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Witcher 2 DRM Dumped, But CD Projekt Is Watching Torrents

Following reports that security features were damaging the playing experience of The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings, today CD Projekt will release an update to remove all DRM from the game. But while the company informs TorrentFreak it was pleased to avoid a pre-release on this major title, as promised it will monitor and go after illegal file-sharers.

witcher2“To me it was quite some news that our lovely DRM, in this case SecuRom, can screw up game performance so much. Would you like a little taste?” a TorrentFreak reader reported to us this week.

He was referring to the DRM present in certain versions of The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings, the hot new title from CD Projekt. His calculations revealed the following:

* With SecuROM: 41 sec game launch, 16 sec savegame, 16-43 fps
* Without SecuROM: 9 sec game launch, 8 sec savegame, 24-73 fps

Although the performance hit is dramatic, only retail versions of the game are affected since Steam versions and those from GOG.com are supplied DRM-free.

“I bought the game from Amazon,” said our concerned reader. “I am an idiot, apparently.”

However, after listening to complaints like these around the web, today CD Projekt will release a patch which will remove DRM from all versions of the game.

“Our goal is to make our fans and customers happy and to reward them for buying our game and DRM schemes does not support our philosophy as they might create obstacles for users of legally bought copies,” reports CD Projekt’s Adam Badowski, refreshingly.

“Our approach to countering piracy is to incorporate superior value in the legal version. This means it has to be superior in every respect: less troublesome to use and install, with full support, and with access to additional content and services. So, we felt keeping the DRM would mainly hurt our legitimate users.”

Interestingly, TorrentFreak had already been in contact with CD Projekt who told us their main concern was avoiding a pre-release situation, something they achieved.

“Nowadays most PC games are available for download with a working crack at least couple of days before official release,” Agnieszka Szostak of CD Projekt told us. “We’re happy we were able to avoid it with our game.”

While CD Projekt’s approach to DRM in this instance is to be commended, and piracy can indeed be deterred by making it more worthwhile to get the official copy, this announcement should perhaps not be read in isolation.

As reported last year, CD Projekt already warned that DRM aside, they might take another and even more controversial approach to dealing with piracy.

“Of course we’re not happy when people are pirating our games, so we are signing with legal firms and torrent sneaking companies,” CD Projekt co-founder Marcin Iwinski explained at the time.

“In quite a few big countries, when people are downloading [The Witcher 2] illegally they can expect a letter from a legal firm saying, ‘Hey, you downloaded it illegally and right now you have to pay a fine’,” Iwinski added.

A couple of weeks ago TorrentFreak heard rumors that a pre-released but uncracked version of a Witcher 2 torrent on The Pirate Bay had been put there as “a trap”. Our investigations didn’t show any evidence to back up that claim. So, along with a link to the company’s earlier statements about getting law firms involved, we contacted CD Projekt and asked them outright – is this torrent a trap and do you still intend to go ahead with tracking illegal file-sharers?

We received no answer on the first question, but we did on the second.

“Yes we will track illegal file-sharing hoping people will find the game good enough to actually change their mind and be willing to pay for it,” Agnieszka Szostak told us.

If CD Projekt do indeed go ahead with their threats, this will be the second time that a Witcher title has been involved in these so-called “pay-up-or-else” schemes. In 2008, large numbers of Internet users started receiving letters from notorious file-sharing lawyers Davenport Lyons in the UK demanding cash settlements. Among those letters were demands for payment on an Atari game with a familiar title – The Witcher.

We asked CD Projekt if that scheme had been successful. We received no response.

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  • I got robbed by IMF

    Oh great. I’ll illegally download witcher 2, and wait for the receipt then.

    It’s more convenient, but don’t expect me to pay though, I probably would have to sell a kidney to pay the current overpriced games. (plus the thousands of taxes till it reach my pc).

    • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=694806849 Cameron Walker

      GoG games are popular on warez forums – shouldn’t be hard to find.
      http://www.gog.com/en/gamecard/the_witcher_2

    • Anonymous

      Boycott it……..

      Don’t buy it…… don’t download it…… Don’t tell anyone about it……..

      No….. Actually……. Tell people it is a shit game…… really really shit……

      CD Projekt …… Treating fans like shit….. the fans will respond in kind…..
      morons…

      • Anon

        ” ‘Hey, you downloaded it illegally and right now you have to pay a fine’,” Iwinski added”

        Excellent. Buy it or do without it, as with products in all times of human history.

        Pirates are increasingly being revealed as self-obsessed, poorly informed morons. Good.

        • Anonymous

          “”Pirates are increasingly being revealed as self-obsessed, poorly informed morons. “”

          “”self-obsessed”"…….?

          “”Pirates”" are the ones who spend thousands of pounds every year on content…..
          ( if they can afford it …. if not then pirating a copy for them is not a lost sale) They are fans….
          If they are obsessed ….. they are obsessed with the content

          “”Poorly informed morons”"………..?…….. lol

          Pirates know…..
          Anything that can be copied a zero cost is literally worthless…..
          The old business models don’t work anymore …..
          Protectionism is used as a method to extract money from people for worthless goods…..

          Content creators *deserve financial reward for the work they do….. BUT selling worthless information is not the way to do it…….
          No one DESERVES financial reward for selling worthless products….

          Punishing people for copying worthless information is also a dick move… you are punishing potential customers and probably fans of the content you create…….

          Sell services….. like WoW , who sell server access ……..
          Blizzard are 5 years ahead when it comes to working business models….

        • Anonymous

          “Sell services…..”

          Pay to play.
          Pay to view.
          Pay to listen.

          This is exactly their dream, isn’t it? Very few overheads. No product to manufacture or ship. And they get revenue every time the content is accessed.

          Welcome to MAFIAA world…..

        • Zzzzzz

          You missed one.

          Pay to breathe.

        • Anonymous

          I left that one out n purpose as I think it’s probably going to be covered by other companies rather than MAFIAA.

          Someone like Exxon maybe? Poison the air and then clean it and sell it back to us in tins?

        • Anonymous

          I left that one out n purpose as I think it’s probably going to be covered by other companies rather than MAFIAA.

          Someone like Exxon maybe? Poison the air and then clean it and sell it back to us in tins?

        • Anonymous

          I left that one out n purpose as I think it’s probably going to be covered by other companies rather than MAFIAA.

          Someone like Exxon maybe? Poison the air and then clean it and sell it back to us in tins?

        • Anonymous

          I left that one out n purpose as I think it’s probably going to be covered by other companies rather than MAFIAA.

          Someone like Exxon maybe? Poison the air and then clean it and sell it back to us in tins?

        • Anonymous

          Agree 100%… the Mafiaa & iRaa dream that…. It wasn’t really my point……

          I didn’t mean… access to a file… as being a service….

          Selling a trip to the cinema….. thats a service… big screen , seats etc….
          Selling a music event….. thats a service…. massive speakers.. live music etc…
          Selling wow access…thats a service…. connection to mmo servers , updates etc..

          Point is…… Sell something that has actual value……. You can’t endlessly copy events and services at zero cost…..

        • Friend of the People

          Ok then, tell me, how are video games that aren’t meant to be played online supposed to give you a service? Take a game like Okami for example, or Shadow of the Colossus. Both of them were beloved to their fans and were completely devoid of multiplayer and had no real need for updates, so what are they supposed to do as a service. There are entire genres of games that can not fit this service model because their focus is on story content, not multiplayer competition. If we attempted to enforce your standards, we would kill many of the best video games in existence. Disgaea, Final Fantasy, Earthbound, The Tales Series, etc. I could go on for pages like this, so let’s just leave it there before I really start to rant.

          The flaw with your logic is that you see replication as the only step to creation. The only problem here is that in any kind of digital medium, the initial act of creation is what instills worth. The worth of the creation is not in what it takes to make physical copies, the worth is in the actual act of creation by the artist. An artist decides what he or she (or in the case of video games, the company) thinks it is worth, and charges based on that .Your only moral responsibility here is to respect the creator’s right of distribution control, and either pay what they ask, or don’t use the content.

          One more thing. Video games are not like music, and can’t use the same business model. A musician gets most of his income from concerts, not copies of his music. The video game company gets all of their income from the copies of their games. Music is usually the creation of 1-10 people. Video game teams can require dozens, many of whom aren’t artists but are vital to the process nontheless. You can’t force both to share a business model.

          And for god’s sake, don’t praise WoW. That business model reduces the entire concept of a game to basic action-reward. Do a quest, get an item, kill an enemy, get experience. In the business model of WoW, there is no room for an expansive battle system or a wonderful story, and there is barely any room for competition because of the time expense involved in playing even one MMORPG. As a devout gamer, I can assure you that WoW is not the business model for the future, if only because you need to be on the top to survive in the MMORPG market and most can never cut in near the top.

          You also can’t force video games to rely on updates. To make my point, I’ll use Shadow of the Colossus. There is literally nothing I would add I would add or remove from the game, because it is a work of art. For the uninitiated, it is a game where you battle only 16 enemies throughout the game, but each is large enough to be a final boss in any other game. It also had an overarching theme of helplessness and made the player question the morality off the protagonist. It doesn’t need to be changed. Would you change Picasso’s paintings or Beethoven’s music? No? Then don’t presume that good video games need updates. You couldn’t force a change on it without diminishing it.

          In summary, don’t equate the way music works to the way games work. The best video games is history are the ones that did not include multiplayer and had little need in the way of updates. If you can think of a way that changes video games into a service model without killing the good games, please tell me. And for the record, Call of Duty, Halo, WoW and all of the other multiplayer games can fit into this model on their own becuase of their competition/cooperation based gameplay. I’m asking for an answer that applies to games like Soul Nomad or Disgaea or Metroid or etc etc etc etc etc…

          Also, one question. Why would updates work to prevent piracy? Can’t a pirate just pirate the update patch?

        • Friend of the People

          Ok then, tell me, how are video games that aren’t meant to be played online supposed to give you a service? Take a game like Okami for example, or Shadow of the Colossus. Both of them were beloved to their fans and were completely devoid of multiplayer and had no real need for updates, so what are they supposed to do as a service. There are entire genres of games that can not fit this service model because their focus is on story content, not multiplayer competition. If we attempted to enforce your standards, we would kill many of the best video games in existence. Disgaea, Final Fantasy, Earthbound, The Tales Series, etc. I could go on for pages like this, so let’s just leave it there before I really start to rant.

          The flaw with your logic is that you see replication as the only step to creation. The only problem here is that in any kind of digital medium, the initial act of creation is what instills worth. The worth of the creation is not in what it takes to make physical copies, the worth is in the actual act of creation by the artist. An artist decides what he or she (or in the case of video games, the company) thinks it is worth, and charges based on that .Your only moral responsibility here is to respect the creator’s right of distribution control, and either pay what they ask, or don’t use the content.

          One more thing. Video games are not like music, and can’t use the same business model. A musician gets most of his income from concerts, not copies of his music. The video game company gets all of their income from the copies of their games. Music is usually the creation of 1-10 people. Video game teams can require dozens, many of whom aren’t artists but are vital to the process nontheless. You can’t force both to share a business model.

          And for god’s sake, don’t praise WoW. That business model reduces the entire concept of a game to basic action-reward. Do a quest, get an item, kill an enemy, get experience. In the business model of WoW, there is no room for an expansive battle system or a wonderful story, and there is barely any room for competition because of the time expense involved in playing even one MMORPG. As a devout gamer, I can assure you that WoW is not the business model for the future, if only because you need to be on the top to survive in the MMORPG market and most can never cut in near the top.

          You also can’t force video games to rely on updates. To make my point, I’ll use Shadow of the Colossus. There is literally nothing I would add I would add or remove from the game, because it is a work of art. For the uninitiated, it is a game where you battle only 16 enemies throughout the game, but each is large enough to be a final boss in any other game. It also had an overarching theme of helplessness and made the player question the morality off the protagonist. It doesn’t need to be changed. Would you change Picasso’s paintings or Beethoven’s music? No? Then don’t presume that good video games need updates. You couldn’t force a change on it without diminishing it.

          In summary, don’t equate the way music works to the way games work. The best video games is history are the ones that did not include multiplayer and had little need in the way of updates. If you can think of a way that changes video games into a service model without killing the good games, please tell me. And for the record, Call of Duty, Halo, WoW and all of the other multiplayer games can fit into this model on their own becuase of their competition/cooperation based gameplay. I’m asking for an answer that applies to games like Soul Nomad or Disgaea or Metroid or etc etc etc etc etc…

          Also, one question. Why would updates work to prevent piracy? Can’t a pirate just pirate the update patch?

        • Zero

          Obvious troll is obvious.

          By all you’re saying, anything single player is a completely valueless product and should therefore be pirated as it is not a “service”.

          As a big fan of single player experiences (like The Witcher 2) I have to disagree. If something had no value, people wouldn’t bother wasting their time stealing it.

          Good sir, you are and idiot trying to justify yourself. I ain’t even mad.

        • Anonymous

          to “Friend of the People”: its easy to offer added value that is a service to single player games or games that have co-op only game modes.

          1. lots of “free” dlc that downloads from inside the game OR via a program like steam, I bought a few games online just for this perpous(borderlands for one)

          2. Online saves/backup of saved games: this is a GREAT service, and for alot of people well worth the cost of paying for a game, as long as they also keep their local saves.

          3. very few games today are being made to be 100% single player, Infact I see the trend being that what would have been SP only games a few years ago and even now, will become co-op games like borderlands.
          this is because people like to play with their friends rather then playing with themselves.

          even RTS games can be done CO-OP for campaign mode, and it can be a blast, One thing that made me NOT buy mass effect 1 or 2 or dragonage was lack of online support, even if it had been 2 player co-op only for multi player, that would have worked fine for me, 4 player would have been perfect(so your whole team could be made of real people)

          I dont agree that the SP experience is without value, BUT I do think that going after your primary source of income is idiotic, its been shown that “pirates” are the ones who buy the most music, and this tends at least in my exp to be true of games as well, good games endup being bought, maby not at release price, but they get bought none the less.

          the big name studios/publishers need to take a look at what some of the little guys are doing, I bought a few games recently one being Section 8 prejudices, at 15bucks (steam) it was a great value, the games fun, and already has had at least 1 DLC patch released(new game mode and stuff), great value for 15bucks!!!

          Price matters, and companies need to realize that they are loosing alot of sales not because of piracy but because they want to much for their games, the economy sucks, we all know this, well all of us but the big boys at companies like activision(who are still charging release day prices for games like black ops…..)

          charge a price people are willing to pay, offer services they will see as value added, dlc(free and paid, charge reasonable price for paid ofcorse not 8bucks for 6 maps), online saves/backups, co-op for single player games.

          if you charge to much, your sales drop, and as i see it now, thats where the game industry is, some can afford to buy whatever games they want, but they are few and far between, most of us are selective about out game buys, and we try b4 we buy for “AAA” titles, but if we see a new game that looks fun at 15bucks alot of us are gonna jump on it without even bothering to torrent a copy, because if we loose 15bucks to a MEH game, its nothing like loosing 50-60-70-80 on a crap game….(Activision prices….)

          If I dont like a game, i delete it, If I like it and cant afford it, i put it on my wish list and keep an eye out for a sale……or wait for a friend to buy me a copy :P

          I see the day of the indi game company/developer as starting, most of the games im keeping an eye on now are from indi developers, most of the AAA titles I see are like HomeFront, a game i was gifted, they come out in a very unpolished state, take months to get patched up(if they ever get patched up) and never really attract the numbers of players they would have had they come out as a finished product, ad to that the fact they cost to bloody much up front……*spits to get bad taste out of my mouth*

          bah, bah, bah……..death to large publishers/dev houses that dont care about the customer and only see us as pocket books to buy them a new car….

