a game :)
    - Anonymous
      
      @ OMGWTFBBQ – if it’s trying it to replace a demo experience (ie, to see how it runs for an hour or two to see if it’s their thing – I think all games should have representative gameplay demos) then I think it’s not an issue, but if it’s to ‘try’ it by playing the whole game then it’s just piracy – and if they’re not so keen on the game and are worried about paying too much, they can just wait for it to turn up cheap down the track.
  - Oompah
    
    yes difficult to wish additional purchase of any ‘game’ that involves loss of pc or jail time- stupid consumer
    
    thought the kidz would liove IT as gift… package WAS shiny.
Anonymous

Game developer companies generally aren’t stupid, and likely know perfectly well how little evidence an IP truly is. To think so many companies who create entertainment products are fine with extortion just boggles me.

Fuck your bottom line. It isn’t worth ruining peoples’ lives over.
- Glad
  
  MOST of companies that pull this kind of crap do not DEVELOP games. They sell them. And in those that do develop games this is lawyer crap. Or marketing crap.
  
  Nice to see that neither Valve nor Blizzard are on the list.
- Fornown
  
  very annoying as well to have ‘cracked’ copy run well without adverse consequence BUT to have ‘legal’ copy toast OS… having paid for and absolved non pirate corp of any liabilities
  
  (yes the meat was tainted BUT your digestion which caused vomIT)
  
  most pyrITz poor bright ones… who are losing access anyway… and rediscovering really lifelike scenes of play at the local food riots/ unemployed protests/ occupy LIFE movements
  
  any ONE may play… for now
http://twitter.com/jtaurasi James Taurasi

Consumers demand good games, especially from S/E
Anonymous

If game developers would stop pushing the same shitty games year, after year, after year, then more people would be willing to pay.

I only bought 3 games in 2011 (Skyrim, AC:R, and AC: Brotherhood). The rest were so shitty, I didn’t feel like they deserved my $60.
- Anonymous
  
  If they’re so shitty, don’t play ‘em. If you play ‘em, then pay for it. Simple as that. If you got some enjoyment from ‘em (and presumably you did, or you wouldn’t have played them in the first place), then you should pay the people that put in long hours over months if not years to make the game. Anything else is leeching, pure and simple.
  - Anonymous
    
    he probably did not get $60 worth of enjoyment out of them, that’s why he didn’t buy them
    - Anonymous
      
      If that’s the case, the legit way to do it is to wait a few months for the price to drop – game prices drop quickly, and if you keep an eye on Steam/Gamersgate (Gamersgate is DRM free as well), Impulse and the like (NOT Games for Windows), then you’ll be able to get games on the cheap (Dead Space 1 and 2 for $20 on Steam over the weekend, for example, less than a year after DS2 released), for whatever amount people think they’re worth. The only people that _have_ to pay $60 for a game are those who can’t live without having all their games at launch.
    - Anonymous
      
      legit, shmegit
    - OMGWTFBBQ
      
      So he should wait until the price has fallen so much that he should buy it when it is in the 5 games for 5 Euro sales bin 5 years later? So that he can put it in a box upstairs and never play it from the legit DVD because he never liked it?
      
      Or should he write to the makers? I pirated your game and i think it’s worth 10 Euro. Plz send me the DVD when you want to sell it for that price. I hope by then there is a good emulator that will let me play it.
    - PelouzeTF
      
      You can rent games to try them out. Gamefly memberships are cheap and they have a huge catalog. Rent a game, try it, if you don’t like it – send it back and get another.
      
      You can do this as many times as you like. The “I download everything for free just in case I dont like it” argument, is really weak because there are many affordable options.
  - http://profiles.google.com/zerianis10 Christopher Kidwell
    
    No, not simple as that, Axe99, except in your dream world.
    
    The fact is that most pirates of games are people who do not earn enough money to buy the games in question legally. If these companies would LOWER THEIR PRICES, more people would buy their games…. more than enough to totally abrogate the losses (if any) from lowering their prices.
    - Anonymous
      
      If people want lower prices, they should wait – it’s not as if games stay priced at their launch prices for very long at all, and people with an eye for value can take good advantage of sales on Steam/Gamersgate/D2D/Impulse and so on. There are _plenty_ of options for people that can’t afford games at their full price (hell, on PC I haven’t bought a full-priced game in years, I reckon the average price I pay per game would be $5-$10, and I haven’t pirated any of ‘em).
      
      Also, if someone can’t afford $5-$10 per game, how have they got themselves a PC that can run anything released in the last couple of years either half-decently?
    - Ogra
      
      @Axe99
      
      If you’re going to start from the axiom that piracy is bad, then your solutions are quite vaild. I suppose that with prices that lower over time, and with Steam Sales, the price of the good shouldn’t really be a large point of contention. I’ll try to restrict my use of that argument.
      
      However, you should realize that you’re asking people to have discipline, and you’re asking them to have it about something that they won’t be punished for if that discipline is not present. You don’t have a very good chance of convincing anyone.
    - Anonymous
      
      @ Ogra – well, for most forms of sales piracy is quite obviously bad – if I think the latest Ford isn’t worth $40,000, that doesn’t give me a right to steal it for nothing! I think that people pirating forget that the people that they’re stealing from aren’t rolling in it – numerous studios laid people off this year, and for every dollar pirated that’s one less dollar to pay gaming industry professionals. Sure, if someone wants to torrent to get an idea of a game, and only plays for an hour or two then either buys or stops, that’s more just demo-ing (think of it as taking the car for a test drive). But if someone torrents the whole thing and doesn’t pay a cent, then the people that worked on that game don’t get paid for their hard earned.
      
      If a software pirate doesn’t mind someone taking from them without paying for it, then at least they’d be not hypocritical, but I suspect strongly that if I went stole stuff from the pirate’s they’d be somewhat unhappy about it.
      
