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EA, Atari Sue Over Videogame Copying Software
Thanks to the Monterey Herald/AP for its news story regarding EA, Atari, and VU Games' lawsuit against the makers of the Games X Copy backup software. The article explains: "The federal lawsuit [PDF version], filed Tuesday in New York, alleges that Games X Copy software by 321 Studios Inc. of suburban St. Louis violates copyright laws by illegally cracking copy-protection systems used by [PC] game makers." Doug Lowenstein of the ESA trade body, also backing the lawsuits, explains: "I wouldn't get into speculating on dollar losses here. What's at stake here is a rather important legal principle - that products with no purpose other than to circumvent copyright protection are illegal under the DMCA." The piece also notes that "Federal judges in New York and California have barred 321 from marketing... [similar] DVD-cloning software - a victory for movie studios, which contended that such products violate the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act."
This is the same EA that just made it IMPOSSIBLE to bypass the 15 second startup movies that play every time you start up Ultima Online. There is a way to disable them, but they can ban your account for making unauthorized mods if you use it.
Many children (young and old) treat their game discs with a bit less respect than they should sometimes. Who wants to buy a new copy everytime your copy starts skipping or fails? Won't you please think about the children!?
[UID-HeinzIntel]
Thanks to this article, I know of the existance of "Games X Copy," a product I would never have known about had EA and the others sued.
What will I do with my knew found awareness? Probably nothing right now, but I'm sure I'll let others know about it eventually and there's a slim possibility I might buy a copy before they're gone...
Thanks EA and Atari! Now I know about another great 321 Studios project!!
I bought SimCity 4 and the Rush Hour expansion. After installing the expansion, running it cam back with the error "Please insert the correct disk." Rush Hour is one disk and it was the one that was in there, so just to play the game I legally bought, I had to find a NoCD crack for it.
Copy protection my ass, I had to go and look for a way around it just to play it. I'm glad I did though, damn its fun.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
Many places charge as low as 5 dollars to have a disk resurfaced, and unless the disk is cracked it always works. The home-resurfacing kits are mostly jokes, but the professional ones work... ask at a local used CD store where they resurface theirs. Of course, you can always buy it new from EB and return the broken copy... that would be dishonest, but let's just say they lost that protection the day they sold me an unopened copy of FF7 on the release date that was scratched to hell, and didn't have a replacement available for weeks.
e mand position, we should get the rights associated with it.
I agree, with your position though, that if media companies are going to take the we-own-the-media-you-have-to-return-it-to-us-on-d
Lunar 2 was better on the Sega CD anyway. The animation was more charming.
The ______ Agenda
A while back (Oct. 28, 2003), the Librarian of Congress granted certain classes of works a three-year exemption from the DMCA. The classes of interest are:
(2) Computer programs protected by dongles that prevent access due to malfunction or damage and which are obsolete.
(3) Computer programs and video games distributed in formats that have become obsolete and which require the original media or hardware as a condition of access. A format shall be considered obsolete if the machine or system necessary to render perceptible a work stored in that format is no longer manufactured or is no longer reasonably available in the commercial marketplace.
I know these classes apply to old, obsolete console systems, but couldn't they apply to CD-ROM anti-circumvention programs for games that are no longer being manufactured, because in that case the original CD-ROMs themselves are the necessary systems? If so, copy-circumvention programs like this would have a legal, legitimate use.
Of more general concern is the fact that such special exemptions need to be made in the first place, suggesting that the whole DMCA is bogus in the first place.
Anyone remember Skeleton Keys? Back around 1979 or so, we used it to copy all the Apple ][ floppies we were selling AT AN AUTHORIZED APPLE RETAILER so we could have a backup. Customers could easily wipe the media they went home with, and they expected us to replace it. G #600 (boots a floppy? something? well, you see...)
This was innadaze of badly mimeographed manuals and a couple disks in a ziploc bag. BTW, that was the first ziploc bag usage I recall. Sue Glad, eh?
I still have an s.keyed "Wizard and the Princess" floppy here somewhere. How the HELL do you get past the snake???