        • Friend of the People

          To AshenTech

          1. Free DLC is cracked and easily downloadable. It usually releases 1-3 days after the crack, if not on the same day. All DLC gets cracked, in the same way the games do. DLC is not an answer because it is content, and content can just be copied.

          2. It is a great service, but I haven’t seen to many games that offer it, and even if they did, it wouldn’t be worth the cost of a game because for the cost of one game, you could get a spare harddrive that could automatically copy the data for all of your games everyday. I know. I have one. Works great, but kind of gets rid of the necessity for online saves. On that note, are there any games that actually use online saves? I think steam was supposed to do that, but I haven’t actually researched it because I’ve never needed it to.

          3. A lot of games are, and a lot don’t work in multiplayer. Mass effect sounds like it would be good in multiplayer, but think of the long sections of talking with no gunplay. In the first one, you had over an hour on the Presidium just walking around and talking. That wouldn’t be interesting in multiplayer. You mention the FPS and RTS genre, but those already have multiplayer. They are designed around them. I’m thinking about games like Disgaea, or Shadow of the Colossus, or Okami. None of these had multiplayer, and to be honest, there’s no real way for it to fit. Adventure and RPG games don’t usually go well with multiplayer, and neither do story-heavy games or games with alterable stories like Mass Effect. Those are the ones I am worried about, not Call of Duty or Borderlands. They fit the online model. I can’t think of a way to include the others into the online model. Can you?

          Yes, many companies are trying to make lots of money off of their games, and ones like Activision and the other front runners make windfall profits. Most game companies don’t. Most require all of the money from their sales. I think that a good idea is for them is to lower the prices and try to get more customers to cover the gap. This has worked for games like Majin and the Forsaken Kingdom, but it’s not a viable option for all companies. More to the point, the high prices don’t justify not paying. They may justify not buying and playing at all, but they don’t justify playing without paying.

          “most of the AAA titles I see are like HomeFront, a game i was gifted, they come out in a very unpolished state, take months to get patched up”

          Then you’re watching the wrong AAA titles. Indies do make good games, it’s true. I enjoy indie titles, but to be honest, there is a value in a good large AAA title that many indies don’t successfully replicate. Some indies manage to match or exceed AAA titles (Minecraft and Amnesia pop to mind), but most are just mediocre, just like the AAA titles. I do think that we’ll see in increase in indie quality soon, or at least, an increase in volume that will produce more quality. It will be interesting to see what happens.

          To be honest, I don’t think I’ve lost more than $30 in the past two years on games (got screwed on Dead Rising though. My lord that was bad). Just read a few reviews and watch a gameplay video and you can usually avoid the crap. Try a combination of gamespot and destructiod. They usually aggregate to a pretty accurate description of a game.

        • Anonymous

          Friend of the People: yes all DLC gets cracked eventually, but DLC like for nwn1-2 wasnt cracked as quickly as many other games DLC, and not having to do multi steps to try and get cracked dlc working would be well worth buying the game rather then pirating it for alot of people.

          as to your comments about the talking parts on ME1, yes that could be boring BUT like with borderlands each member of the party could run and talk to a dif person to get all the quests, OR everybody could just sit thru the same talking stuff as they would have to in single player mode, it really wouldnt be any worse then playing solo and having to listen to the blah blah blah as they get their next task/clue.

          steam does backup some data from steam games, but not all,(still far from perfect) to me it would be nice if it was like bfbc2, where i can login to my acct from work, and even in the SP game can take up where i left off.

          NO DRM STAYS UNCRACKED, it just dosnt happen, but with regard to DLC, normal methods as used by a few of the game makers out there would be enough to make sure they made money off it, and be enough of a deterrent to make people think “shit, it would be easier to just buy the game” I know a few people who broke down and grabbed both nwn and nwn2 because they where tired of the issues getting the dlc working, and by that time the game was a decent price.

          sames true of expantions, but also with nwn/nwn2 alot of people i know downloaded , tryed it out(single player) and then bought it once the price dropped a bit so they could play online, again, this is “imoral” from your view point BUT the fact is even at 20-30bucks atari and their dev houses still made money off the sale, and they also made money off the expansion sales(because you had to get legit keys for the expansions to play online)

          I have delt with the cracked DLC thats out there, in some cases its easy easy easy, in other cases, its an utter clusterfuck of directions that take so many steps that have to be done in the proper order to work that its really not worth it, most are in the middle someplace.

          if the ‘free’ dlc was done via a built in downloader/installer that used encrypted compressed archives (still crackable but more work) and had to be installed via the built in downloader, it would force people to make hokey patches using dif files OR to reseed a version of the full game with each new DLC that comes out, to me this would be a deterrent.

          and yes, i know torrents could be used as an update system the problem with that system comes in if the game devs make minor changes to alot of files forcing the update to effectively be redownloading all the game content.

          again no systems perfect, but the point of this kind of “drm” (for lack of a better term) is to slow down pirates without having any negative effect on the paying customer.

        • Anonymous

          Agree 100%… the Mafiaa & iRaa dream that…. It wasn’t really my point……

          I didn’t mean… access to a file… as being a service….

          Selling a trip to the cinema….. thats a service… big screen , seats etc….
          Selling a music event….. thats a service…. massive speakers.. live music etc…
          Selling wow access…thats a service…. connection to mmo servers , updates etc..

          Point is…… Sell something that has actual value……. You can’t endlessly copy events and services at zero cost…..

        • Anonymous

          Agree 100%… the Mafiaa & iRaa dream that…. It wasn’t really my point……

          I didn’t mean… access to a file… as being a service….

          Selling a trip to the cinema….. thats a service… big screen , seats etc….
          Selling a music event….. thats a service…. massive speakers.. live music etc…
          Selling wow access…thats a service…. connection to mmo servers , updates etc..

          Point is…… Sell something that has actual value……. You can’t endlessly copy events and services at zero cost…..

        • Anonymous

          Agree 100%… the Mafiaa & iRaa dream that…. It wasn’t really my point……

          I didn’t mean… access to a file… as being a service….

          Selling a trip to the cinema….. thats a service… big screen , seats etc….
          Selling a music event….. thats a service…. massive speakers.. live music etc…
          Selling wow access…thats a service…. connection to mmo servers , updates etc..

          Point is…… Sell something that has actual value……. You can’t endlessly copy events and services at zero cost…..

        • Anon

          Obvious shill puppet is obvious

        • Jeremy the Great

          ya anon does not deserve to use the name anon, if you don’t think like anonymous don’t use the name.

        • Jeremy the Great

          beavis,your a stupid,dumbass….

      • Tbird83ii

        The game itself is actually pretty amazing. I am satisfied with it. As to the point of CD Project treating fans like shit… I think they do a good job. The digital release of the game (the unfortunately now normal $50) comes with extra incentives, such as the sound track, game guide, full color map, and making of content… normal “special editions” which contain this cost upwards of $80 normally. Thus, I feel like I am getting (more) of my money’s worth with this purchase. Also, not to mention the fact that you can install the game on five separate accounts on steam… thereby allowing friends to play the game… I say it is a good way of getting around a publisher setting prices as high as they are currently.

        • Tbird83ii

          and yes I realize *CD PROJEKT* and *NORMALLY NORMAL* hehe

        • Anonymous

          I don’t play video games….. so will never know how crap this game is or isn’t….
          I won’t be gettin fined……

          I think it’s good that CD Projekt offer extra incentives to make it worthwhile buying their ?????…..
          They could do more…. like sell a subscription to games servers etc….

          But punishing fans of the work they create is really short sighted……

        • Anonymous

          “punishing fans of the work they create is really short sighted”

          They are only interested in fans who pay though.

          Why should they care for others? What do they owe them?

        • Anonymous

          “”"” Why should they care for others? What do they owe them? “”"”

          Agree , 100% ….. they owe people nothing…..

          People don’t owe them anything either…….
          Why should we care about CD Projekt……. are there any reasons to dislike them ?

        • Anonymous

          “People don’t owe them anything either…….”

          Except that when someone plays a game (or insert other media-types here) which they’ve produced they kind of do, don’t they?

        • Anonymous

          because, as ironlore found out, if you punish the “pirates” you loose sales, titanquest was a fun game, but got a really bad rep due to the DRM they used that crashed the game to desktop without any error message if it thought you where a “pirate”, there sales went to shit because of this.

          on the other hand, had they either 1. left out the drm and just put up with a bit of piracy or 2. put an error message that said “buy the game ya bumb” or “error: 0×000666″ so they could track who was getting said error and let those pirating know they should buy it(and even offer them a discount like alot of app makers have started doing now) they could have avoided the bad rep, and if anything i think their sales would have gone a good bit up, I mean I had a legit copy and got the CTD issue only pirate’s where sposta get, they didnt like it when I posted pictures of my disks and all on the forums and showed that my exe was not cracked and was up to date, yet i still got the ctd issue(that i later tracked down to the game thinking windvd was piracy software, same as securom started doing years later)

          long and short of it is, if you do things to inconveniance pirates they WILL hit some legit users, its a given, it raises support costs, these companies have started to admit this in the last couple years…..in many cases the support costs+cost of the DRM itself negate any bennifit they may have gotten from including drm at all…….

          or a game i paid good money for NWN2, i HAD to crack the game, bought a legit copy and found it unplayable due to framerate drops and load times (thanks securom) cracked it with a crack from a well known site, bam fps jumpped to being locked at vsync even with AA maxed out, that was when i really really started to see the harm DRM does to games and customers, I mean I didnt really mind cracking the game, I was no virgin to the net, but it really ticked me off paying for a game, then basickally being screwed over by drm that wasnt effecting the pirates at all, infact pirates had a better time with nwn2 then people who paid for it, they had workarounds for the patching issues(that most nwn fans ended up having to use as well) they had better fps(no securom) game loaded/saved faster, no cd check…….

          bah, bah, bah……..

        • Ers

          Servers for what? It’s a single player game, and all people who are online already have access to patches. What could they possibly give?

        • Anonymous

          2 easy ways to show value added is to 1. online game save backups 2. dlc that downloads via a built in update system

          yes, the pirates would be able to share updated versions and create patches, but it would be much less conveniant then just having a legit key/acct setup and letting the game update itself.

          they can also give away some dlc, and offer other dlc for a charge, tho I strongly advise any game dev’s who may read this to avoid the activision path of keeping high game prices and charging high prices for DLC, your sales will reflect peoples displeasure at such actions.

          there are other features they can offer to ad value, like ading limited co-op modes for single player games(limit number of players to 2-4-6-8 depending on the game) people like to be able to play with their friends, this is yet another added value.

          I bought nwn1(and all expantions) because i love DND and because i wanted to play with my friends, I wouldnt have bought it if it wasnt for that, bioware was smart enough to patch out the DRM early on(to fix some issues that where taking up alot of time for support), but the added value i saw in buying the game was worth it, we played the campaign and custom maps and even persistent servers for years, IT WAS A BLAST, and bioware was up on the support end(another reason I still try and support bioware when the prices are decent)

          on the other hand nwn2, i bought, hoping for the same experience, but the developers where pushed to get the game out before it was really ready for the market lots of bugs, and you couldnt even patch it most of the time, had to run patches over and over(one time it took me over 60 trys to get a patch to fully apply) the drm crippled game perf, it was a nightmare, wish I had waited and just played the SP game via a torrent till they got the bugs out……..but its still one of my favorite games now that they got the bugs out :)

          I was told that part of the patching issue was related to the DRM method they used, but no clue if thats true, wouldnt suprise me, DRM is stupid and evil, worst of all, it only really harms people who buy the software, “pirates” dont get hurt by it……infact in the case of games like nwn2, they get a better game experiance……better load times, better fps, more stable….BAH!!!!

    • Smoketowater

      You must be a tottaly dick if you download the game. Cd Pproject is fucking small company who finally create good game.

      It’s not EA. Start watching SoutkPark

      • Anonymous

        Funny episode….

      • Anonymous

        I agree to a point, BUT when small developers resort to DRM that harms the user and user experiance I dont feel bad for them when they have people choose to pirate their software rather then buy it.

        1. I am quite sure that the patch dosnt remove securom from the system just the game files.

        2. legal threats and blackmail/extortion are wrong, even if the person in your eyes was “Asking for it”

        IronLore wasnt a big developer and they learned a hard lesson, if you put DRM in your game that can harm the user esperiance even if it mostly only effects “pirates” your rep can get stomped, titan quest was a fun game, well made, but it crashed to desktop as its drm without any errors, and tho it mostly effected pirates, it also hit some legit users who where told by support that they where bumbs and should buy the game……(asshole move….)

        in this case they say they only used the DRM to prevent premature release but they could have done that another way, require the user to patch the game release day to make the game functional, its annoying BUT would be as effective if not more effective at stopping premature release.

        just my opinion but I think alot of the moves game dev’s and publishers make are due to not really understanding their audience/market base as well as they think they do.

        charge a reasonable price, give good support, put a game out thats not buggy as hell out of the box, and please for the love of god, dont put any drm in the game that could have any negative effect on the user experience…..

      • Anonymous

        I agree to a point, BUT when small developers resort to DRM that harms the user and user experiance I dont feel bad for them when they have people choose to pirate their software rather then buy it.

        1. I am quite sure that the patch dosnt remove securom from the system just the game files.

        2. legal threats and blackmail/extortion are wrong, even if the person in your eyes was “Asking for it”

        IronLore wasnt a big developer and they learned a hard lesson, if you put DRM in your game that can harm the user esperiance even if it mostly only effects “pirates” your rep can get stomped, titan quest was a fun game, well made, but it crashed to desktop as its drm without any errors, and tho it mostly effected pirates, it also hit some legit users who where told by support that they where bumbs and should buy the game……(asshole move….)

        in this case they say they only used the DRM to prevent premature release but they could have done that another way, require the user to patch the game release day to make the game functional, its annoying BUT would be as effective if not more effective at stopping premature release.

        just my opinion but I think alot of the moves game dev’s and publishers make are due to not really understanding their audience/market base as well as they think they do.

        charge a reasonable price, give good support, put a game out thats not buggy as hell out of the box, and please for the love of god, dont put any drm in the game that could have any negative effect on the user experience…..

  • http://twitter.com/icanhazsake O Rly Owl

    Clear msg, don’t buy any games from them. They rely on what was deemed “legal blackmail” and despised by the ppl so one can only avoid buying anything from such unscrupulous companies.

    As for the DRM removal tool it’s pure win. Now it would be fully worth to buy the original, depending on the price. Oh wait, they use shady pay-up-or-else schemes….

  • http://disqus.com/ Rob8urcakes

    “Of course we’re not happy when people are pirating our games, so we are signing with legal firms and torrent sneaking companies,”

    Hah! So my torrent proxy gets a letter from you – good one lol

  • bob

    you received no response on the later because it was unsuccessful. DRM is also easy to Circumvent and remove so there will be cracks on tpb soon for the torrent download.

  • Mudkipz

    I fully support their decision to remove DRM and monitoring torrents.
    I hope in the future freedom of speech in p2p can co-exist with copyright protection – of course once we figure out how to implement a ‘fair’ kind of copyright protection, whatever that is…

  • Mudkipz

    I fully support their decision to remove DRM and monitoring torrents.
    I hope in the future freedom of speech in p2p can co-exist with copyright protection – of course once we figure out how to implement a ‘fair’ kind of copyright protection, whatever that is…

    • Trololol

      They removed DRM. But that’s it. They’re still gonna track torrents.