      I agree that people both lack the discipline and capacity to emphathise with the people upon whom their hobby depends (the software devs themselves) to stop piracy, but we can but hope.
    - Ogra
      
      I am willing to believe that many of those who claim that they’re demoing games aren’t really doing as such. I’ve always thought of the argument of demoing as a reason for piracy to be a bit silly. We live in an age where we have a ton of information. If I want to know if a song is good, I can 99% of the time listen to it on youtube or a similar location (usually put there by the artist), and if I want to know about a movie, I can watch a trailer, watch released footage, read reviews, read MORE reviews, etc. I understand it a bit more with games, those being interactive and all, but it still seems silly when you have reviewers whose job is quite literally to point out any flaw they can see in a game.
      
      No argument there.
      
      “every dollar pirated that’s one less dollar to pay gaming industry professionals.”
      
      This is a fallacy. Scientific research has actually provably shown that for small products, say, an indie game or a game from a smaller studio, piracy actually increases sales. The reason for this is that the limiting factor in the money these games make is market penetration and marketing. If pirates take this service unto themselves, then they increase the sales of the game by bringing it to public attention. This has been shown to hold true for all music. This has not been shown to be true for larger movies or games, say, something of Call of Duty or Inception’s size. For those products, early research creates the implication that piracy does have a negative effect on sales, mainly because marketing is not their problem.
      
      Also, when I said “bad”, my implication there was “bad enough to enforce with legislation”. I should have made that clearer. It’s clear that piracy is based off of greed. Any honest pirate can admit that, and I have no shame in saying it. That doesn’t necessarily make it bad, but for money, that’s more then enough. Fine. However, consider that any means to combat piracy will be, by nature, worse than piracy. The only options are monitoring (bad for privacy rights) or DRM (bad for legitimate customers).
      
      In short, we pirates may be assholes, but any response against us will be, by nature, far more damaging than what we do.
      
      “stole stuff from the pirate’s they’d be somewhat unhappy about it.”
      
      You’ve made an error here. While what pirates do might be loosly classified as stealing, it is not actually theft. Let me explain the difference. In theft, one person loses a good and the thief gains one. In piracy, one person is unaffected, and the other gains a copy. This is a key difference. If piracy did
      
      In truth, what copyright does is create a limitation on what the average citizen can do with their property. It says that if I own a copy of a movie, I can not make a copy of it. It serves to restrict what I can and can not do with my property.
      
      You can say that perhaps artists have some moral right to have their wishes regarding their work followed, and to a point, that’s true. However, that right must be secondary to the right of any citizen to use his property as he chooses (barring causing direct harm to or violating the rights of another being, of course).
      
      As before stated, pirates may be assholes, but the solution of limiting property rights is a failed one, and goes against all notions of liberty. It sucks, but them’s the breaks.
    - Anonymous
      
      @Ogra The issue we’ve got here is that the cost of reproducing the original good that takes often tens to hundreds of people often years to produce, is next to nothing. So unlike China backwards-engineering US military designs (which is expensive and very hard to do), it costs next to nothing to pirate a game.
      
      However, if piracy is allowed to run rampant, and there aren’t enough paying customers, then there’ll be no way to meet the costs of the devs who make the games. This is the big issue with piracy – the pirates effectively lower the wages of the devs and raise the prices of paying customers.
      
      Even for the small indies, piracy is by no means as black and white as you say. For every indie that talks up exposure, there’s another who notes that for every copy sold, five have been torrented. Sure, not every one of those would have been a sale, but even if one in ten of the pirated copies was a sale, the indy would have made 50% more, which is 50% more to invest in new games. That’s more jobs and better games for folk, and cheaper game prices for paying customers.
      
      In effect, the idea that no-one else is affected except the pirate, by software (or music/movie/anything else with a very low marginal cost of production) piracy is a fallacy based on an overly simplistic understanding of how the world works. Although I respect your honesty in acknowledging that what you’re doing hurts the industry, I find it strange that you continue to run down something you enjoy.
    - Ogra
      
      “However, if piracy is allowed to run rampant, and there aren’t enough paying customers, then there’ll be no way to meet the costs of the devs who make the games. This is the big issue with piracy – the pirates effectively lower the wages of the devs and raise the prices of paying customers.”
      
      This is not based in reality. If theoretically, everyone pirated and no one paid, then yes, this would be true. However, this has not been the case. Even in states that completely legalize piracy, rates remain constant, and fluctuate only with the state of the industry (ease-of-access, content available, etc. You know, the same stuff purchases fluctuate with.)
      
      I’m sorry, but you’re simply arguing based on an idea that’s not true. You’re presenting a hypothetical argument that has not happened. It’s a slippery-slope argument about what might happen, not what is happening or what has happened. The real world just doesn’t work that way.
      
      “who notes that for every copy sold, five have been torrented. Sure, not every one of those would have been a sale, but even if one in ten of the pirated copies was a sale, the indy would have made 50% more”
      
      You’re assuming that without the piracy, the same number of sales would be avaiviable. That is provably false. Here’s the clean and basic of how it works in the real world. In a hypothetical instance where piracy is limited, a game may be bought by 5,000 people, and pirated by none (or by 5,000. It’s not important). In a situation where piracy is more prevalent, then maybe 50,000 copies would be downloaded, but 10,000 would be bought. In this hypothetical, the rate of piracy increased from 1/2 of all copies to 5/6, but profits for the
      
      Yes, you can say that if more pirates bought the game then profits would be higher, but that is superseded by the fact that without piracy, sales would be even lower. You’re arguing based on the assumption off the benefits of piracy, but you’re then saying that piracy doesn’t have to be part of the equation. Essentially, you’re assuming the benefit while ignoring the cause.
      