The latest Slashdot meme.
That basically boils down to the fact that when you spend your hard earned 50 bucks, all you are getting is a CD / DVD disc (and hopefully a box and a manual), as you have no rights to do anything to the data contained on it.
That's one damn expensive disc.
Don't get me wrong, its their work and they should keep ownership rights, but for the money consumers pay for the product, they should at least have some freedom to copy the data providing it is for personal use. Whatever happend to "fair usage"? I can understand their concern over piracy, but from a business point of view, is screwing over your customers in an attempt to stop a few people getting the product for free really a wise move? Seems like the path most corporations and companies are travelling recently.
Also, by preventing your customers from copying the data, you are implying guilt before innocence, ie: people are more likely to be pirating than making legimate backups, so treat them as criminals by limiting their experience.
She's built like a steak house, but she handles like a bistro....
This is where the difference between license/purchase scheme comes in. Companies want the best of both worlds (dictate how you use it, and you're responsable for the media). However, if they don't have a disc replacement policy, the idea is that judges will tend to see the 'purchase' point more than the contract point, and that means that you can do whatever you want with it. Kinda like when you buy a car.
I don't read AC A human right
Who the hell are these guys? I'm glad the game publishing industry is so clued up on these things that nobody uses. If they were really serious they'd go after Alcohol Software or Elaborate Bytes, both of whom offer CD/DVD copying software with options to "break" copy protection. Of course they don't "break" the copy protection at all, they simply copy the copy protection.
As Macrovision (creators of SafeDisc) have said in the past, their products are not so much copy protection as copy dissuasion: making it more of a pain in the ass to copy stuff. And it sure is. Copying a SafeDisced game takes hours in raw mode, as exactly duplicating the ECC/EDC data on the disc is a painfully slow process (probably because ECC/EDC checking has to be done in software for every block when it's disabled on the drive).
Anyway, all the above is besides the point. 321Studios have made a critical error which I see as remarkably foolish: Marketing their product as "HAY GUYS, SOFTWAREZ TO KOPY UR GAMEZ!" Who in their right mind would do this and not expect their ass to be kicked severely by some legal body? You don't get any more obvious than calling it "GameXCopy" which is a name that doesn't even make sense anyway. What the hell is the X about? Other software remains legal because it sells itself on the fact you can create exact clones of any CD for back up purposes: not just games.
It's not this kind of software they should be going after anyway. People don't copy games onto another CD anymore. People create images of a game and distribute it over the internet. It's considerably easier to create an image file, and from what I can tell GameXCopy doesn't let you do this. Furthermore, software such as Daemon Tools, Alcohol 120% and Virtual CloneDVD will let you mount ripped protected images in Windows as if they were a CD-ROM drive. Just download and mount. No burning. Surely this should be what they're worried about?
Somebody needs to come out in support of these guys [321studios.com].
These are the good guys. They are pissing off the evil copy-protection guys. They have a very reasonable argument.
you obviousally never owned one of their products... their activation and CALL HOME scheme is nastier than anything any game maker or movie maker has ever created.
I a msitting here with a legitimate copy of DVD X copy PLatinum that they REFUSE to give me a activation key for bcause they did not see a "uninstall call home" when my hard drive crashed.
they are Assholes that are no better than the people suing them. and their products are BASED on open/free versions that are on the net now... DVD shrink is 20 times better than their dvdXcopy product. (I unfortunately found out about 2 months after I bought the crud from 321.)
and the tools to backup PS2 games have been on the net for just as long...
they are NOT the good guys otherwise they would not be jerks to their own customers.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
It's the mainstream market finding out that they can copy their neighbours' software and music that keeps them up at night.
Somehow, I think it's not that. It seems to me that what they're really afraid of are people who download these games and programs for free off of P2P software (I'm thinking Kazaa, Morpheus, Gnutella, etc. more than BitTorrent). Even the RIAA has said that making a copy for a friend or neighbor is fine and that it's the mass distributors they're really focused on.