  • gabs

    the greedy game companies always threaten u of copyright infringements and stupid stuffs like those even after they profit from selling their games…they dont have to ‘sneak peek’ the torrents…they can easily get the ip-s of seeders and leechers if they themselves download the torrents with any torrent client…at present nearly 20-40k people at minimum are downloading it, and will do so…even if they send a copyright infringement, one can redirect it as sharing…not seeding and leeching…what does they think?…send me a copyright infringement and i’ll sit and scratch my ass?…motherfuckers…i’ll press charges and sue them for not informing ‘torrent system of transmission’ rather than ‘illegal’ transmission…dont expect a single penny from us CD Projekt…we wil sue you too!

  • Shawn T

    Looks like we will just need to wait till Steam release, and then someone will crack that.

  • Friend of the People

    This seems pretty good overall. They agreed to remove the DRM that was slowing down people’s games. I think this might be a good way to approach DRM in the future; have it only to prevent pre-release cracks, or at least to dampen the effects, and end it soon or immediately after release. As far as that goes, I’m supportive of Cd Projekt.

    On the issue of tracking people who download it illegally, I do think they have the right to attempt to track people, but it may not be their best decision. I think sending a series of letters to the person who downloaded it asking them to pay would be more effective. Then again, I’m assuming that people will have enough respect for the company to listen to them, and that is a large assumption to make. I don’t know. To be honest, I’m kind of conflicted on the second part.

  • Derp

    >insert SecuROM
    >receive pirated copies

    Don’t do this shit, seriously.

  • Iseemtobelost

    NOTE: Don’t be evil folks. Downloaded in 20 minutes out of boredom… Purchased the following day. Its a sweet game. Have a little faith in yourselves.

    J.

  • Gae

    First of all, DRM has only EVER been an issue to legitimate purchasers so it is crazy why it is still used so much.
    The crackers love to crack it and the pirates just download the crack. Only people who paid their hard earned cash get to suffer with the side effects.

    Secondly, I am happy to buy a game where the legitimate version offers something extra than a pirated version for example DLC or multiplayer. But as I now know that if I buy this game then my money will be going to fund pay up or else lawyers and threatening letters to what are quite possibly innocent people then there is no way they are getting hold of my cash.
    I will just take the pirated version, or maybe just not bother playing it atall.

    • Anonymous

      “I am happy to buy a game where the legitimate version offers something extra than a pirated version”

      But you’re not prepared to pay for the plain-vanilla edition even though you may play it and like it?

      That kinda sucks.

      • Gae

        Well lets face it, the choice is the option to own a product and there are 2 possible costs. These 2 possible costs are free or £40. Its not a hard choice.

        But more to the point, I am not prepared to pay extra just to have a bunch of pointless restrictions imposed on my game and how or where I play it.

        • Ers

          “Well lets face it, the choice is the option to own a product and there are 2 possible costs. These 2 possible costs are free or £40. Its not a hard choice.”

          So, no moral quandary, just unwilling to pay. Thank you for saying it. Unless that’s not what you meant?

        • Ers

          “Well lets face it, the choice is the option to own a product and there are 2 possible costs. These 2 possible costs are free or £40. Its not a hard choice.”

          So, no moral quandary, just unwilling to pay. Thank you for saying it. Unless that’s not what you meant?

        • Anonymous

          “But more to the point, I am not prepared to pay extra just to have a bunch of pointless restrictions imposed on my game and how or where I play it.”

          It seems odd, then, that you don’t mind the “pointless restrictions” being imposed on a paid-for copy as long it has the extra content.

          But what you actually said was “I am happy to buy a game where the legitimate version offers something extra than a pirated version”

          This implies that even if the legitimate plain-vanilla version is DRM-free you still wouldn’t pay because it doesn’t have extra content.

          And that still kinda sucks.

  • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_DZ2ON4YLPYL4E5REWYFEJQZO6Q Vug Vee

    Wow that is most impressive dude. NEver thought about it like that.
    real-privacy.int.tc

    • Anonymous

      spammin again…. ?

    • abc

      flagged

    • Quinn

      Also flagged.

    • Quinn

      Also flagged.

    • flagged

      flagged

  • gabs

    now see CD Projekt how some of the ‘legitimate’ copy holders are also posting comments…yes, they exist and in huge numbers with which u can easily make profits from your game…stopping ‘piracy’ is just an eyewash…u people are greeedy to make more profits…more money…dont u?

  • http://www.facebook.com/thambling Tom Hambling

    i had witcher 2 19th may

  • http://modmyi.com/forums/iphone-4-new-skins-themes-launches/740147-neurotech-hd.html#post5637502 Jay

    This game has a lot of love put into it. Graphically it’s a work of art. I hope they generate a lot of sales despite piracy. They deserve it.

    My theory is that most people that pirate a game are simply poor. My friends with money have never even thought to pirate a game, but all my poor friends are very into it. The only people they actually lose money from are the ones that have money but steal it anyway.

    I can only remember doing this once. I went to 5 different stores looking for a game on launch day and absolutely couldn’t find it because it was sold out everywhere. So I went home and downloaded it in about 8 hours and was playing that night. I eventually bought the game cause I felt bad.

    Nice story bro, I know. I’m just bored and felt like typing something.

    • Indian

      I like to buy the games too.But I have to travel for about 1 hour to reach a shop that sells originals and the cost is extremely high sometimes.

      • Macabre

        Then buy from Steam. What’s the problem?

        • Anonymous

          depends on where he live, could be he lives someplace where he cant buy thru steam, I got a buddy overseas whos a US citzen who cant buy from steam because it detects his IP (stupid yo…)

          so a few times hes had me login to his steam, buy something for him, then he logs in and downloads it OR he logs off has me gift him a copy then he logs in and is able to start the download…..again stupid but, it is what it is….

          And I have had the same experience Jay, tho I checked 12-13 stores one day for a game, nobody had it in stock, said screw it, went home, torrented a copy, game was full of bugs, nearly unplayable, few weeks later a patch came out and fixed most of them, but the only local place that got more in stock was asking a $20 preimum over MSRP for the game, so I waited and eventually got the game “dented box” for 1/2 msrp, and put it on a shelf, played the cracked updated version even after buying the full because i was to lazy to want to reinstall and patch to play again :P

    • Another Gamer

      Like others have said, DRM only hurts those who buy the game via legitimate means. DRM is easy to circumvent and thus a pointless endeavor that not only causes problems for fans, but also adds unnecessarily to the overall cost of the game, not just monetarily but also in terms of performance and bugs. On top of that, it also tends to be a headache for the developers because of the resulting support required. We see it over and over, yet the gaming industry never learns from their past development projects. I can only surmise that fear over the potential loss of imaginary profits is what drives their line of reasoning. It is self delusion at its finest. The people that are willing to pay, will pay, and the ones that don’t want to never will. Nothing you developers do will ever change that fact.

      For what it is worth, I am a so called “pirate” and have been for over 30 years. I’m also a hardcore gamer and have definitely paid for my fair share of games. I truly believe that good developers should be rewarded for their efforts, and I certainly don’t want to see the gaming industry go down in flames. I refuse to pay for bad titles though, and I don’t think any sane person can fault me for that. Give me a game with no DRM, as few bugs as possible, fairly priced, and of worthwhile value, and I will be more than happy to pay. However, when I pay $60+ dollars for a game I cannot return, and discover I’ve been taken advantage of, that does more to hurt your industry than pirates ever could.

      Case in point is Dragon Age 2, which I’m currently playing. Talk about a quickly slapped together piece of trash designed solely to profit from fans of the first game! I try to be careful, but sometimes they slip through, especially when one is a fan of a particular series. Most likely I will pirate Dragon Age 3 when it comes out, then pay for it when is is in the bargain bin for $20. I think this seems fair considering how I, as a fan, was treated, no? And Bioware and EA only have themselves to blame.

      • Anonymous

        in cases like this(dragon age2) I would put more blame on EA then bioware, they tend to push dev houses to get games out early so they can keep a stream of “full price” title sales going, I was hoping they would be smart and leave bioware alone like they did in the start, but…..well I have this feeling they are gonna screw up bioware and endup with just another “Grind out a sequile” house under their name, and all the good developers at bioware will endup leaving and getting other jobs or starting their own projects.(good)

        I never buy EA titles anymore unless they are bargin bin, and Im even more selective then you are about that, 20bucks for an EA title…..only if its been updated and is in really really mature state(stable and such)

        My last EA title was bfbc2, EA nore DICE want to do anything about the hacker problem in their bf titles, they expect the failboat that is pukebuster to do all the work for them, and its USELESS, there are free public cheats(esp/radar) hacks that have been out since around christmas for bc2 that havent been detected if properly used, (rename exe, inject a process other then the game process) thats pathetic, and pukebuster causes alot of false kicks, like “loosing key packets”…….utter bullshit…….

        if you are going to put out a game, put a little effort into supporting it……

      • Anonymous

        in cases like this(dragon age2) I would put more blame on EA then bioware, they tend to push dev houses to get games out early so they can keep a stream of “full price” title sales going, I was hoping they would be smart and leave bioware alone like they did in the start, but…..well I have this feeling they are gonna screw up bioware and endup with just another “Grind out a sequile” house under their name, and all the good developers at bioware will endup leaving and getting other jobs or starting their own projects.(good)

        I never buy EA titles anymore unless they are bargin bin, and Im even more selective then you are about that, 20bucks for an EA title…..only if its been updated and is in really really mature state(stable and such)

        My last EA title was bfbc2, EA nore DICE want to do anything about the hacker problem in their bf titles, they expect the failboat that is pukebuster to do all the work for them, and its USELESS, there are free public cheats(esp/radar) hacks that have been out since around christmas for bc2 that havent been detected if properly used, (rename exe, inject a process other then the game process) thats pathetic, and pukebuster causes alot of false kicks, like “loosing key packets”…….utter bullshit…….

        if you are going to put out a game, put a little effort into supporting it……

    • Jeremy the Great

      you wish it was “theft” bud.

  • http://www.facebook.com/warface.aps WarFace Aps

    Good idea to appeal to customers … bad idea to sue illegal downloaders!

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Cole-Cunningham/100000784848405 Cole Cunningham

    Torrents are not the only ware to share file you know there Mr, Big game company <3

    • Trollbag

      Ooh, that’s cunning.

      USeeWutIDidThar?

      • http://www.facebook.com/people/Cole-Cunningham/100000784848405 Cole Cunningham

        Very Original ^_^

  • gabs

    @jay…agreed with jay…the witcher 2 is indeed a work of art and aesthetically its a complete visual extravaganza of 2011, and for it CD Projekt indeed requires a good profit, but my point is when they are at a stretch making profits after the game’s launch why disturb people who do not have the ability to buy the game, but are willing to play…as they have worked with their sweat and blood for the game…by default they will get good profits…yes it may not reach their expected mark, or a bit lower than that, but it would be enough for a ‘profit’ and they will not be able to say it was a ‘loss’

    • Retarded Snowman Annoyance

      well i dont agree with jayjahye because hes a troll and has questionable tendencies.

    • Retarded Snowman Annoyance

      well i dont agree with jayjahye because hes a troll and has questionable tendencies.

  • Phishy

    Here’s a thought, if you want to convert the pirates, instead of trying to sue them, ensuring they WON’T buy your game, how about you offer them the option to pay a “fine” and in return for not being douchebags, they GET a copy of the game? Sounds reasonable to me as me downloading it cost them 0$ but they expect me to pay a fine, well, give me the game, make the fine the price of the game, case closed. If I refuse, sue me.

    Is this not logical? doesn’t this limit the game devs ability to use suing pirates as a means of generating income?

    • Gae

      That is a pretty good idea. That way you can turn pirates into customers without resorting to charging silly ammounts for a settlement.

      I would proboaly be ok with it if some game company sent me a letter saying that thy know I pirated their game so they would now like a payment of £25, instead of some asshole lawyer saying they collected my ip address and now they want £1000 or they will continue to threaten me.

    • Gae

      That is a pretty good idea. That way you can turn pirates into customers without resorting to charging silly ammounts for a settlement.

      I would proboaly be ok with it if some game company sent me a letter saying that thy know I pirated their game so they would now like a payment of £25, instead of some asshole lawyer saying they collected my ip address and now they want £1000 or they will continue to threaten me.

    • Anonymous

      “how about you offer them the option to pay a “fine” and in return for not being douchebags, they GET a copy of the game?”

      This is pretty much how the normal, non-pirate business model works. It’s called “buying stuff”.

    • Anonymous

      a good number of app developers have started giving “pirates” discounts on their software, sometimes pretty steep discounts, funny thing is, it turns a problem into a source of income AND earns you goodwill, turning a problem into a source of income=smart business.

      when i was a kid a local minute mart owner would sometimes catch kids stealing, but rather then calling all their parents sometimes he would have them sweep outside the front windows or do something else for him to earn what they where trying to steal, sure he wasnt always getting his value per-say, but he was getting stuff he didnt want to do done for him, and he was teaching kids at least a little big of the value of that pack of gum or candybar they where trying to pocket.

  • HDPT
    • Guest

      flagged

  • Pingback: Witcher 2 DRM Dumped, But CD Projekt Is Watching Torrents | Links Daily

  • Anonymous

    “Steam version [is] supplied DRM-free.”

    Steam is DRM

    • http://profiles.google.com/quasit.lair quasit quasit

      Yeah, how clueless can someone (enigmax) be thinking Steam is just for downloading/buying games.

    • Anonymous

      You’re dumb as fuck.

    • Anonymous

      not really, it can serve that function, but thats not its primary function, steam games tend to be easier to crack then the original games from what i have seen.

      steam can be a pain in the ass at times, but its still better then buying cd’s and dealing with keeping track of dozens of plastic disks and shit, and it is FAR better then direct2drive last i checked.

  • Gelu

    Not really because most of the people that would get it for “free”* will never be found thus paying a bigger fine is like getting in the bus without a ticket. If you could get into a bus without worrying about a fine you wouldn’t get a ticket. But if the fine is considerate than you would get the ticket or risk paying a big sum. This way the fine covers transport expenses that you haven’t payed for in the past (because you get on the bus without a ticket regularly)

    * it’s not for free it’s at the expense of the company that makes it and it can really jeopardize any further updates and development this also means higher prices for people that do have morals and choose to support the people that brought this gem into the world.

    • FInh

      it is a good analogy i have to give you that….however, your forgetting the buses business model is well ahead of the entertainment industry….

      Those who are too poor to buy tickets have benefits that take into consideration the cost of travel, those disabled or older, get to ride for free. They offer season tickets to allow you to enjoy as many routes as you want (games) for a competitive price…

      General Ranting Time:

      I find it hard to feel bad about copying media….If i went to the cinema to watch something and later downloaded it, then the company who produced the works has got all the money that i think the items worth….If i really enjoyed it i buy it on blu-ray / dvd.

      I am currently paying for Sky HD. If i download an episode of House MD or stream an episode of South Park because it airs in the US several days before it airs on Sky then i have still effectively supported the creators…but this is illegal….

      I recently downloaded all the final fantasy series because my originals had become scratched….having already paid for the games once i can’t see an issue but this is illegal….

      On the flip side of the coin, if i buy a game i don’t like, i can’t return it. If i buy a
      movie, i have to break the law to transfer it onto my preferred playback device.

      The entire entertainment industry and copyright world is a mess…Companies trying to sue end users is only going to hurt the companies…..

      I definitely won’t be downloading any of CD Projekt’s works, but i can also promise you i won’t be buying them as i don’t want to support people who follow the sue sue sue mentality….admittedly my lack of funding to the company ain’t gonna cost them there jobs…but if your reading this then i am happy to confirm the thought is there!

      • 232

        One big thing; you seem to be paying for all you have and then downloading it in a different form. That’s not why people complain about piracy. People complain about the aspect of downloading something and never paying for it in any way, shape or form.