      Another notable factor is that the benefits of piracy compound with the review scores of a game. In short; better games earn more from piracy (to be honest, this has not been definitively proven, but it does have an interesting but slightly flawed study vouching for it.)
      
      “piracy is by no means as black and white as you say”
      
      Nothing is absolute. Coca-cola has spent money on ads only to find their revenue (not profits, just revenue) going down and rising again when the ad went off the air, contradicting common sense. Piracy isn’t helpful in 100% of the cases, but it has been proven to be helpful in the vast, vast majority. For music, it has been shown to be almost universally helpful. For games, it’s still the majority, but by a smaller margin than music.
      
      So yeah, it’s about as black and white as the real world gets.
      
      Now, you can believe that piracy is morally wrong, or that people are assholes for doing it. That’s valid, but that doesn’t change the fact that the economic effects of piracy have been studied, and simply aren’t what you think they are.
    - Anonymous
      
      @ Ogra – ” For music, it has been shown to be almost universally helpful. ” This is just plain not true – the single biggest factor in the rise of concert tickets in recent years has been to try and offset the huge fall in overall music sales due to rampant piracy. Music sales have plummeted since it became easy to pirate online and while the ease of itunes has slowed the decline, sales are still dropping.
      
      Hell, early on in the PS3s life, despite the install base, many publishers were doing relatively well because of the low rates of piracy, making it more viable to publish on the platform relative to its install base. And while we’re on it, why does everyone think the bulk of development money moved from PC to console? It wasn’t because all the PC devs suddenly decided they wanted to have their games played in the living room – it was because they could make more money because they had a higher proportion of paying customers. Given that we’re yet to see a flood of devs heading back to PC, it suggests pretty strongly that piracy (which has always been more rampant on PC) is hurting the industry on that platform.
      
      I definitely agree there are instances where piracy has helped ‘spread the word’, but it’s nowhere _near_ as black and white as what you’re citing, and there’s no doubt it’s raising overall costs for gamers who do pay, and lowering pay for devs, as well as overall production. The overall decline of PC gaming is possibly the biggest available evidence for this (and yes, PC gaming has improved a bit lately, but it’s _nothing_ like it was in the mid 90s, before piracy aided by the internet derailed it – back then the consoles got PC ports, now it’s the other way around).
    - Browism
      
      I dont earn enought to drive a Ferrari , perhaps they should lower their costs to $5000 each so i can buy one. If they dont then its perfectly acceptable to steal it.
      
      Is that your arguement.
      
      Lets be honest , if you pirate a game , your a criminal , and you have FA right to complain about the distributor chasing you to recover the theft. Why 800 Euro for a 50 euro game , chances are your torrent has probably helped allow 50 others steal it too.
  - Axehole
    
    Or buy them from the bargain bin or used for next to nothing. Sell it when your done to recoup your money and it’s practically free. Better yet, borrow them from friends. There is always a way to play for free completely legally and still screw them over for being gigantic pricks. Or like Axe99 said, don’t buy games that suck… nor promote them and the companies who make them. Let them do the work of killing themselves off lol.
    - Lol
      
      But… that would require me to not have instant gratification. I deserve to have everything I want RIGHT NOW!!! I can not wait for sales or for friends to be done with games. It’s too much of a burden.
    - Anonymous
      
      Aye, totally agree – anyone that games a lot should know how to get around paying $60 for every game by now (or have won the lottery!), without having to steal to get the job done.
    - Anonymous
      
      pirating is not stealing, so yes, there is a way around the $60 without stealing, well observed.
    - Anonymous
      
      Good points indeed but they have the preowned section under their thumb with those horrendous “Online passes”. Greedy bastards…
    - OMGWTFBBQ
      
      @Axe99
      So you are ok with borrowing a game from a friend and not paying for it?
      Did you ever borrow a game from a friend? Or a book? Or a CD?
      Did you buy it after you read it?
      
      -Hint: This is a trick question.-
    - Ogra
      
      @OMGWTFBBQ
      
      He already said he was OK with that. I’m unsure why you’re asking that when he already said that in earlier posts.
      
      Besides, none of those things you mentioned are comparable. None of them involve the creation of copies, which of course is what copyright is based on.
      
      If you’re going to take on copyright supporters, please consider what you’re writing.
    - Anonymous
      
      @ Zenamez – I agree the online pass thing is a bit rubbish (particularly for peer-to-peer games! Dedicated server games it’s a bit of a greyer issue, as servers don’t just run themselves for nothing), but many of the games pirated are single-player only experiences, or don’t have an online pass (the CoD/MW games are some of the most pirated games in existence, but don’t charge for online). And hell, if people want a quality online shooter, TF2 is available for free, and Counter-strike is pretty cheap, and CoD4 on sale is easily affordable (and CoD4 was the best of the ‘modern’ series anyways).
      
      I think it in many cases (ie, when it’s not just using it for a demo, or when the genuinely can’t afford it rather than want alcohol _and_ new release games) more comes down to people being able to rip people off without consequence, so they do. There’s plenty of studies that people behave like this given the opportunity, so it’s hardly surprising that this is the case when they can do this.
      
      I just think it’s a little sad that most software (and movie/music) pirates lack the strength of character to admit that they’re ripping off the people upon which their very hobby depends, who often work in pretty tenuous employment (plenty of studios closed up or downsized in 2011).
  - Ugly American
    
    “If they’re so shitty, don’t play ‘em.”
    
    How would one find out if they’re any good or shitty WITHOUT trying them first? Magic? Should we consult the Ouija board? Rely on reviews made by others? Or should we just take the word of the developer – “Buy this game, it’s the greatest under the sun! We swear to it!”
    
    “If you play ‘em, then pay for it. Simple as that.”
    