        And don’t think it doesn’t happen just because the torrentfreak community doesn’t often do it. A community like this isn’t exactly a representative sample.

    • FInh

      it is a good analogy i have to give you that….however, your forgetting the buses business model is well ahead of the entertainment industry….

      Those who are too poor to buy tickets have benefits that take into consideration the cost of travel, those disabled or older, get to ride for free. They offer season tickets to allow you to enjoy as many routes as you want (games) for a competitive price…

      General Ranting Time:

      I find it hard to feel bad about copying media….If i went to the cinema to watch something and later downloaded it, then the company who produced the works has got all the money that i think the items worth….If i really enjoyed it i buy it on blu-ray / dvd.

      I am currently paying for Sky HD. If i download an episode of House MD or stream an episode of South Park because it airs in the US several days before it airs on Sky then i have still effectively supported the creators…but this is illegal….

      I recently downloaded all the final fantasy series because my originals had become scratched….having already paid for the games once i can’t see an issue but this is illegal….

      On the flip side of the coin, if i buy a game i don’t like, i can’t return it. If i buy a
      movie, i have to break the law to transfer it onto my preferred playback device.

      The entire entertainment industry and copyright world is a mess…Companies trying to sue end users is only going to hurt the companies…..

      I definitely won’t be downloading any of CD Projekt’s works, but i can also promise you i won’t be buying them as i don’t want to support people who follow the sue sue sue mentality….admittedly my lack of funding to the company ain’t gonna cost them there jobs…but if your reading this then i am happy to confirm the thought is there!

  • Ali3nx

    it’s jackals like these guys that keep me from supporting anything to do with buying or commerce related to tangible goods.

    • Anonymous

      So no more computers or TVs or phones for you then!

      • Gae

        Not in a few years when my tv will probably arrive with built in drm to ensure I can only watch each show once only, even if repeats are showing.

        • Anonymous

          Kinda missed the point there, Gae.

          Ali3nx said that (s)he refuses to support *anything* to do with buying or commerce related to tangible goods.

          I’m wondering how (s)he gets food. Grows it? Goes hunting? Gets it from dumpsters? Steals it?

      • Gae

        Not in a few years when my tv will probably arrive with built in drm to ensure I can only watch each show once only, even if repeats are showing.

  • Rikuti

    Give them a break. Its small polish company and they told they need atleast 1million sold copies to make new game. So i truly do understand their fears of piracy. Also its pc exclusive game which are fairly rare these for AAA game. And Game is truly amazing rpg! + its extremely beautiful. Oh yes i bought it. And these guys need your support not your hate.

  • http://twitter.com/MichaelStruwig Michael Struwig

    I’m seriously baffled as to why there’s so much hate going on here.

    The game is available, for purchase. DRM-free from GOG.com for the same price you’ll pay at retail.

    The main reason people use to justify piracy is because “we hate DRM”. So, when a developer actually LISTENS to users, and releases the game DRM-free, and removes DRM from the retail version 10 days after launch, they deserve to be applauded.

    If the only reason you’re downloading games is because you hate DRM – then there’s no god-damned reason why you shouldn’t be buying this game. You’re downloading a game illegally simply because you don’t want to pay.

    The scapegoat of “DRM ruins it for legit customers, thus I’ll not be a legit customer” no longer applies – yet you still harshly criticize CDP for listening to you and releasing a game without DRM.

    Seriously. The only thing this is proving is that DRM isn’t the reason piracy is rife on PC. It’s because people just don’t want to pay for legitimate, user-feedbacked games. All you’re doing is proving the publishers right.

    It’s a great game, and doesn’t have DRM. You shouldn’t even be THINKING about downloading this game if DRM has always been your excuse, so why in heaven’s name are you angered when a company chases after people who no longer have legitimate reasons to pirate?

    Come on.

    • Anon

      “You’re downloading a game illegally simply because you don’t want to pay.”

      It’s about fucking time truth comes to Torrent Freak.
      Well played.

      • Anonymous

        Pirates are being revealed as the cheap shits they really are. On a global stage. About time.

        • Quinn

          1. Self replies are lame.
          2. We’re cheap shits? Then why are you reading this article, why are you replying, and why are you afraid to use your real name?

    • I see dumb people

      So, what i’m hearing here is “Listen to me, i am a troll.”

      “The main reason people use to justify piracy is because “we hate DRM”.” UM, where did you get that bit of nonsense? People hate DRM, thats true, and rightfully so. Does that make it the main reason? No. The main reason is lack of money and the value of freedom of culture.. Freedom to share comes to mind. Freedom in general. If something is duplicated, nothing is lost, so QUIT YER CRYIN!!! Dbag…

      • Anonymous

        “So, what i’m hearing here is “Listen to me, i am a troll.”"

        So, what I’m hearing here is “I don’t agree with you, and your comments seem to go against the group-think so I’ll disparage you by labeling you as a troll (as I obviously don’t know what trolling really is).”

    • Anonymous

      Seems to me they will make ANY excuse to justify their BS. I don’t know why they can’t have an realization and understand what CDPR is doing for the PC gamers and support such actions this time.

    • Someone

      The game is available, for purchase. DRM-free from GOG.com for the same price you’ll pay at retail.

      Why on earth would I pay the same price to download something that costs the creator / distributor nothing to send me that I would pay for a retail copy that has to be printed onto a disc, put in a nice little box, distributed to a warehouse, boxed up and shipped overseas, sent to another warehouse, distributed to a retail store, sold to me by an employee who has to be paid, the retail store who has to pay rent, etc etc etc; can you see the differences here or do I need to go on?

      • ers

        So, just to clarify, you’re refusing to buy it because it has standardized pricing?

        • Someone

          You can twist it any way you choose, but facts are facts. A legitimately downloaded copy is NOT a retail bought copy and the pricing should reflect that.

          To answer your question I am choosing not to buy it because I don’t play games, however if I did, I would buy the retail copy.

      • Anonymous

        Fair point, and well spotted that content/media and all its trappings does in fact have ‘value’, regardless of the oft-repeated nonsense that people spout claiming otherwise.

    • Hlrejftr

      Its because “pay up or else” schemes are a particularly repugnant form of DRM. I don’t usually pirate games. But I don’t usually buy em anyway. Ill rent. Buy used. Or cheap on steam. This I might actually have bought if it weren’t for the “pay up or else” shit. But I definitely wont now. Fvck them. The people pirating are the poorest. People who can afford a game will buy it. If they still don’t, but do pirate, they never wouldst bought the game. If you really truly are excited by a game and want it u buy it, cuz it works better. Unless there’s broken by design dem or u HATE the company as a morally bankrupt extortion machine. I’m so sick of this “woe is me” piracy whining bullshit. U turds ever think for a second that hey, maybe you’re just losing to gamefly, Indie developers, and streaming media? Awwwww. Poor little game companies boo hooo. That must be why all the piracy hyperbole. Babies can’t take the blow to their egos realizing they’re latest and greatest multi million dollar reskin of last decades tired gameplay is replaceable by angry birds, farmville, minecraft and last years used console discs. Morons.

      • 123

        I don’t give a shit if they’re poor. The issue isn’t about lost sales, the issue is about morality. It’s immoral to steal. They don’t need it, so I have no sympathy for them. They want to wait until it is cheap, fine. They just can’t take it for nothing. Shit costs money. Live with it.

        • Gae

          You are right – It is immoral to steal, but piracy is not theft so nothing is bieng stolen.

          If somebody can not afford a game then the game company will not get money out of this person. The ammount of money the game company will recieve or lose from this person will not be affected by the fact that they pirated the game.

          The game company has not lost any money, but the pirate may spread word of how awesome the game is to his many friends with a strong possibility of encouraging a legitimate sale at a future point.

        • 123

          Again, not concerned with the amount of money the company gets. Screw the company, I don’t care if they get anything. Here’s the thing though; that pirate doesn’t deserve the product if he doesn’t have the money. He doesn’t need it, so there is no justification for him taking it. He has no right to the product, so he’s still wrong for taking it. It’s as simple as that.

          And I really don’t care if he recommends it to his friends. Not in the slightest. If he won’t pay, he doesn’t deserve it, and can’t have it.

          (Exceptions for above statement may be made for countries with shitty living conditions. But if you’re anywhere in a demographically stage 2-3 country, then you should pay.)

        • Cause were all so rich

          I guess were ask all so lucky to be exactly like you, a person who isn’t a college student trends of thousands of dollars in debt by loans. Oh I shouldn’t be allowed to play a game because I can’t afford it? So what of I buy the game and it sucks? I just wasted money I can’t afford to waste on a shit game I could have downloaded and tested, then decide if the game is worth purchasing.

        • Ers

          I’m focking broke. I’ve got a college degree that doesn’t help me get a better job and over $30,000 dollars in debt. The only difference between you and me is that I don’t pity myself for it. And if I can’t pay for a game, I either skip or wait for a price reduction. I’ll work hard and earn my way into a position where I can afford all the games I want. I don’t deserve it until I can pay for it. Neither can you.

          And if you buy a shitty game, well then, sucks for you. You take risks in life, and sometimes, they bite you. And really, with all of the game reviewers in the world, you can’t find one to trust? You should know if a game is shitty before you buy it. It’s not that hard to tell. The only game I’ve gotten screwed on in the past two years is Dead Rising, and even then that only cost me 10 bucks because I waited. Do your research and don’t bitch.

        • Anonymous

          Ers, if your so poor, maby a better way to spend your time, rather then trolololing torrentfreak would be to go do some pay servants or look for a part time job, or try and find a job that would put you degree to good use……in other words STFU you suck at trolololing.

    • Gae

      Most of the hate is not because of the drm but because of their choice to continue to fund the pay up or else schemes, which if you read this site enough you will of course know have a great many problems and unfairness, and do nothing to reduce piracy.

  • Cavelord

    I just bought the Dungeon and Dragon Daggerdale, with f’n Steam activation. I hate it. I’ll keep it, cause it’s only $14.95, but as soon as one comes on the scene, I’ll be downloading that cracked one. Do they really think they are stopping anyone from copying it? Just the ones that buy it. Once again, bad monkey, bad, you paid, and now get an inferior product :(

    • Cavelord

      P.S. I don’t hate the game, just the DRM.

      • Anonymous

        um, you could have just bought it on steam, then the activations really isnt an issue, the advantages of steam for most people out weight the inconveniences, (at least since they got the issues with offline play fixed years back)

        Your one of the few people I have seen bitching about steam outside the steam haters forums that are mostly populated by people to pirate steam games (like l4d/l4d2) and most of them bitch about it only because they dont like having to update and recrack their illgotten games manually…..(cry me a river)

        as my past comments will show, im not pro drm at all, but, when i see people crying about something as paultry as having to have steam installed or having to have games for windows live installed or having to make an acct to play EA games online……i just roll my eyes…..get over yourself, if you really hate it that much, dont buy games that have any tie-ins with any of the download services…..ever…..

        personally, I have started adding my non-steam games to steam because its a conveniant launcher for them :)

  • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_FCNK7C55CBUYFVSC5LNWKB322E Buglord

    steps to make piracy less common:
    step 1. make sure the game isn’t sold out everywhere for weeks after the release.
    step 2. keep the price reasonable, not just the standard “50$ cuz it’s new”
    step 3. remove anything that will only make the game worse for those who actually bought it (as in many forms of DRMs and alike)
    step 4. make games that actually have content. (I at least, will not buy a game that I essentially already have, because that new game nearly only has the same content that was in the previous 4 games.. or that I’ll be done with and tired of after 2 hours..)
    step 5. make some of the best parts of the game multiplayer so you need an online account to get the server lists and such..
    ——————-

    when you’ve done these 5 steps it will lower piracy (mostly) to those who really have no other way of getting the game.
    and put a donation option somewhere on the site of the game, just in case somebody thinks you deserve more for it…

    • Quinn

      Flattr.com anyone?

    • Friend of the People

      Ok, before I start railing on you, I just want to say that I agree with steps 1-3. I particularly like number 2, because giving shorter games an alternate pricing scheme seems logical, and as seen in the cases of games like Majin and the Forsaken Kingdom, can something that pushes a game into purchasable territory. Steps 4-5 are where I’m going to attack you.

      Step 4: You say here that making games with content is a good way to keep customers. This is true, but I dislike the implication that you add on in your explanation. To put it simply, if you think the game is or will be derivative of earlier games, DON’T PLAY IT. If you think a game is worth you time, it should be worth your money. If it’s not worthy of your time, you shouldn’t be playing it in the first place, and if you don’t like the price, you should respect the creators of the game enough to abide by their terms and not play it.

      Step 5: I really hate this provision. Online multiplayer is the cesspool of gaming. The best games in our history were single player. Okami, Zelda, Shadow of the Colossus, Disgaea, Metal Gear, Fire Emblem, Diablo, etc… All of these were single player. There are genres like the FPS and RTS that on necessity rely on multiplayer, but others like RPGs and story-based games are damaged by the unnecessary addition. Multiplayer requires a disassociation from story elements in order to work. Don’t force that on games that don’t need it.

      • Chuck Norris

        When people say a particular game is not worth their money and still go ahead and download & play it, that there is hypocrisy at its very best and pirates are quite good at being hypocrites.

        I hate Multiplayer too because the story aspect of any game can only be experienced in Single player mode but unfortunately devs are being forced to go the route of Multiplayer due to rampant piracy of exclusive single player titles. Its understandable, they need to somehow make money off their work too. Pirates think devs magically make money when they download it for free.

        • Gae

          A game might be fun to play, but not everybody considers £50 for a few hours entertainment a suitable or acceptable use of their money.

        • Anonymous

          “not everybody considers £50 for a few hours entertainment a suitable or acceptable use of their money”

          I always figured it as 40 hours play for £40 equals £1 per hour. I don’t think that’s an unreasonable a rate for entertainment.

        • 123

          Then don’t play.

        • Anonymous

          all humans are hypocrites, what differs is to what degree we are hypocritical, I refuse to buy overpriced games, I may download a game I want to try, if I enjoy it, I may pay full price, depending on how much i enjoied it, if it wasnt worth the MSRP, I will wait till it goes on steam sale or is bargain binned locally, and I have no problem if it was $1 for 1hr of gameplay, BUT most sp titles today are well below that, Infact I havent seen that kinda gameplay outside maby borderlands and the masseffect games in years, go back and play some of the old FPS games like Quake1/2 and Unreal Gold, (and other games of that era) even doom had longer SP gameplay then most of todays AAA titles……

          I have said for a long time, games like MassEffect NEED co-op multiplayer, again see borderlands for how this can be done, tho it can be done better borderlands is one of the games of this era/generation that people still play and love!!!!(and its got shit loads of dlc!!!)