    I’ll tell ya what, oh pusher of all things copywrong – we’ll try ‘em out and return them if they fail. Fair enough? Can we expect A FULL REFUND if we’re not completely satisfied (as is the case with most other products in a free market)? Gee, I didn’t think so…
    
    “If you got some enjoyment from ‘em”
    
    Assuming he got ANY enjoyment which you haven’t established. Did it ever occur to you that perhaps he likes to try a product before he purchases it? Most logical people would – especially in a tough economy. What, this “complicated” concept doesn’t register? Would you like a diagram?
    
    (and presumably you did, or you wouldn’t have played them in the first place),
    
    That’s like assuming he “enjoyed” driving a car by simply taking a test drive. Using your convoluted logic, he should pay the full price of said car even if he doesn’t like / want it because, “presumably,” he “enjoyed” it. Delusional much?
    
    “then you should pay the people that put in long hours over months if not years to make the game.”
    
    Yeah, like it makes one bit of difference how long a product spends in development or how hard others worked on it. If it’s garbage, it shouldn’t be subsidized by the marketplace “just because.” Sorry, kid – reality doesn’t work that way. Worthy content + reasonable fees + full refunds = end of “piracy.”
    
    Familiarize your masters with that little formula – just don’t copywrong it or I’ll see you in court! <3
    
    "Anything else is leeching, pure and simple."
    
    Spoken like a true copywrong troll – "Pay to try, pay to own, pay even if you just look at it and place it back on the shelf. JUST PAY, PAY, PAY! OR ELSE!"
    
    Make yourself scarce, shill – you reek of copywrong.
    - Anonymous
      
      If you’re reading this thread, you’ll see that I don’t condemn piracy as glorified demos – torrenting to try something for a few hours, then buying, is fine. Which kinda makes half of your post pointless.
      
      As for finding out about things – there’s oodles of information on games on the net – it’s one of the best covered consumer products available. For the games that are torrented most, there’s normally hundreds of reviews and forums discussing the product. If someone wants to find out what they’re liked, they can with little trouble or intelligence.
      
      Note that I also said the if people are genuinely too poor to buy the games, then I also have no issue with it. But if people are simply saying “I want my booze, weed, eating out and my games too”, then it’s just greed and people need to decide whether they want to take or add to society. If they want to take, then they shouldn’t be surprised when people get the irrates with it.
      
      Your argument on quality of game stamping out piracy is cut to ribbons by which games are actually torrented. Many AAA games with top-notch reviews get pirated like it’s going out of fashion. Other games that are rubbish often don’t get pirated much at all. Going on your argument, you’d expect that the lower quality games would get pirated more. Unfortunately, the way it actually works doesn’t support your contention.
      
      As I noted somewhere else, we have to learn to deal with something where the marginal cost of production of the good (virtually nothing for games) is far, far greater than the fixed cost. If the marginal production can’t be controlled (such as for games, movies, music and digital books) then piracy can mean that the fixed costs are never recouped, often for worth products, because the individuals that are pirating either don’t realise or don’t care about the cost they have on their industry. But for every genuine pirate (as noted elsewhere, I think a genuine pirate is someone who pirates a full game, when they had disposable income that could have been used to purchase it) that steals digital content, less content is produced, the content producers are paid less and the legitimate consumers pay more.
      
      So before you think I’m just regurgitating some copyright-related stuff, it’s far from that. I’m just a legit gamer that’s cranky at the piracy that means I pay more for games, and have less to choose from.
    - Sin
      
      “How would one find out if they’re any good or shitty WITHOUT trying them first? ”
      
      Reviews, play footage, trailers, more reviews, demos, analysis from friends who have it, reading a description of the mechanics… I don’t think I missed anything.
      
      (Actually, demos are a big one. So many games have demos, but still get pirated at just about the same rates. I do have to wonder why.)
      
      And that’s just for games. For music and movies it’s even easier.
      
      I agree with most of your argument (aside from the rudeness that makes you sound like you don’t know what you’re talking about), but that part was stupid. Really, there are so many ways to get that information, that it simply isn’t vaild to claim that piracy is the only one.
      
      I mean, copyright is bad, but call it bad for actual reasons. You don’t have to make reasons up; they already exist.
  - Anonymous
    
    And let me guess. You never test drive a car before buying? You’d purchase a hyped product with the implied guarantee that you couldn’t reverse the sale?
    
    The games I play, I’ve bought. That may boil down to one out of a hundred games, but hey, I don’t waste a minute of my time utilizing those 99 games anyway.
    
    Obviously no one plays a crap game. And what most of the people here are saying is that for those few games well worth playing, we usually do pay for them.
    
    The only exception I can think of would be where the pirated copy of the game actually works better than the original (DRM-free and CD-cracked).
http://www.twitter.com/echoman74 echoman

Silly wabbits tricks are for kids. They should just make a free project markets for users instead of making games to pay. You’d really be surprised what is available in open-source.

If not eventually someone will. I remember an old game called grand theft auto which is now available free. Get greedy everyone hates you, work with the public and become a god.

If more people in this world had the mentality like Richard Stallman just imagine what a better world we’d live in.
- Beezelbuddy
  
  imaginaNation ???
  
  imaginaNation ???
  
  imaginaNation !!!
Opennet Net

I am going to download all your games and give them away to people. Eff you studios, you don’t get to dictate what I do or what anyone does on the internet. You have lost what money I was going to pay for. Its a shame your so stupid. Ohh and fuck you!
- Beezelbuddy
  
  yes… fuck the fucking fuckers- but US repeat USselves
  
  hmmm… new skin SAME olde game
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000617943487 Máté Bikfalvi

I appreciate the work put into writing this article (very creative), but a list would have been easier to look over if you’re in a hurry. Because of that I have to ask: Why aren’t you guys making the list available for everyone? Why just ‘gaming publications’?
- OMGWTFBBQ
  
  The list is available for everyone (far as i can read), just send an email.
  - http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000617943487 Máté Bikfalvi
    
    Then what’s the point? Do they like to waste both our times?
- Beezelbuddy
  
  need to know:
  
  you will be downloaded and updated IAW the Soylent master kernal
  
  then ALL your concerns will be alleviated
  
  AND wait there’s MORE !!! act now or forever hold your speech…
HarrasingWhores

damn them
Randy_Lahey

Ah yes. Cash, the answer to all of life’s problems.

/s
ElectricJesus

Bear with each other and forgive whatever grievances you may have against one another. Forgive as the Lord forgave you.
http://twitter.com/PostConsumerWat Davi Jame

Offer a product that people are willing to pay for and piracy isn’t a concern.
- Robertofication
  
  I couldn’t agree with you more…
- Indeed I am a walrus
  
  Offer a game someone can’t afford and they’ll pirate it regardless.
  - Anonymous
    
    Then they wouldn’t have bought the game either way. If they copy the game and are happy with it, at least the net benefit of a good review and advertising is there.
    
    From the industry view, this boils down to no gain at all or an infinitesmal gain.
- Anonymous
  
  Just as Gabe Newell put it in an interview about Portal 2. “Counter piracy by making a product people are almost guaranteed to buy”.
townie2

ha! good luck. most people pirate games because they do’t have any money. don’t you think they would buy them if they could? there will be few settlements pushed when they find out many of these people live below the poverty line so have zero chance of getting anything from them.
- Anonymous
  
  This goes for many, but by no means all. I know plenty of people who can afford to pay but pirate because they can (not unlike music and TV/movie piracy). If people are poor and seriously can’t afford it (rather than decide to pirate a game and then spend as much money on alcohol or cigarettes) then I have sympathy for it, but for the rich kids who pirate just to make their dollar go further (and there are plenty of ‘em) I have no respect for at all. I still think these legal blackmail type proceedings are inappropriate, but no more inappropriate than stealing from people that work long hours to put games together.
  - http://profiles.google.com/zerianis10 Christopher Kidwell
    
    Axe99, I think that you are lying about ‘knowing plenty of people who can afford to pay but pirate because they can’ to be blunt….. if I saw you spouting that in real life, it would be BAP BAP across the face for you, that’s how sure I am that you are lying.
    - Anonymous
      
      Spoken like a 12-year old! I’ve been gaming since the early 90s kid, and have known hundreds of gamers across two decades. And I do know plenty of people that can afford to pay but don’t, for games, music and movies. My sympathies if you’re from a poor neighbourhood where you don’t know anybody like that, but trust me, it’s out there.
    - Guest
      
      No, I’m going to back him up here. I’m in college, and I know plenty of people who say they can’t pay for games, but still eat pizza every other meal, and spend hundreds on booze/weed. There are plenty of people for whom the idea is “I can’t have everything I want if I pay for it all, so I’m not going to pay for this, even though I could if”. To ignore this attitude is to be dishonest.
      
      People are greedy. People act due to that greed. Are you saying that pirates are somehow exempt from this most basic of human laws? Are they special?
    - OMGWTFBBQ
      
      Lol @ i’m older then you so shut up.
    - Anonymous
      
      @ OMGWTFBBQ, OK, hardly the strongest response, but what do you do to someone that says “no you don’t, I know that you’re lying” when they’re just plain wrong?
  - Anonymous
    
    This right here: Copying information is not theft.
    
    If you want to maintain control over information there is only one way to do so. Keep it a secret.
    
    Or you can go down the same tired old road the communists did and expect human nature to change because of a political rant. That’s not going to happen. If people canc communicate at all, then filesharing will be rampant. That this does not break a business has been demonstrably proven four or five times over already.
    
    However, it does render it highly difficult to peddle pure crap or mediocre games and software with extraneous bling attached. The real adversary for the busines here is consumer awareness.
    - Anonymous
      
      OK, let’s put it another way, and take things to their logical conclusions. If _everyone_ pirated their games because they could, the games industry would implode. There’d be no new games and we’d be left playing the old stuff forever (except for the people that would code their own games, and keep them secret, lol!)
      
      On the other hand, if _everyone_ paid for what they played, then there would be even more games, and more jobs in the industry.
      
      Same story for music and movies.
      
      I mean, isn’t it obvious that piracy is better for everyone? /sarcasm. Whether it’s theft or not, regardless of whatever ‘principles’ the pirates hang onto, the more piracy exists, the smaller the industry is. It’s the classic case of individuals biting the hand that feeds them, and almost exactly like climate change (where the individuals think that they’re too small to make a difference on the overall picture, when they’re not, they’re just lack the information/imagination to understand how it all works).
      
      As I’ve noted somewhere else, we’re faced with a problem of high costs of production but almost negligible marginal costs of reproduction of a good. If we don’t have a large enough proportion of the userbase behaving pro-community as opposed to ‘screw the community’, then without DRM there would be no gaming community. That PCs get console ports and not the other way around as was the case before piracy became rampant through the internet shows how much of an impact a change in the sizes of the proportion of legit/leeching customers has.
      
      I’m not getting all ideological here – I’m coming from the fact that piracy really hurt the PC game industry, and almost pushed it to oblivion, beyond a few niche genres. It’s come back a bit now, but relative to the rest of the industry it’s a shadow of its former self, primarily because of piracy.
    - Anonymous
      
      OK, let’s put it another way, and take things to their logical conclusions. If _everyone_ pirated their games because they could, the games industry would implode. There’d be no new games and we’d be left playing the old stuff forever (except for the people that would code their own games, and keep them secret, lol!)
      
      On the other hand, if _everyone_ paid for what they played, then there would be even more games, and more jobs in the industry.
      
      Same story for music and movies.
      