      • Anonymous

        “Step 5: I really hate this provision. Online multiplayer is the cesspool of gaming. The best games in our history were single player. Okami, Zelda, Shadow of the Colossus, Disgaea, Metal Gear, Fire Emblem, Diablo, etc… All of these were single player. There are genres like the FPS and RTS that on necessity rely on multiplayer, but others like RPGs and story-based games are damaged by the unnecessary addition. Multiplayer requires a disassociation from story elements in order to work. Don’t force that on games that don’t need it.”

        play borderlands, it plays the same with 1 or 4 players, just tends to be more fun when you get FRIENDS to play with you(as in a private multi player game you invite friends to)

        Border Lands looses NOTHING by going into mulitplayer mode, infact, I and my friends(one of whome use to talk like you) have had a blast, I have played the game thru at least 3 full times with various friends, and it was fun every time, you know why? because I got to share the experience with friends who liked the game to, and the games harder the more players you have :) also, if you hate MP so much, your probably better off sticking to nes/snes/n64/gc/master system, genisis, satern, and other old consols that offered games that where pretty much all built to be single player only……the best part about that is, you wont be causing headakes for people who enjoy playing with their friends…….ofcourse you could just be one of those people who dosnt have any friends to play with……..wouldnt suprise me with how bad a troll you are.(you suck at it)

        • Friend of the People

          “There are genres like the FPS and RTS that on necessity rely on multiplayer, but others like RPGs and story-based games are damaged by the unnecessary addition. ”

          “play borderlands, it plays the same with 1 or 4 players, just tends to be more fun when you get FRIENDS to play with you(as in a private multi player game you invite friends to)”

          You didn’t read everything I wrote. I know games like Borderlands get better with more people. I’ve played it, and it’s pretty good, although I do wish the online mode and split screen mode could have been used at the same time. The thing is, Borderlands is an FPS, which as I said above is a genre that benefits from multiplayer. It’s games like RPGs and story games that suffer. Shadow of the Collossus could never have been multiplayer, not without losing the element of loneliness that helped make the game great. A Final Fantasy game or astory-based RPG game couldn’t be multiplayer because no one wants to control only half the party. Next time you want to criticize me, don’t use something I addressed in the same post you’re replying to.

          You said above that Mass Effect could have just let everyone go off and get all the quests seperately. That misses the point of the game. It wasn’t all about collecting quests and then going off to do the combat. It was about immersing yourself in the world and seeing the choices that the world gave to you. If we give one player the power to make choices, the other players won’t like being left out of the decision. If we give everyone the power to make choices, then people won’t be happy about not being able to see all the content on their own. The story wouldn’t be able to have as much of an impact. In short, it wouldn’t work. Not all games can be multiplayer.

          “ofcourse you could just be one of those people who dosnt have any friends to play with……..wouldnt suprise me with how bad a troll you are.”

          I enjoy playing games with my friends, but none of use particularly FPS games (with a very few notable exceptions). We’ll play Starcraft sometimes, but oftentimes we’ll just take turns with a nice RPG, and watch on the couch as one player controls all the action. And I have no intention of being a troll, I just disagree with you. Maybe I seem bad at being a troll because it’s not my intention. I don’t want to annoy you, I want to persuade you. That’s not what a troll does. You can say that maybe I don’t persuade you and that my arguements are flawed, but for god’s sake, don’t assume that everyone who disagrees with you on a forum is like Jack Murdoch.

          And be polite. There are people on this forum who’ve convinced to change my views. They all had one common factor; politeness. If you just want to boost your own ego, continue as you are. If you’re actually in this to convince me you’re right, change your tone, or you’ll never convince anyone.

    • http://profiles.google.com/quasit.lair quasit quasit

      step 6
      Have reasonable prices on digital downloads. Publishers setting digital download prices much higher or even same price as retail deserve to get pirated.

      • Neil

        And New Zealand!!

      • Gae

        Another good point. The move to downloaded games cuts out an entire part of the games production: There are no discs to press, pack and ship, no manuals to print, no game stores to take a cut of the profit, no factories to deal with/workers to pay.

        That alone must be quite a big saving yet I can find almost nowhere that this saving is in any way passed on to the customer, so once again legitimate purchasers get shafted.

        • Anonymous

          But there are servers to buy/rent and maintain. Network infrastructure to consider. Bandwidth costs. Salaries to pay.

          Hosting stuff, and particularly large files and high-bandwidth stuff, definitely isn’t free, or even cheap.

        • Anonymous

          its far cheaper then physical retail, google around a bit, its shocking the cost difference, and profit margins on new AAA titles on Digital services vs retail store.

          Also, If they do a “cloud” setup like blizzard and even steam have been doing/working on the bandwidth costs are cut drastically because users are using their upload to share the file as they download(blizzards is a torrent based download system)

          its like book publishers trying to say an ebook is worth the same price as a hardcover book……its just not, now if they made it so that the digital copy got all the dlc free but people who bought retail had to buy the dlc(and there was plenty of dlc to come) that would bit different, it would give the Digital copy added value.

          in reatail you have many teirs of people and costs involved that are not there for digital distrobution,
          sales people
          managers of sales people
          warehouse workers
          transportation
          warehouse workers
          inventory systems
          printing
          pressing
          packaging
          it goes on and on(and yes i said warehouses 2x, because distribution warehouses tend to ship to get their titles from a publishers warehouse, in some cases you even ad in a 3rd warehouse if the distributor sends it to the stores corporate warehouse that then sends it to your local bestbuy or gamestop.)

          for digital distro you need
          technical people to setup the digital distro version OR to test the version the publisher subits, then stick it on the server
          servers
          bandwidth
          administrators to manage the systems and deal with technical problems
          tech/sales support(in other words india)

          its why a few small game developers i know of decided to go digital only for now and signed up with steam, impulse and desura for starters…..its just alot less costly to use digital distro.

          hell, they could in all honesty put the games up as torrents, let the user download then then use a digital distro platform like steam/desura/impuse extract and install the downloaded content, and alot of people would leave games seeding for days/weeks, specially if they gave you credits of some kind for seeding (would be a smart move if you ask me)

  • Anonymous

    Peter Sunde launched Flattr. Wonder why it hasn’t become the worlds leading “pay what you wish” site?

    He hoped pirates might pay for things they like.
    Yeah right good luck with that. PAY is the key word there.
    Not while hiding can get it for free, right? Pirates have even fucked Sunde.
    Publicly. lol

  • Anonymous

    Peter Sunde launched Flattr. Wonder why it hasn’t become the worlds leading “pay what you wish” site?

    He hoped pirates might pay for things they like.
    Yeah right good luck with that. PAY is the key word there.
    Not while hiding can get it for free, right? Pirates have even fucked Sunde.
    Publicly. lol

    • Anonymous

      um because most people dont have a clue what Flattr is, or how it really works,
      http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1748166/
      take a look at that, fan/community funded, also have the vodo link
      http://vodo.net/pioneerone

      would bet you if the economy where doing better they would be getting more donations :)

      note: I only heard of Flattr here on torrentfreak, nobody i know has heard of it, so its really not gotten any meaningful publicity.

  • Monitormyass

    HAhaha yea track me downloading this off an one-way fully encrypted connection to a full encrypted file server.

    • macweirdo

      Can’t be one-way. That wouldn’t work.

      Packets are sent back and forth for things like:
      * Verification
      * Seeding
      * Communication with other peers and seeds

      Without these, your download would not work.

      • Monitormyass

        You assume that I use bittorrent. That’s what I like to hear. :)

        • Anonymous

          Lrn2Network

          TCP/IP is bi-directional by design. Every packet is acknowledged to ensure correct receipt.

          And even if you use a stateless protocol (such as UDP) then there will still be two-way communication. You have to request something to get it sent to you, after all.

  • Thoughtful

    I did legitimately buy the game. At first I wasn’t sure what the hype was, so I pirated The Witcher. It was fun. Then a few months later GOG released it for $5 for a couple of weeks. I paid for it. The Witcher 2 was pre-ordered before that, and I’m happy about it. I like to support companies of good games, even when my wallet is almost empty.

    I don’t agree with pay-up-or-else schemes, but given the actual size of CD Projekt, I can understand them trying to be careful. For those who don’t know, they actually own GOG, whose ideas are no DRM, and share with your friends. GOG also got, in my opinion, the best pre-order deal out there, which included a free game. They gave a lot with this game, and made a special edition out of the retail version. I’d say give them a chance to see how things work out. Look at the fact that they’ve only developed 2 really good games on their own. They have every right to be nervous and watching their games like hawks. Game development is expensive, and when your company is riding on a game and its sequel, you have to be careful, especially if your second game is a sequel.

    Long story short: They shouldn’t do this, but it’s understandable. They’ve shown themselves to be fairly honest in the past, but if we want services like GOG to stay open, and good games to be made, then try to support them a little.

    • Chuck Norris

      Yes, exactly, the game developers like CD Projekt need to be supported. They are trying to be fair to us, then why would you want to screw them over by downloading illegally a game which has taken so much effort, money and time to create?

      It’s understandable if you don’t have a whole lot of money. Most of us don’t but who said you have to play every game title that comes out? Only play the ones which you can afford to buy.

      • Fredrika

        > “Only play the ones which you can afford to buy.”

        Why should people limit their access to games in that way, when they can play them all for free? Copyright isn’t about limiting people’s access to culture, it’s about the complete opposite.

        • Chuck Norris

          Games have nothing to do with culture. Stop bringing culture and knowledge into everything. You make yourself sound stupid. Games aren’t free, they take years of hard work and loads of investment to develop. The problem with pirates is that they have this huge sense of entitlement when in fact nobody owes them anything.

        • Anon

          The problem with pirates is that they have this huge sense of entitlement when in fact nobody owes them anything.

          should actually read

          The problem with studios is that they have this huge sense of entitlement when in fact nobody owes them anything….

          Do you even know how markets work….you get what an item is worth…if its not worth paying for you get nothing…stop whining

        • Anonymous

          “The problem with studios is that they have this huge sense of entitlement when in fact nobody owes them anything….”

          This is true, right up until the point where someone uses one of their products. From that moment, they do owe them something.

        • Anon

          I agree completely, hence why i pay for the things i like….but i don’t pay for things i don’t like…..

          If you went to a restaurant and they served you inedible crap you wouldn’t pay for it. You use the product first and pay for it second…..

          The other argument i think is fair is if people can’t afford the things they download then they should be allowed access as it doesn’t disadvantage the studio in any way…no lost sales no lost income etc…

          if people can afford things but download anyway then I have issue…..but i think you will be suprised how few people fall into this category.

        • Fredrika

          > “Games have nothing to do with culture.”

          Actually, they do? Both music, movies and games are culture? Whether or not you interact with them has no relevance.

          > “Games aren’t free, they take years of hard work and loads of investment to develop.”

          In that sentence, with the word “games“, you mean that the development of games isn’t free. No one has argued against that obvious fact.

          However, that did not answer my question, why one should limit one’s access to games, when one can play them all for free.

          > “The problem with pirates is that they have this huge sense of entitlement when in fact nobody owes them anything.”

          Actually, copyright is a monopoly that only exists through an intrusion into the public’s own property, so one could make an argument that those who are privileged with that monopoly and intrusion to ones property would owe them something in return.

        • Friend of the People

          You’re right that games are culture. Thank you for that. You’re wrong when you say that culture has to be spread infinity. To put this simply, you have a right to be part of the cultural landscape, but you have no right to any specific piece of culture. The right to distribution of a product exists with a creator. Say that a musician decides to record all of his music but never give anyone a record. You wouldn’t say that he had to give it to anyone against his will, would you. No, you wouldn’t, and I won’t insult you by saying you would. Your flaw is in saying that by having sold it to anyone, he has given anyone the rights to listen to it. No one has the rights to listen to his music until he allows them, and no one has the right to play a company’s game until they allow them. That is why we pay for culture, because the artists require that of us to use their art. If the price is to high, don’t use the art. It’s not about lost sales, it’s about the morality of using someones work against their will.

          And don’t mistake this, an artists work is always their own. They give us copies to use, and we can morally share that with friends because of the assumption of community life, but you can’t morally share it with millions of strangers without violating the artist’s right to control of his specific piece of culture.

          “In that sentence, with the word “games”, you mean that the development of games isn’t free. No one has argued against that obvious fact.”

          No one has argued against it, but you also don’t address it. And here’s my answer to your question there. Why should you limit yourself? Because it is moral. It is immoral to actively force a change on someone’s business model. If their model fails because people go elsewhere, fine, but the people have no right to dictate the price and terms of distribution to an artist. If the artist decides to change, that is perfectly acceptable and natural, and if he sticks to his guns and fails, that is also acceptable, but for the consumer to take that choice out of his hands is immoral. That is why you should limit yourself. You have the physical capability to take every piece of content made without paying. That doesn’t mean you have the right to.

          Now that I’ve answered your question, perhaps you will answer a few for me. Isn’t the value in art not the act and culture not the act of replication, but the act of initial creation? And what gives you the right to any individual piece of culture? And most importantly, what would predict would happen to video games in a pirate society, where art was not financially rewarded because culture belonged only to the people? What would happen specifically to games, which cost millions more than any piece of music or any painting to develop?

          I have a prediction for what would happen, and while some like WoW and Call of Duty, based on multiplayer and competition would survive, my beloved Team Ico and Nippon Ichi games would likely fall by the wayside. I’ve already had to watch Clover die, not by piracy but by ignorance, and I’m not in any hurry to repat the experience. Convince me that I am wrong. And good luck trying.

        • Fredrika

          > “You’re wrong when you say that culture has to be spread infinity.”

          I have not made any such claim.

          > “To put this simply, you have a right to be part of the cultural landscape, but you have no right to any specific piece of culture.”

          I have not made any claim that i or anyone else has any “right to any specific piece of culture”?

          > “The right to distribution of a product exists with a creator.”

          Some rights, yes, not all.

          > “Your flaw is in saying that by having sold it to anyone, he has given anyone the rights to listen to it.”

          I have not made any such claims?

          > “No one has the rights to listen to his music until he allows them, and no one has the right to play a company’s game until they allow them.”

          That is incorrect. People do not need others peoples permission to access content that is already in their hands. Society does not work in that order, that everything is forbidden, until one is given permission, society works the other way around.

          > “That is why we pay for culture, because the artists require that of us to use their art.”

          No? People pay, because they find the product or service that is offered to them to be reasonably priced.

          > “If the price is to high, don’t use the art.”

          Since people do not pay for any right to “use the art”, that reasoning makes no sense.

          > “It’s not about lost sales, it’s about the morality of using someones work against their will.”

          Who’s morality? Your own personal subjective moral? Must everyone share your personal subjective moral?

          > “And don’t mistake this, an artists work is always their own.”

          Correct, no one can force an artist to create. They themselves chose of free will if they want to perform that work, of creating.

          > “They give us copies to use, and we can morally share that with friends because of the assumption of community life, but you can’t morally share it with millions of strangers without violating the artist’s right to control of his specific piece of culture.”

          Apparently, hundreds of millions if filesharers can do just that, morally.

          >“Why should you limit yourself? Because it is moral.”

          According to who’s morality? Again you seem to argue that everyone should share your personal morality? In reality, people obviously do not.

          > “It is immoral to actively force a change on someone’s business model.

          Nobody is forcing anything. Entrepreneurs are free to chose the business model of their own choice. If they choose a business model that in reality doesn’t provide enough revenues, a business model that people simply doesn’t have any need for, well then they have made a bad choice. There has always been lousy entrepreneurs, nothing new with that.

          > “but for the consumer to take that choice out of his hands is immoral.”

          Oh, your moral again? That seems to be the only argument you have, that people must do so because your personal subjective moral says they should?

          > “That is why you should limit yourself.”

          Then those hundreds of millions if filesharers obviously shouldn’t limit themselves, because they obviously don’t share your moral.

          > “Isn’t the value in art not the act and culture not the act of replication, but the act of initial creation?”

          Of course, and therefore it’s is better from a cultural economical point of view not to pay creators through cost ineffective business models that is built up around replication and distribution, business models that puts large parts of the money in the hands of unnecessary middle men, when the consumers can perform those tasks for themselves, free of charge, but instead pay the creators through other business models, which contribute with value that the consumes themselves can not add.

          > “And what gives you the right to any individual piece of culture?”

          Again you try to reverse the order of society. When a consumer have culture in front of them, they do not need any rights to access it.

          > “And most importantly, what would predict would happen to video games in a pirate society, where art was not financially rewarded because culture belonged only to the people? What would happen specifically to games, which cost millions more than any piece of music or any painting to develop?”