      I mean, isn’t it obvious that piracy is better for everyone? /sarcasm. Whether it’s theft or not, regardless of whatever ‘principles’ the pirates hang onto, the more piracy exists, the smaller the industry is. It’s the classic case of individuals biting the hand that feeds them, and almost exactly like climate change (where the individuals think that they’re too small to make a difference on the overall picture, when they’re not, they’re just lack the information/imagination to understand how it all works).
      
      As I’ve noted somewhere else, we’re faced with a problem of high costs of production but almost negligible marginal costs of reproduction of a good. If we don’t have a large enough proportion of the userbase behaving pro-community as opposed to ‘screw the community’, then without DRM there would be no gaming community. That PCs get console ports and not the other way around as was the case before piracy became rampant through the internet shows how much of an impact a change in the sizes of the proportion of legit/leeching customers has.
      
      I’m not getting all ideological here – I’m coming from the fact that piracy really hurt the PC game industry, and almost pushed it to oblivion, beyond a few niche genres. It’s come back a bit now, but relative to the rest of the industry it’s a shadow of its former self, primarily because of piracy.
Robertification

Fuck you all, greedy fucks.
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Guest

I love how most of the people here “justify” pirating games because they’re so shit.

Still, they aren’t so shit that you aren’t willing to play them, eh?

If you’re going to pirate something at least try to be honest about the reason you’re doing it.

You’re doing it because you think you can.

You’re doing it because you think no one will do anything about.

Hopefully, one of these days you’ll find yourselves wrong.
- Anonymous
  
  if you release a quality game people will buy it.
  case in point: StarCraft (the original one, not SC2)
  it shipped without any copyprotection whatsoever, it was copied like crazy (between friends or on LAN parties mostly, the internet connections weren’t good enough to realistically p2p games) and it still sold extremely well.
  
  make good games and people will buy it (and also pirate it)
  make shit games and people will not buy it (but probably still pirate it)
  - Beezelbuddy
    
    and the anonymii WIN
- Ogra
  
  You’re correct in all your statements (barring the last one), but you’re missing the important point; so what? So we’re pirating them because we don’t want to pay. Who cares? More importantly, how is this legally actionable?
  
  If you want to stop it, you either have to stop the root of the behavior (impossible, as the root is basic greed), or you have to be able to monitor the behavior (which would require huge violations of basic privacy laws to have any sort of reliability or validity in the results). In short, it’s best for companies to just let piracy happen, because it either helps them if they’re a small company, or doesn’t cause much harm if they’re large.
  - Anonymous
    
    I guess the ‘so what’ here is that ripping off the people who develop software (which taking what they worked on for free when their pricing structure involves charging a fee) means less software in the long run. This is the sad thing here, in that to feed their short-term desires software pirates weaken the whole industry in the long term. Something humanity is unfortunately rather good it.
    - Aussie Bob
      
      actually piracy means that the companies have to rethink their business model, simple. Those who say my model has worked for the last 50 years or whatever so why should i change now are going to go bust, unless the produce some pretty awesome games, no company i can think of is doing that.
      
      survival of the fittest is what the game companies are going through.
    - Anonymous
      
      @ Aussie Bob – and if this happens, and everyone goes free-to-play (the only real model to defeat piracy), we’re left playing Farmville and ‘pay/grind to win’ games. Awesome. I can’t express how thankful I am to game pirates that their theft of other people’s hard work is unnecessarily limiting the potential range of gameplay experiences to some of the most boring available.
      
      Unfortunately, the pay up front for a quality interactive experience model works very well for certain types of gameplay. The pirates are just lucky that there’s enough customers willing to actually pay for them so that they get to play it as well.
      
      Speaking of which, the pirates (and I define pirates here as people that can pay but choose not too, noting that most genuinely poor people won’t be able to afford a rig that can decently play games that cost enough to make them worth pirating) don’t just rip off the devs. By not paying for what they play (if they are able, which many are), they push up the price of games for legit, paying consumers. Pirates have _always_ been the scum of the videogame world, leeching off the devs and paying consumers. They bring almost nothing to the table, and take a lot away. I’m happy to be convinced otherwise, but the main bonus of piracy in the last two decades has been to crack draconian DRM, which wouldn’t have been necessary in the first place if the pirates weren’t pirating in the first place.
    - Prick
      
      I have a friend who recently bought a gaming rig for $4000 and then says, “I’m too poor to pay for a game, so I have no option but to pirate”. Do you have anything to say against that?
    - Anonymous
      
      @Prick – err, lolz?! I mean, if they seriously said that, then they’re so lost in themselves they need to seek counselling ;). More likely, they made a conscious judgement that they could afford to go all-out on the kit because they knew in advance they could get the games for free.
- Anonymous
  
  I don’t pirate games so that’s probably my argument over. In terms of music- I may occasionally torrent an album to see what it’s like. If it’s good then I’ll buy a copy. If it’s not however- I’ll delete it and move on. Yes I could buy it and ask for a refund but it seems far too much of a hassle and most times in the past the product was rejected from a refund because it was opened. Same for the occasional movie. I also hate Apple and iTunes so I don’t have the whole ‘listen to a track’ business and Spotify refuses to work. Oh and YouTube (in most cases) doesn’t have the entire album but a few songs so I can’t listen to them and make a judgment. Regardless the company doesn’t lose money. People like me are those going out and purchasing their stuff without the need for them to lose money in refunds. Ok they lose money (a very very small amount ) on piracy but those that pirate and purchase make up a bigger percentage. As long as there’s a product they’ll be people checking it out for free and those that won’t buy the final product.
  - Ugly American
    
    “Yes I could buy it and ask for a refund but it seems far too much of a hassle and most times in the past the product was rejected from a refund because it was opened.”
    
    Exactly, and it still applies today. Under the current business model, you’re stuck with the garbage. Ask for a refund and they’ll tell you to go fuck yourself. “You don’t like, too bad – we got your money. Leave or we’ll call security. Come again!”
- Guest
  
  So in the event that someone pirated a game, and didn’t like it and didn’t play it, what then, eh?
- OMGWTFBBQ
  
  You have trouble reading i think. People don’t say they pirate BECAUSE the games are shit. They say they pirate and then only buy if they like it.
  
  And hey look, that renders the rest of your post useless…
  - Guest
    
    There was a blog post from a developer I was reading recently. It tracked games that players had submitted high scores from and had a flag if they had been submitted from a pirated version of the game.
    
    Around 75% of the high scores had been submitted from a pirate copy.
    
    Cross referencing device ids (it from from an iOS game) to see how many of the pirates had then purchased the 0 had. Not a single one. Yet reviews from people who had purchased the game had been very positive so it didn’t look like the game was shit. Also, a large number of the scores submitted from pirates were submitted upon completion of the game, so you can’t say that they didn’t like it either.
    
    So no. The vast majority of pirates don’t only buy it if they like it.
    - PelouzeTF
      
      Anyone who creates something knows from their reducing bottom line that this is a real world reality.
      
      Pirates trot out so many BS cliches for not buying something and I can’t think of one of them (apart from “its not available in my country and I have to have it, I simply can’t do without it and I’m going to take it because its their fault I can’t get it. and i have to feed my insatiable media appetite nom nom nom” lol) that even begins to justify not paying for IP.
      
      The vast majority of those same people for sure wouldn’t act the same way in the real world – get online though and the morals disappear.
Mailto

And the “do not support” list grows,,

At this time the only game I’m planning to buy is Interstellar Marines, when it’s ready.
oh’ also invested in good VPN last week.
Leak

No wonder sending cease, pay up and desist letters is so rampant in Germany – it’s even written into law:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abmahnung
AVGN Junior

Aren’t games dead?
- Prick
  
  No, you idiot.
  - AVGN Junior
    
    Obvious fanboy is obvious, looks I offended someone <3
- Beezelbuddy
  
  have you tried the new sim outside life? only ONE so ‘play’ carefully
  - AVGN Junior
    
    Heh multiplayer can also be defined: A person socializing outside of the gaming world instead through a screen with fake friends who he will never met.
    - LOL
      
      Right…because people have to meet to be friends.
foff

Why the fuck do they ask so much? Why do they think one person ought to pay for several others? No one really has a right to try before you buy but we pirate because we can. In my case I have not played a game in years but occasionally download one because it sounds interesting. I cannot justify the price. I have never played online and have no interest in doing so. I think all these companies need to stop using lawyers to try to extort more money out of those who don’t want to pay and just be content with what they make.

In my case preventing me from downloading a game will never ever lead to a sale. I suspect that a very large percentage of those that download would never buy either. I don’t know why all these greedy fucks think there is an endless supply of money in the world. Reality dictates they make what they make and that is it If the margin is not enough then they are free to do something else. They are not entitled to be in business or have special protection, like all businesses if they don’t like what is happening and they aren’t profitable then they can pack the fuck up and move along.

I am glad because of jurisdictional problems none of these pay up or else schemes fly in the US.
- Beezelbuddy
  
  there they profIT off providing less bandwidth than promised, life long(almost) contracts with heavy penalties for switching(if possible)…
  
  and a pointed advert assault which now makes many sites impossible to view via builtin exploits -comm paths – making US safe to snoop and ‘target’ the consumer
  
  while exploiting the pocketbooks of the last well heeled middle class… while tying their future earnings(tithing?) via SSN and phone service(trying getting a dial tone ANYWHERE else if computer shows balance owed(even if charges result from telco error- ahh freedom)
  
  of course none of this USed to be legal… but a little well placed golden coins AND… the next level… calling Dantes party of…
Anon

Even you, Kalypso. :2
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Gast

German Court:” file-sharing settlement is a completely useless legal service”

Source: http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Gericht-Filesharing-Abmahnung-ist-eine-voellig-unbrauchbare-anwaltliche-Dienstleistung-1413290.html

But i doubt that this will stop this greedy fucks
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http://otester.myopenid.com/ PiRat

Glad I didn’t buy DX3, they also fudged the reviews by only giving pre-release copies to reviewers that would give them 9/10.
Screwlooose

tough being only hammer in a nailed world
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Anonymous

You know, all sim things by Aerosoft are crap anyways.

Piracy is, as the awesome Gabe Newell said, a service issue. I only buy my games from Steam (I do pirate though, mostly games I can’t get anymore or with questionable DRM) because it works. I only use Origin for 1 game, and that’s Battlefield 2142 – EA takes too long to get it on Steam, but I’m only buying BF3 when I can get it on Steam for a reasonable price. (MW3 is just CoD4 with another name). Also, Portal 2 was kind of expensive at it’s launch. So I waited. Then it got 29.99 in less than 6 months, so I bought it… Valve is an awesome company.
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Get 5gb for free on dropbox: http://db.tt/XUecIU
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CTVic

The only thing that these companies are going to listen to is their bottom lines. If they’re making money from threatening to sue people they believe to be pirates, without trial, they will do it.
So to get them to stop, affect their bottom lines. Boycott companies that participate in Copyright Trolling.
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DocGerbil100

Hello, TF. :D
I am on holiday and have the time to post here again. This is nice. :)

Regarding the speculative invoicers:

Regardless of whether one is in favour of games piracy or against it, some things are, at this point, largely beyond any reasonable dispute – and one of them is that IP addresses are not a reliable means of identifying copyright infringers.

If my (admittedly, rather vague) memory serves, the ACS Law leak showed that nearly a quarter of the IPs returned by one ISP in the UK had no customer account information attached: customers who should have been easily identified were simply listed as “Unknown”, for reasons that have never been made clear.