          Well, since video game piracy has been around for over 30 years, during which time the videogame industry has grown for each year, and made continuously new record turnovers, and since there is no scientific research that says that non-profit piracy cause any hinder to the creation of new games, i don’t feel the need to predict anything. Reality seems to be evidence enough of the fact that no actual problem exists.

          .
          >“..my beloved Team Ico and Nippon Ichi games would likely fall by the wayside.”

          It is sad to see that you have such low confidence in people’s astonishing ability to create new working business ideas, so that you assume that they will fail and go under, unable of adapting to reality. However, poor business entrepreneurs deserve to go under, that’s how the free market works.

          “I’ve already had to watch Clover die, not by piracy but by ignorance, and I’m not in any hurry to repat the experience.”

          Why was that so horrible? I have the Nintendo versions of Viewtiful Joe 1 & 2, and Okami, but those are three out of maybe 300 console games in my home, and my world does not revolve around those three, regardless of how great they are? There will always be new developers that will create new games, that again and again will astonish you. Also, the fact that a developer once created great games is no guarantee that they would have created more great games, if they had remained in business. The third Viewtiful Joe game, Red Hot Rumble, is a great example of that.

        • Friend of the People

          @Fredrika

          First, I’m glad to see you know the games I’m referencing. it’s always good when someone knows good games. And it was quite disappointing for me when they died, but oh well, life goes on. Back to the debate.

          “I have not made any claim that i or anyone else has any “right to any specific piece of culture”?”

          You did not make the claim in those exact words, but that is the meaning of what you said. Your claim is that anyone has the intrinsic right to view any piece of culture they want, and they should not have to pay for it. My claim is that the right to control of distribution of art rests in the hands of the creators of art. These claims are incompatible if the artist decides not to release his art for free.

          “People do not need others peoples permission to access content that is already in their hands. ”

          I don’t understand this. The content is not “already in their hands”. Filesharers don’t just have the content, they have to seek it out. They use the distribution model of torrents or other download sites. My claim is that this is immoral because they have taken the distribution choice away from the creator. They don’t just have the content, they have to get it first. I’m not going to go after this to much because I don’t think I understand what you’re saying here. Please clarify and I’ll address it later.

          “Apparently, hundreds of millions if filesharers can do just that, morally.”

          No, they just can physically do it. That doesn’t make it moral. You can’t just claim something is moral and make it so. That’s justification, not morality. Anyone can make any claim about morality, but that doesn’t mean that everyone is valid. I argue that piracy is immoral. Just because someone else doesn’t believe it is won’t sway me from this belief. Try saying why you don’t believe it is immoral, and then we’ll have something to go on.

          “Oh, your moral again? That seems to be the only argument you have, that people must do so because your personal subjective moral says they should?”

          I’m using this argument because I believe this is important. I don’t really care about lost sales or who succeeds and who doesn’t (well, I do, but I don’t think it’s central to the issue and I’ve also seen times where piracy can both help and hurt sales, so I don’t think it’s as clear cut as some people say). To put it simply, I think what you’re doing is wrong. I’ve presented my argument, which is based on the argument that the artist should have control over how their product is distributed. A pirate takes that control away from them. Therefore, the pirate is immoral. Tell me why that is wrong.

          I will put this simply. Culture overall belongs to the people, and everyone has the right to participate in the cultural landscape. Any individual piece of culture belongs to the person or group who made it. You have the right to witness and experience culture. To bring it back to the article, I have the right to be a part of the video game culture by playing games. I do not have the right to play any specific game. I pay for the right to play it. For example, I do not currently have the right to play Witcher 2. If I pay their asking price, CD Projekt allows me to play it. That should be how it works. If they want to give it for free, awesome. If not, I either pay their price, or move on. Simple as that.

          Final point:
          “No? People pay, because they find the product or service that is offered to them to be reasonably priced.”

          Correct. The only thing we disagree on is what happens when they don’t find it reasonably priced. I say they should walk away and not have access to the content. You are saying, as far as I can tell, that they are allowed to not pay and have the content anyway. If that is not what you are saying, tell me. If it is, tell me why you think that.

        • Friend of the People

          Something I forgot to add. There does need to be change. For example, I think once you have purchased access to content, like buying an album, it should be licensed to you for life. I would like to see that change. There are quite a few others changes I would like too, like alternative pricing for different types of games, but that’s a bit off topic, so I’ll leave that be for now.

        • Friend of the People

          You have the wrong definition of copyright. The goal of copyright is not to maximize society’s access to culture.”

          Wikipedia:
          “Copyright is a set of exclusive rights granted to the author or creator of an original work, including the right to copy, distribute and adapt the work.”

          U.S. Constitution
          “to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.”

          That is what copyright is for. It’s to secure the rights of the artist or creator, not to ensure proliferation to society. If anything can be said to be the goal of copyright, it is to promote progress. Progress means that art and science is advancing, not that more people have access to science and art. That is an admirable goal, but it is not the goal of copyright. Copyright gives the creators the right to control how their product is used, for a limited time at least

          Copyright acts to incentivize creation by promising the creators control of how their their content will be used. That means that the creators even have the right to ask non-profits not the use their work. This control of content applies to file-sharing. When it expires, all those who absolutely could not afford it can have access.

          That is what copyright is and is for. It’s for science and art, not society.

          One final thing. Some societies may not recognize filesharing as a crime, but all members of the U.N. who are signatories to the Declaration of Human Rights do recognize the right of the artist to control the material proliferation of their art.

          “In the same way as non-profit free access to content on a commercial scale has been widely accepted as the basic norm in society for over a 150 years”.

          What specifically are you referring to? I haven’t heard of this. Most societies I know of in the past were more restrictive with their art than we are. I’ll address this when you write back.

        • Fredrika

          >> “”I have not made any claim that i or anyone else has any “right to any specific piece of culture”?”

          > “You did not make the claim in those exact words, but that is the meaning of what you said.”

          You’re claim was “but you have no right to any specific piece of culture”. This is a illogical claim that totally reverses the order of society. Society does not work in that order, that everything is forbidden, until you have gotten a specific right or permission, it works the other way around, everything is ok, until it is specifically forbidden in law.

          What that means, which you’re reasoning indicates that you don’t understand, is that people don’t need any “right to any specific piece of culture“? The starting point is that they are free to do whatever they wish, with “any specific piece of culture”. Then they might forbidden to do so.

          > “Your claim is that anyone has the intrinsic right to view any piece of culture they want, and they should not have to pay for it.”

          Again, people do not need permission to view any piece of content they want. If they have access to it, there’s nothing that forbids them to watch it. and it is naturally free to watch it. Consuming culture has always been free, you can not charge anyone for consuming what is right in front of their eyes and ears.

          > “My claim is that the right to control of distribution of art rests in the hands of the creators of art.”

          They have been to a various degree privileged with a monopoly of some distribution, yes, not all.

          > “These claims are incompatible if the artist decides not to release his art for free.”

          That’s because you are confusing distribution with accessing.

          >>“”People do not need others peoples permission to access content that is already in their hands. ”

          > “I don’t understand this”.

          That was a response to your following faulty claim: “No one has the rights to listen to his music until he allows them, and no one has the right to play a company’s game until they allow them”

          > “The content is not “already in their hands”. Filesharers don’t just have the content, they have to seek it out.”

          Your example did not discuss distribution, it was regarding listening and playing.

          > “My claim is that this is immoral because they have taken the distribution choice away from the creator.”

          Since there’s no evidence to support the claim that the creator should ever have been priviligied with that control over non-profit distribution in the first place, the only immoral thing is the copyright monopoly’s intrusion into people property.

          >> “”Apparently, hundreds of millions if filesharers can do just that, morally.”

          > “No, they just can physically do it. That doesn’t make it moral.”

          I have not claimed that the fact that they can do it, is what makes it morally accepted? Basic understanding of how the humans race works tells us that people only performs tasks that their moral belief finds acceptable. Hundreds of millions of people fileshare whether it’s illegal or not, because their moral standards says that it’s a perfectly acceptable task. There’s actual research to back this claim up, the public does not believe that non-profit copyright infringement is anything immoral at all.

          The only people who on a regular basis goes against their own moral, and performs tasks that they in fact think is immoral, are disturbed people.

          > “You can’t just claim something is moral and make it so”.

          Which i have not.

          > “That’s justification, not morality.”

          That’s exactly what you do, regarding the parts of the copyright monopoly the regulates non-profit distribution, you justify the monopoly with your own moral belief.

          > “I argue that piracy is immoral.”

          Yes, and you have to accept the fact that others might not share you’re moral on that point. When it comes to non-profit infringement, the public does not share your moral.

          > “Try saying why you don’t believe it is immoral, and then we’ll have something to go on.”

          I don’t see anything immoral with ignoring a monopoly that is clearly illegitimate.

          > “I think what you’re doing is wrong.”

          What i’m doing? I have not made any claims to be doing anything?

          > “I’ve presented my argument, which is based on the argument that the artist should have control over how their product is distributed.”

          Yes, but that is a completely empty argument, without any actual reasoning, or only circular reasoning, which is a logical fallacy.

          The only relevant question is why should they be privileged with such monopoly in the first place? As i said, the way society works is that everything is allowed, until it is forbidden in law, and the only thing that should be justified is why something should be forbidden, or in this case, why they should have any control over non-profit distribution in their monopoly.

          > “A pirate takes that control away from them. Therefore, the pirate is immoral. Tell me why that is wrong.”

          Because that is textbook circular reasoning.

          > “Any individual piece of culture belongs to the person or group who made it.”

          Then i will make it simple for you. No, it does not. It belongs to the public, the second it is published. Then the public decides whether or not there’s any need for the creator to be privileged with any sort of copyright monopoly, for the actual goal that copyright seeks to achieve, to occur.

          > “You have the right to witness and experience culture.”

          Again you try to reverse the order of society, with a completely illogical claim. People do not need any right to witness and experience culture.

          > “I do not have the right to play any specific game.”

          Again, you do not need any right to play a video game that is in front of you.

          > “I pay for the right to play it.

          Definitely not! You pay for the physical copy, consumer laws are very clear on that point.

          > “The only thing we disagree on is what happens when they don’t find it reasonably priced. I say they should walk away and not have access to the content. You are saying, as far as I can tell, that they are allowed to not pay and have the content anyway.”

          I have not said that. What happens in reality however, is that they instead of buying it, manufacture the copy themselves through filesharing, since the task is reasonable easy to perform, and fully morally accepted among the public.

          And again you have lost the thread. You’re initial claim was: “That is why we pay for culture, because the artists require that of us to use their art.”

          And that is of course a faulty claim. We do not pay because the artist require that of us, to use their art. We pay for the physical copy, because people previously found the value of having someone else manufacture the copy for us, was worth the price.

        • Friend of the People

          First: Torrents and other filesharing sites are a form of distribution. Once you have downloaded a torrent, you have a copy of the art. That is distribution. It’s not access. I’ll get to what access is later.

          “Basic understanding of how the humans race works tells us that people only performs tasks that their moral belief finds acceptable.”

          Well, yeah. A basic understanding of the human race tells us that people’s moral beliefs are incredibly easy to shift and are subject to the problem of justification. People will change their morals to fit their situation. That is proven. I’m not saying that they believe it is immoral. I am saying it is immoral, regardless of what they believe.

          “Again, people do not need permission to view any piece of content they want. If they have access to it, there’s nothing that forbids them to watch it. and it is naturally free to watch it. Consuming culture has always been free, you can not charge anyone for consuming what is right in front of their eyes and ears.”

          The flaw in this argument is that the culture is not right in front of their eyes and ears. If they turn on the tv and a show is playing, it is right there. If you go to a club and a song is playing, the culture is right there. If you go on a torrent site, you are seeking a specific piece of culture out. You are seeking out something that will give you a copy of the content.

          “> “A pirate takes that control away from them. Therefore, the pirate is immoral. Tell me why that is wrong.”

          Because that is textbook circular reasoning.”

          Wrong. Circular reasoning would be if I said that the pirate is immoral. and therefore he pirates, and his piracy makes him immoral. I’m saying that piracy is always immoral. The pirate believes piracy is not wrong, so he pirates. Taking part in piaracy means he is undertaking an immoral act. That does not mean he is immoral, it means he is mistaken about morality. He does not continue to pirate because he is immoral, he pirates because he believes he is not doing harm and he believes he has the right to do it. He is wrong.

          “Your example did not discuss distribution, it was regarding listening and playing”

          You need to have something before you can listen or play with it. The act of playing or listening is not the problem. The problem is how you acquire it. You have to have a copy of something to use it. I need a copy of Call of Duty before I can play it. If I acquire that copy in a way the creator did not authorize, then I am doing wrong. The act of acquiring it is covered by how I am using distribution. It may not be commercial distribution, but just because no one is earning a profit on it does not mean it is not wrong.

          Culture has never been free to access. People pay to access art galleries or go to operas. There has been public culture, but it was the artists choice to make it public. The artist chose to let his music be played on the radio or in tv shows. You can listen to their music there, but you can’t take it upon yourself to acquire a copy outside of approved means.

          And you’re right that we assume things are allowed unless they are specifically forbidden. You are wrong in how that impacts art. Art is treated as the property of the person who created it. They have ultimate control, but they can choose to sell or give away copies of their art. You don’t have the right to acquire copies of art for the same reason you aren’t allowed to use anyone else’s property without their permission. Even if you don’t deprive anyone of anything, you don’t have the right to use it without permission.

          To wrap it up, the most important point made here is that culture sought out and acquired in a way the artist did not approve is not content “accessed”, it is content “acquired” in a model that the artist has forbidden. That is the important part here. And I don’t think we have anything left to say to each other We’re starting to repeat ourselves. Thank you for the debate, and consider what I have said.

        • Fredrika

          > “I’m not saying that they believe it is immoral. I am saying it is immoral, regardless of what they believe.”

          And they might say that it isn’t immoral, regardless of what you believe? You seem to have a real problem understanding the meaning of the concept moral? Moral is subjective and personal. You again and again claim that things are immoral because you think they are.

          > “The flaw in this argument is that the culture is not right in front of their eyes and ears.”

          Yes, in your example it was. That was the only thing i responded to.

          >>> “A pirate takes that control away from them. Therefore, the pirate is immoral. Tell me why that is wrong.”

          >>Because that is textbook circular reasoning.”

          > “Wrong”.

          No, it is circular reasoning, because your argument is that’s it’s wrong because the filesharers disregard the right holders monopoly. But your argument assumes that the right holder should be privileged with this monopoly in the first place. Maybe they shouldn’t. If so, it’s is not wrong to disregard the monopoly, which in that case would be clearly illegitimate.

          > “I’m saying that piracy is always immoral.”

          According to your personal moral, that others obviously doesn’t share.

          > “Taking part in piaracy means he is undertaking an immoral act.”

          According to your personal subjective moral, that others don’t share.

          > “it means he is mistaken about morality.”

          No, it means he has a different moral then your own personal subjective moral. That doesn’t mean he’s mistaken, it could just as easily be you who are mistaken. And since you continuously argue that your personal subjective moral is the only right one, that decides what is immoral and not, and that everyone that doesn’t share your subjective personal moral, is wrong, it’s painfully obvious it’s you who is mistaken.

          > “He does not continue to pirate because he is immoral, he pirates because he believes he is not doing harm and he believes he has the right to do it.”

          So now you are making claims about what other filesharers think?

          >> “”Your example did not discuss distribution, it was regarding listening and playing”

          > “You need to have something before you can listen or play with it.”

          That does not change the fact what your example discussed?

          > “If I acquire that copy in a way the creator did not authorize, then I am doing wrong.”

          Ok, so now you have something against libraries as well, and all legal copying for personal use? Because libraries doesn’t need any authorization from the creator, to be allowed to on a commercial scale make content available to everyone for free?

          Again you are trying to reverse the order of how society works. Your logic dictates that the public has no right to do as they wish, if the creator hasn’t authorized it, and that the creator has some divine control, that would be the starting point, and that it’s from there that people then are given rights to do as they wish with the creators content.

          The creators authorization is only relevant if society has privileged him with any control to begin with. In many areas the creator has not been privileged with any such control. Then his authorization is in no way needed, it is in fact completely irrelevant.

          “It may not be commercial distribution, but just because no one is earning a profit on it does not mean it is not wrong.”

          In reality, just because it isn’t authorized by the author, does not mean that it is wrong.

          > “Culture has never been free to access.

          I have not made any such claim. What i did claim was that once it is in their hands, then it’s free to access.

          >“The artist chose to let his music be played on the radio

          Incorrect. Radio stations can play any music they wish, as long as they have a general licensing agreement. The artist has no say on that.

          > “but you can’t take it upon yourself to acquire a copy outside of approved means.”

          Hundreds of millions of filesharers can indeed do that, and they have no moral problems with that.

          > “And you’re right that we assume things are allowed unless they are specifically forbidden.”

          That’s not an assumption? That a fact about how society works.

          > “You are wrong in how that impacts art.”

          I have not made any claim about how that fact impact arts?

          > “They have ultimate control”

          No. They might be priviliged with some control, if society deems that’s what best serves the public.

          > “You don’t have the right to acquire copies of art for the same reason you aren’t allowed to use anyone else’s property without their permission.”

          Definitely not. Property rights exists for completely different reasons from why society uses the concept of copyright.

        • Anonymous

          “> “The right to distribution of a product exists with a creator.”

          Some rights, yes, not all.”

          Please explain. What rights does the creator not (or should not) hold, and why?

        • Fredrika

          > “What rights does the creator not (or should not) hold, and why?”

          The creator should only be privileged with those rights that actual foundation and evidence can prove will promote the goal of copyright, which is maximising society’s access to content.

          Since absolutely no existing research or evidence can back up the claim that the creators copyright monopoly must regulate non-profit distribution, for society’s goal with copyright to occur, it obviously shouldn’t.

          Which it in many countries does not, where therefore filesharing is completely legitimate, not only in the public’s consciousness, but also the actual legislation.

          In the same way as non-profit free access to content on a commercial scale has been widely accepted as the basic norm in society for over a 150 years.

        • Anonymous

          @Fredrika, who said:

          “the goal of copyright, which is maximising society’s access to content.”

          No, it isn’t. It’s to “promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” (or so says the US Constitution anyway).

          Nowhere can I find anything to suggest that it is for “maximising society’s access to content.” Please, provide a reference.

          Until you address your misunderstanding of what copyright is actually for your statements will continue to be built upon false foundations.

          “filesharing is completely legitimate, not only in the public’s consciousness, but also the actual legislation.”

          Can you provide citations or any studies to back up those statements?

          I know for a fact that many of the people I know don’t think it’s legitimate (although I personally do it), and it certainly isn’t legitimate in actual legislation in most (all?) of Europe or in the US. I can’t speak for other countries though as I don’t know their laws in enough detail. I suspect, however, that in the majority of jurisdictions it isn’t legitimate (legal).

        • Friend of the People

          I think we’ve ceased making progress. We can’t really continue without getting into a discussion about the nature of morality, and that’s not quite what this forum is for (not to mention the girlfriend wants to see an opera and I can’t really bring the computer to the opera house). If I see you again in another forum topic, I’ll be glad to pick up where we left off.

          Have a nice evening (assuming it’s evening when you see this of course), and thank you for the lively discussion. I may not agree with you, but you debate well and respectfully. Have a good day.

        • Anonymous

          so, I must ask this directly, do you or do you not understand that people have different moral values?

          some are based on culture they where raised in, others based in conclusions they have made due to how they see the world.

          I have a friend whos morally apposed to people eating animals or using any animal products, hes also apposed to people keeping pets or killing animals for any reason, hes very admitted about it, specially when im eating an oh so tasty animal infront of him(such as a steak or burger)

          I dont share his morals, but I still respect his right to have those opinions and he respects my right to be of the oposite opinion and eat animals.

          I know people who have the moral opinion of the fellow above who feels theres nothing wrong with sharing/downloading, dont 100% agree with them about it, but I dont 100% disagree either.

          I am morally apposed to giving activision or atari(infogramers) money, but it dosnt mean I dont play a title they published from time to time without paying, they have both screwed me over dozens of times, I figuare the few games I download of theirs are back payment for games i got screwed on…..again you will say this is immoral and wrong, I dont agree, I feel it was wrong of them to sell me a game at MSRP then cut support with the game in a barely functional state or take down the master servers to try and force me to buy their next big title……

          as to copyright laws, they need to be reformed baddly, at this point nothing made in my lifetime will ever go public domain, and yes i know thats how the mafiaa want it, but thats not the original intent of copyright or patent laws, now days they are used to insure indefinite profits for MAFIAA style companies who dont ever want to see for example the beatles works go public domain(why they pushed so hard a while back to get copyright extended again)

          our copyright laws are quite out of date, and where poorly writen for their time, sorry to say but they are a bad joke that infact is doing the opposite of what was originally intended.

      • macweirdo

        See? Chuck Norris agrees.

        • Thoughtful

          See, the thing is that I am pro file-sharing. I’ve done it many times for games that I wanted to check out, but couldn’t afford or something. I’m not going to say I deserve it, but the demo scene is very small, among music the single is slowly vanishing (you may not think so, but I can’t think of a store within 50 miles of my home that sells them), and with movies, we have trailers.

          Because trials are hard to work with, we rely on reviews, and those can shape our decisions, but there’s nothing like a hands-on full experience. If I like something enough, I’ll buy it. There have, as always, been a few exceptions, but that’s the way it is for a lot of people.

          Games have officially been recognized by the NEA as an art form. They are now officially culture, and I could write a paper on how Call of Duty is a bad example of culture, but there it is. Copyright is supposed to be what allows a creator to get the maximum profit from their original work. Copyright these days is what allows a company to get the most out of your work so you can sell it and make as much as you would have without their advertising.

          File-sharing became relevant in that it counteracts extreme copyright policies that would have us empty our wallets for the next piece of crap that an industry churns out of its fad-copying machine.

          So while we don’t necessarily deserve file-sharing, and creators are indeed entitled to protect their works in whatever misguided ways they see fit, we need to know that we are a part of an undercurrent in society that resists the power of the few. We are here to ensure that companies evolve and look to produce something better, not copies of the same crap over and over. True file-sharers don’t copy and download in spite, but because they want to try, or learn, or help spread culture and entertainment. We all have our own reasons to file-share, but underneath it all, that is our root cause.

          Society will do everything it can to resist change. Once started, we find the grooves in the road, and let them guide us. The fear of change and the risk of new methods is what drives the ever more strict copyright laws. Because they do this, we know that our file-sharing is working. Let CD Projekt try this. When they see it alienate their customers, they’ll stop. They’ve had good heads on their shoulders until now, and we all make bad decisions. There’s no sense in getting riled up and boycotting something that could be great for culture.

          Besides, just knowing the risks of how you obtain it puts us one step ahead of copyright law again, and thanks to the excellent reporting by Torrent Freak, among others, we can see just how much of an impact this undercurrent of society is having on the world.

  • Anon

    Threatening people with lawsuits is not going to make them buy it. Especially if you sue for many times more than the price of the item. I own the first game, and have recommended it to others based on the removal of drm and general fixing of that game with the patch. Hearing this now means that the forty bucks I had set aside for the sequel this christmas, will now go elsewhere.

    • Smarta**

      Actually, this is something that always bothered me. Why is it that people want to set aside money for a game, or say they will, get angry when a company watches torrents for their games? If you were going to legitimately buy it, then you have nothing to worry about. I know file-sharing is a community, but it’s the self-entitlement that makes file-sharers look bad.

      As to the $40 the Anon above me saved… If you’re saving money to buy yourself something, during a holiday about giving, half of a year from now, then I’m sure the money was going to go elsewhere anyway, unless you live in a place where it takes half a year to save ten bucks. If you are in one of those places, then why are you spending it on yourself instead of Christmas gifts for the people you care about? That’s called greed, and someone has to tell you because we can’t all et lucky like Scrooge and let some ghosts tell us.

      • Anonymous

        >it’s the self-entitlement that makes file-sharers look bad

        This.

        • Chuck Norris

          Seconded.

        • macweirdo

          Thirded.

        • Anonymous

          Forded.

      • Anon

        I don;t appreciate people that try to run pay up or else schemes. I also have a budget and plan out what I am likely to purchase and allocate funds for such things. Why shouldn’t people get mad at companies and law firms that engage in extortion using methods that cannot even ensure that the “right” people are extorted? Will these same people send demand letters the moment they figure out a way to see who has borrowed one of their products, or will they come up some strange excuse as to why that is not a problem but file-sharing over the internet is? After all using their logic the effect is identical in every way.

        Oh by the way Christmas is very much about consumerism, they got the damn date wrong for Christ’s birthday as it is. Oh and for the record I buy my own christmas gifts, much simpler that way.

        You wouldn’t know what greed was if it hit you in the face. Has it ever occurred to you that putting aside a single day out of the year to be about giving is greed? Our entire lives are supposed to be about giving of ourselves to others. Not just one day a year. Why don’t you think about that before you attempt to lecture me or anyone else about greed or self-entitlement?

        • Anonymous

          well said.

          I have this issue that most of my friends and my whole family dont really understand me, they dont know what to get me, so I endup with what I know are many times gifts they put a lot of thought into but are…to be kind pretty useless to me, tho i got a coat a few years back thats still serving me well…..

          that said, alot of times I have put aside a set amount for my own gift around my bday/christmas(very close togather) and put aside money to buy gifts for others.

          I also do other things as gifts, a few years back i ripped all my fathers cd’s to mp3 for him and put them on a couple dvd’s so he could listen to them on his computer without having to change disks all the time, he LOVED IT, and it took alot of time to get good rips off disks hes never really been very careful with(scratched to hell in some cases).

          for my mother i did the same thing but to ogg and put them on her sansa fuze I bought her, again, she loved it, she only had like 12cd’s but she was so thrilled that I took the time to do it for her that she couldnt stop telling her friends for months.(and showing them her fuze and letting them listen to a song or 2)

          but I also do alot of stuff for people year round, not gonna say im never self centered, because, that would be saying I am not human, and I clearly am….

          but honestly anybody who infers that because somebody puts aside money for a gift for themselves is greedy is really an idiot….

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1381194360 Jason Carter

    Their going to watch torrents, when they can’t even get their own servers working correctly and their forums are still down…..

    I see slightly more pressing issues here to deal with.

  • Pirate4life

    That is cool they dropped the DRM but leave us alone!

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qKj8IhifI4

    • Guest

      spam

  • I am a sausage not a hotdog

    My first reaction any company willing to sue people can go screw themselves. thanks have an awesome weekend.

  • Josh C

    A little off topic, but for those of you that are going “LOLOL PIRATE B BAD PEOPLE 4 DOWNLOADIN”, then you should slap yourself because everyone has a different reason to download stuff. I pirate because I’m broke as f**k and don’t want to waste money on something I won’t want (ie 90% of the sh*t music released by the Big 4 Record Companies, 99% of the sh*t movies released by Hollywood, etc). Also on that note, being broke, I don’t have the time or money to run out and buy a movie if I need to watch it, so quit generalizing about us like such.

    Back on topic, I’m glad to hear a game company actually listening to people (I am not a gamer, I do not see the appeal of sitting on Xbox Live/PSN/etc for hours and gaming with randomness, but my brother doesn’t see why I sit around and write/sing/listen to music, so…), but it is not a good idea to go around decimating your pool of potential buyers. I know there are idiots that don’t ever buy anything that they download (lolentitledhos), but not all pirates are like that. There are pirates who want a taste of the game (who would love to give you their money), but here you are, yelling “WHY’D YOU DOWNLOAD, HUH? DID YOU THINK YOU COULD GET IT FOR FREE, BUT NO YOU AIN’T, I’M TAKING MORE MONEY THAN I PUT THIS UP FOR PURCHASE!!!” I understand that you’re a small company, but that’s no real excuse. This is bad publicity, and you should be lolno to it, imo.

    • Friend of the People

      “run out and buy a movie if I need to watch it”

      Not to nitpick (actually, yes I am nitpicking, but whatever), but no one NEEDS to watch a movie. You want to watch a movie, but don’t have enough money. My humble suggestion is to not watch or listen to the shitty things and only get the primo stuff by paying for it. I know that’s not really the easy solution, but that is the moral one.

      Also, it’s been my personal experience that while people may “sample” music through filesharing before making the decision to buy, many of those who pirate video games will not buy the product even if they like it. The reason I’ve been given by my filesharing friends is that if they buy and play the legal version, they lose whatever progress they have made in the cracked version, and they aren’t willing to pay for a copy they won’t use. I don’t have anything beyond anecdotal evidence, but I think that should be a consideration when discussing filesharing as it relates to videogames.

      • macweirdo

        Netflix is a better idea. With whatever titles they stream, watching them via Netflix is faster than downloading the whole object and then watching.

        • Friend of the People

          Yes, but only because pirates don’t know how to efficiently stream titles on a large scale. Megavideo is only so effective. Wait until new comes up, then we’ll see.

        • Josh C

          “Yes, but only because pirates don’t know how to efficiently stream titles on a large scale”

          Is that supposed to be an insult?

        • Friend of the People

          Not really. They just don’t know how to yet. They’ll figure it out in the future, but I don’t know of any large-scale streaming apparatus better than Megavideo at present time. I could be wrong, it’s just that I don’t know of any. No insult intended.

        • Anonymous

          netflix has the other advantage of not having to try a bunch of dif streams or downloads to find a copy thats of decent or acceptable quality.

          and you can steam videos with torrents now if your client dosnt suck….but you wouldnt know that.

      • Anonymous

        google around a bit, and search this very site, studies (more then a few) have shown that so called pirates are the ones who buy the most music of any group, not all but most “pirates” i know either already own what they download or buy the stuff they like(and they delete the rest)

        one cause of downloading stuff you already own is that the disks damaged (music wise), i know a dozen or so albums I downloaded in flac where only downloaded because the disks where scratched to hell OR cracked/broken by my ex-gf(stupid cu*t)

        also have downloaded a few movies so i could recode them to go onto my mobile player, this was out of laziness as much as anything else, I didnt want to have to rip the dvd to hdd, then convert the movie to a single file rather then a bunch of vob files, the recode and resize it for my players, downloading a copy and recoding it was easier…..well one of my movies has a “digital copy” on the 2nd disk BUT its DRM encrusted with drm my players do not support….

        plenty of movies and anime I have downloaded ended up being bought later so i could have a full quality copy, bought the full kevin smith movie set in dvd because i like his work so much after downloading all of them for example.

        but then again there are alot of movies i havent bought because they sucked so horribly that I barely managed to stomach them once.

        also, alot of the stuff i download you CANT buy here, and cant find on tv here, british tv shows for example, just cant get them here, but they are at times a riot…..(to somebody who gets the dry hummor)

    • Anonymous

      “I don’t have the time or money to run out and buy a movie if I need to watch it”

      What do you mean “need to watch it”? How can you *need* to watch it?

      Surely you mean “want to watch it”?

      • Josh C

        I’m a high school student. I have my days when I miss school. Last year, I was in a class where we watched movies and “reviewed” them (for a grade, mind you). That’s where the “need” comes from; yes, most of the time when I download a movie, I *want* to watch it. Yes, before you guys start ripping me apart for circumstantial sh*t, yes that is something that very few people go through, but it happens.