It would not be unreasonable to assume that a similar percentage of the results that were returned were simply wrong.

Any methodology which has a nearly 50% chance of accusing the wrong person in any given instance is not a reasonable, ethical or responsible basis for threatening even one person, much less invoicing tens of thousands of people for nearly a thousand Euros a pop, much less actually taking them to court.

Another thing that is largely unarguable is that the lawyers involved in these cases appear to be – without any apparent exceptions – the sleaziest and most dishonest lawyers money can buy.

Such as Andrew Crossley in the UK, who claimed that prior verdicts had established a clear legal precedent for his case, that his evidence was 100% reliable, that he would sue those who didn’t settle, yet immediately dismissed any case where the validity of IP evidence was credibly questioned, who accidentally leaked a tonne of emails that proved him to be a liar from start to finish and who today was finally found guilty and banned from practising for two years for – basically – being a big fat fraudulent toad taking money from every side under false pretenses.

Such as the RIAA in the US, notorious for the still-ongoing work-for-hire bribery scandal, who sued hundreds of thousands with the same claim of 100% accuracy and yet actually sued in only the easiest of cases and inexplicably voluntarily-dismissed every single case where the validity of IP evidence was questioned by a halfway-credible defendant.

Such as ProjektCD, who once again claimed 100% accuracy, yet wouldn’t sue outside of the one European country where the evidence is accepted without question, who refused to cough up a single detail as to how this amazing feat of accuracy was possible (or even who harvested the evidence) and who have now abandoned their campaign completely rather than face further scrutiny and public condemnation.

The general term we’ve used for them here is “extortionist”, but it seems to me that by far the strongest thread binding them all together is deception from start to finish.

With each and every one of them being only too happy to tell lies to their customers, lies to the courts (and to the police in the larger cases) and lies to their hapless victims, I think perhaps this activity is better described as Settlement Fraud.

Ultimately, however we or they describe themselves, however hard they try to sell themselves as legitimate representatives of aggrieved copyright-holders, they are nothing more than criminal fraudsters, taking money under false pretenses – and when the authorities finally get to grips with this still relatively-novel legal exploit, I’ll be surprised if at least some of these confidence-tricksters don’t end up prosecuted and sentenced to jail.

Now, that’s a day to look forward to. :)
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http://www.facebook.com/people/Alejandro-Suárez-Mascareño/1467011507 Alejandro Suárez Mascareño

If everyone started to play using copies instead of original stuff, industry wouldn’t implode, disappear or anything like that. They would just evolve and stop making money on selling copies (which is nowadays a poor way of making money) and find another way to earn it.

Maybe they should just ask themselves a question: When distribution is worthless (because everyone can do it without effort), and copies themselves are worthless (because it demands no effort to duplicate them)…

WHY ON EARTH DO THEY STILL TRY TO MAKE MONEY DISTRIBUTING COPIES!!?!?!?

Is freaking retarded.
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Jonelo

Oh yeah . Piracy killed the PC game. 3DFX not kill PC gaming nor Nvidia , and ATI with the scheduled obsolescence and Direct X and Shader model 1.0 , 2.0 and 3.0, DRM chips from Intel like the famous Intel IGP . Or the XBOX or the consoles .

The proof is that games like COD or Batterfield 3 are played less in PC than on consoles due to piracy.

Are somebody sure that know someone in the real life – no on internet – who playing on PC and is not a game like Solitaire of Facebook games ?

What is the reason why PC games now are given away for free, even the MMO?
Common Man

If I was running a video game company, I’d deal with piracy by giving users a very strong incentive to purchase the original copy by combining the digital data with:

1) An excellent game box (like the Starcraft original box – where the cover opens up)

2) A first-class manual (like say, Master of Orion 2′s)

3) Extras, such as a separate tech tree foldouts (Starcraft, Imperialism 2, etc…) posters/character info foldouts, (Etrian Odyssey III) a colour pamphlet highlighting other games, (such as with the Total Annihilation Gold Edition), etc..

These extras, once mass-produced, probably don’t cost much, but they add a great deal of perceived value to the consumer.

Some people would still pirate and might even take the effort to download a 100+ page manual and print it, but many more would purchase the original for the psychological gratification of having a well-crafted product in their hands.
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Youcannotfindme

well this is kida ironic: the company’s have become pirates themselves XD true people are stealing their product (have done it sometimes myself i admit it) but now the company’s strike back (reminds me of starwars) both sides arent playing fair the people steal but the company’s make examples of everyone they can track down.
talking about tracking down; arent they violating the privacy rules if they found out where i live with this ip?
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Hotmaillulwut

Can I ask for better games?
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http://twitter.com/dethgarcia Eder García

these companies needs to confirm these kind of actions to prevent all kinds of frauds
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Maximilian

They can blow me.
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http://twitter.com/DrakonerDE Daichi Kurosawa

German law is the most complicated law system on the whole planet… at least that’s what different sources and personal experience say. It’s just natural to need a lawyer to do anything there, which costs 80,- € upwards (private people). In addition those companies suing take actions against the law, some examples: 100,- € is the highest sum they can demand, everything else is against law. How they gain the personal information can also be against law, like going to a court and getting personal info off an IP. Third: mass letter sending is also against the law, each letter must be made for a specific case. Fourth: They have to prove you downloaded/uploaded 100% of the game/music/movie, which they do not. Fifth: Letting people sign a (modified) declaration to cease and desist that gives copyright holders the right to demand 2.000 ,- € per game/music/movie for 30 years to come (it’s regarded as agreement). This list goes endlessly on… while the public response is mainly manipulated by politics and news-media (pirates are bad, we have to sue them). End users have little to say there, despite being the masses, maybe this changes with german pirate parties taking politics. In France the law for copyright holders seems very favorably against Germany… like suing without courts.

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