        • Friend of the People

          Kinda figured you might be referring to some specific job or class. Most people aren’t, but many still use the language of need. That’s why we jump on it.

          Unrelated to the larger issue, couldn’t you have just asked the teacher for a copy or a time you could watch them? They’re usually pretty accommodating. Although some weren’t. I’d still say you should

        • Josh C

          But wouldn’t that be stealing? Who’s to say I won’t keep the copy and watch it whenever I wanted to… (Just a little teehee jokey joke there). On a serious note, though, most of her movies were on VHS and she didn’t have a clue in the world how to copy those.

        • Friend of the People

          No, I meant like borrow a copy, and give it back later. I don’t mean get a copy to keep, I mean ask for the copy she played to the class, watch it, and then return it to her.

        • Anonymous

          Funny thing is, copying it would have been illegal. She would have to lend you the original.

        • Anonymous

          that depends on the license the school had for the videos, I worked in the AV room one period a day in highschool, and spent a good amount of time copying tapes and later dvd’s for student and staff use, but only ones off this specific list of what we had that kind of a license for.

          as to this issue, I had the same kinda problem with a collage class, and you COULDNT borrow a copy out for most of the videos, because they where constantly checked out with huge waiting lists at the libery (public and collage)

          I got stove up(stress fractures in both feet and a borked up knee) AND got the flu all at same time, the teacher let me do the class from home, but i had to find my own source for the videos the class was watching and writing reports on.

          it was a real pain some of the videos where VERY hard to find on download not to mention trying to find a place to have somebody rent them for me…..BUT i got lucky and found all of them and the extra credit videos, a couple of them i ended up ordering online after watching really horrible xvid downloads but most where just crap, but hey, despite all the problems, I got a b+ out of the class :)

  • http://www.facebook.com/eric.boehm Jack Murdock

    I love all the angry, self entitled people who are so incensed that they are protecting their own property. You would too if it was yours.

    People will always find something to complain about. People claim that they pirate games because they are supposedly legitimate custemors whose experience is being tarnished by the DRM.. And now that they remove the DRM, what happens? People find something else to grumble about.

    • Chuck Norris

      The fact that people are still trashing CD Projekt despite the fact that they removed DRM shows that at the end of the day, piracy is all about getting things for free which you otherwise would have to pay for. It just proves that all this whinging about “DRM” and how it’s the biggest reason why people pirate games is nothing more than an excuse to justify piracy.

      Even when the devs give you exactly what you want, they still find an excuse to pirate and even have the nerve to put the company down for trying to protect their assets!

      • http://www.facebook.com/eric.boehm Jack Murdock

        Couldn’t have said it better. Piracy now shows it’s true colors. It’s not about reforming copyright or something. It’s just about dodging price tags.

        • Hlrejftr

          Pay up or else extortion IS DRM turds. Its not just one thing, its the entire culture of treating people like shit. Lobbyists, lawyers, ripping off creators. When its EA doing whatever they want to save a few bucks its fine but a normal person takes something and its the end of the world? You people are delusional if you think you can take any moral stance LOL

        • Anonymous

          if you havent noticed they are mafiaa trolls, posting their “moral” attacks on anybody who views this site is just their way of getting lulz and getting paid.

  • Chuck Norris

    A big thanks to CD Projekt for removing the DRM. Now I can buy this game without inhibition.

    “A little off topic, but for those of you that are going “LOLOL PIRATE B BAD PEOPLE 4 DOWNLOADIN”, then you should slap yourself because everyone has a different reason to download stuff. I pirate because I’m broke as f**k and don’t want to waste money on something I won’t want (ie 90% of the sh*t music released by the Big 4 Record Companies, 99% of the sh*t movies released by Hollywood, etc). Also on that note, being broke, I don’t have the time or money to run out and buy a movie if I need to watch it, so quit generalizing about us like such. ”

    Are you a dumbass or what? If you are broke, that’s fine, don’t buy the game and don’t play the game. You certainly won’t die if you don’t purchase or play the game. If you don’t have money, you won’t be adding any new hardware to your system but yet again when it comes to software or games, its like you must have it, even if you have to illegally download it. It’s as if you’re entitled to it. It’s this kind of mentality for which pirates will always be known as criminals. Sad but true.

    Bottomline, not having money is a poor excuse to download illegally and not reward the game developers for their hard work, especially after the company announced they would remove the DRM.

    • Josh C

      My comment was never that I wouldn’t pay for this game if I liked it; it was explaining to all the people trashing piracy that all pirates have their reasons for downloading things. I’ll never download a game for two reasons – 1) LOLSHITCOMPUTER and 2) I’m not a gamer, plain and simple.

    • Josh C

      My comment was never that I wouldn’t pay for this game if I liked it; it was explaining to all the people trashing piracy that all pirates have their reasons for downloading things. I’ll never download a game for two reasons – 1) LOLSHITCOMPUTER and 2) I’m not a gamer, plain and simple.

  • Dia

    I was wondering about the 40 sec start-up time for the skidrow release.

  • Ad

    Wow. Let’s see – CD Projekt release the downloadable copy without DRM. Their distribution service – Good Old Games – changed to allow you to choose your region and therefore get the best price. They reduced the first Witcher game to about $5 in the leadup. They patch out the DRM in the physical copies of the games.

    And there’s still the self entitled whining from cheap little shits about how terrible CD Projekt is because they’re tracking some torrents?

    Just what do you want a games company to do at this point? Fly the company jet to your door with a free copy and let you choose to throw them some spare change when you finish the game?

    Tracking a torrent with a mind to sending out an infringement email. One bad point. Balance that against four good points.

    • Chuck Norris

      Pirates want game companies to keep developing awesome games without making any money. They want developers to beg on the streets in their spare time to make money.

      As I said above, nothing any company does short of giving their product away for free will ever earn any praise from any pirate because piracy is all about stealing and getting stuffs for free.

  • Sharra

    I was truly looking forward to this game, but after the draconian an insulting responses like these, I will not be supporting this company in any way, not now nor ever again I don’t care if they make the best game ever to date, which fortunately seems incredibly unlikely. They should take a lesson from Stardock, they know how to treat their customers and I have supported them with my wallet.

    • Friend of the People

      Stardock hasn’t exactly been a model of good behavior recently. They violated their own Gamer’s Bill of Rights by releasing Elemental: War of Magic in an unfinished state that remained unpatched for months. They had layoffs and are relying on a future game that will have the same engine and concept as Elemental to keep them afloat. All in all, I think that balances out their lack of DRM.

      As far as lack of DRM goes, CD Projekt has almost as good of a record on DRM as Stardock. They run the Good Old Games store, which sells games without DRM. In truth, CD Projekt is mostly posturing on the torrent tracking, hoping to dissuade people from pirating their games. It may not be the best way to go about it, but it’s not an offense worth avoiding them forever. Don’t make judgments until you hear about someone actually being brought to court. Until someone is sued, the company is posturing. Good rule to go by. Give CD Projekt the benefit of the doubt until they actually do something.

      On that note, I’d recommend to avoid Witcher 2 just because it’s probably not a very good game. The first one had horrible pacing and broken pacing. I can’t imagine much has changed.

      • Chuck Norris

        People like Sharra just want an excuse to not pay for stuffs they enjoy most. This has nothing to do with what CD Projekt said or how they treat their customers. Let’s face it, if you download their game for free, you are not their “customer”.

        • Anon

          quite right so under what logic should they have the right to demand that non-customers pay them any money at all? My brother and I sometimes share a copy of a game between the two of us. Should a company like CD Project be able to get some guys in suits to send me letters demanding money? It seems that the two main reasons they don’t is that they would be laughed at by a judge, and secondly doing such a thing is technically not feasible. But it certainly does not seem to mean that they wouldn’t try to do that if they could get a judge who wouldn’t laugh in their face and it was feasible.

        • Friend of the People

          No, they’ve supported people doing that in the past. The crucial difference is real community vs. online. If you share only with people you know, you are acting as part of a living community. If you give it to thousands of people you will never really interact with, that is filesharing, which if done illegally is piracy. Little differences are important.

        • Anon

          Wow how very silly. These are the same people that are trying to argue through their lawsuits that swarms are a civil conspiracy. But according to you the online sharers are not a community. However a community does not necessarily interact directly with each of its’ members. Furthermore the companies argue that they lose sales because of file-sharing. They don’t directly argue that there isn’t a community when it comes to the online world. If lost sales are the problem one must consider everything that causes sales to be lost to be equal and that includes sharing between people the old fashioned way.

          I also would love to hear your stance on letter writing by individuals who may never meet in person or who may only be in physical proximity for a very short time over the course of their relationship whatever it may be. Being able to see someone or interact with them physically really does not allow a person to know another individual any better than reading text does. People usually do not present their true selves to anyone other than themselves.

  • Julian

    Hehe nice to be taking part of a torrentfreak news ;)
    At least I understand now, why they used DRM, but still there is no reason not to remove it with Day 0 patch.
    Cheers!

  • http://twitter.com/thedanrichie Daniel Richardson

    Rofl, this thread is absolutely filled with corpo’s and their bullshit.

  • 1337 H@X0R

    pirated > bought the next day
    probly will not buy another cd projek game for awhile
    threatening me with pay up or else scams are bad mmmk

  • Jim Forrey

    I bought this game, didn’t even pirate it first, its been crashing like crazy, nothing seems to work, downloading via torrent now. I hope to get a fine, I’ll send them my receipt for the game purchased before the date my IP was logged saying what a piece of shit job they did on it. Hope the cracked version works :) As for the pay up or else I hope people are getting smarter to this and not paying.

    • Gary

      Dude the game is fine..your a trolling lying bastard.

  • Whatever

    A “remove DRM” update ?

    Now they should calculate how much money they would have saved if they didn’t include it at all in the programming. Its not like the DRM programming clowns did this for free or the integration didn’t cost time and resources.

    Now they are spending even more money on other parasites: lawyers and unsecure media security/tracking companies.

    If they didn’t do the DRM in the first place they wouldn’t need the other parasites to “recoup some lost money” because there would have been enough profit just from not buying DRM.

    • Jack

      Sry but that’s not true! Come on, you cant be so blind to see simple facts ?! What would be better ???
      Losing a lot of sales in the first few days because CD-Project didnt add DRM or adding DRM for a couple of days and NOT LOSING all the FIRST DAY / INITIAL SALES ???

      Even idiots can see that the 2. method brings the better outcome.

  • Likeiwouldtypemyrealemail

    Sounds like TW 2 is going to break 1 million units sold, just not this week.

  • Anon

    One thing I would like to add is that Jefferson did not think that someone could own an idea. IE. He did not believe in intellectual property as we understand it today. The reason the copyright clause is written the way it is in the U.S. constitution is that the monopoly granted to a copyright holder was intended to be done for the public benefit. It was not necessarily intended to allow copyright holders to make money. The idea was not to protect business models but to advance the society. Profits happened to be one side effect of this concept. The other side effect that we are seeing now is the rise of information ubiquity. Or more correctly the need to support universal access to the “useful arts” and the sciences.

    The problem right now is that in the two centuries since the copyright clause was articulated America has reverted to the old way of thinking about copyright, as a monopoly by and for publishers as opposed to the creators of content and the consumers who ultimately grant that right.

    What these self-entitled fools think right now is that if they just terrorize people with more lawsuits and/or draconian laws that the people will come back and buy their shit in the same way that they had been doing up to this point. No one is going to pay 240USD a year for porn, especially not in a recession like this one, when there is plenty of free porn out there that isn’t pirated at all. ( I read an article where one of the performers stated that it was the free streaming sites that are killing them and not downloading.)

    No one cares about their production values when the whole thing is so mechanical and is ultimately not memorable. These morons in the porn industry started believing that they were immune to economic realities, they probably also thought and still do think that what they sell is sex which human beings will need regardless of the economic situation.

    However they don’t sell sex, they sell pornography; they sell material that helps one think about sex. We’ve never actually needed them for that, they just happened to be convenient. An actual prostitute is infinitely more valuable than any porn producer or performer. Of course the performers are also far more important than distributors.

    Soon the cellphone carriers will be relegated to mere data providers if internet access is able to keep steadily marching along. Hence the push to try and charge different rates for using things like Skype. Cable companies hate t.v. show torrents because it cuts into their DVR scam. They are either too stupid or unwilling to figure out how to monetize these torrents so they claim that it injures them. All of this in spite of the fact that I can build a DVR and record tv all I like without giving them a single cent for that particular privilege

    • Jeremy the Great

      thank you someone who has common sense!

      read that well trolls, copyright was not meant for you to be leeches, it was to benefit the public. the day it goes back to that is the day i will start taking it seriously again, filesharing is acceptable under the current broken law. i know you’ll throw stuff and have a tantrum at that reality, but its the way it goes, and you’ll just have to learn to live with it >:p

      have a nice day

    • Anonymous

      “The reason the copyright clause is written the way it is in the U.S. constitution is that the monopoly granted to a copyright holder was intended to be done for the public benefit. It was not necessarily intended to allow copyright holders to make money. The idea was not to protect business models but to advance the society.”

      The first part is very likely true, and probably also the part about business models. Copyright was, however, intended to allow holders to make money.

      The idea was to give innovators and creators an incentive to do what they do by protecting and giving them the right to ‘exploit’ (i.e. make money from) their work, so that they could get some return on their investment of the time and effort any innovation or creation requires.

      Without that guarantee, provided by copyright, many things would likely simply not have happened, because people would have been less likely to make the necessary investments (not necessarily monetary investment, but time and effort).

  • Anon

    One thing I would like to add is that Jefferson did not think that someone could own an idea. IE. He did not believe in intellectual property as we understand it today. The reason the copyright clause is written the way it is in the U.S. constitution is that the monopoly granted to a copyright holder was intended to be done for the public benefit. It was not necessarily intended to allow copyright holders to make money. The idea was not to protect business models but to advance the society. Profits happened to be one side effect of this concept. The other side effect that we are seeing now is the rise of information ubiquity. Or more correctly the need to support universal access to the “useful arts” and the sciences.

    The problem right now is that in the two centuries since the copyright clause was articulated America has reverted to the old way of thinking about copyright, as a monopoly by and for publishers as opposed to the creators of content and the consumers who ultimately grant that right.

    What these self-entitled fools think right now is that if they just terrorize people with more lawsuits and/or draconian laws that the people will come back and buy their shit in the same way that they had been doing up to this point. No one is going to pay 240USD a year for porn, especially not in a recession like this one, when there is plenty of free porn out there that isn’t pirated at all. ( I read an article where one of the performers stated that it was the free streaming sites that are killing them and not downloading.)

    No one cares about their production values when the whole thing is so mechanical and is ultimately not memorable. These morons in the porn industry started believing that they were immune to economic realities, they probably also thought and still do think that what they sell is sex which human beings will need regardless of the economic situation.

    However they don’t sell sex, they sell pornography; they sell material that helps one think about sex. We’ve never actually needed them for that, they just happened to be convenient. An actual prostitute is infinitely more valuable than any porn producer or performer. Of course the performers are also far more important than distributors.

    Soon the cellphone carriers will be relegated to mere data providers if internet access is able to keep steadily marching along. Hence the push to try and charge different rates for using things like Skype. Cable companies hate t.v. show torrents because it cuts into their DVR scam. They are either too stupid or unwilling to figure out how to monetize these torrents so they claim that it injures them. All of this in spite of the fact that I can build a DVR and record tv all I like without giving them a single cent for that particular privilege

  • Pingback: CD Projekt porzuca DRM w Wied?minie 2 – dobry ruch ze strony polskiego studia, czas na innych

  • anon

    There’s always direct dl.

  • BTGuard - BitTorrent Anonymously

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