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GTA: San Andreas Leaked
Anonymous Coward cuts-and-pastes: "Less than a week after a pirated version of Halo 2 began appearing on the Web, another of the year's most sought after games has been stolen. Ironically, it also happens to be a game titled after a larcenous act itself. That's right. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas has become the latest victim of piracy, with illegal copies of the game, its manual, and its cover appearing on various Web sites." Update: 10/21 13:54 GMT by Z : Rockstar adds some details to what we know about the crime in a press release covered by CVG.
"Downloading, possession and distribution of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, including making the game available on the internet, is theft." Then came this warning from the company: "We take the theft of our intellectual property very seriously and we are and will continue to diligently and aggressively pursue this matter."
I take the virtual theft of guns, money, sex with hookers, cars, and other people's lives very seriously and I will continue to diligently and aggressively pursue this matter once I get my hands on the game.
Yet another news article that continues the bombardment of the uninformed public trying to change the definition of words to fit their needs.
This is a another example, as the bbc explain in the article:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3745484.stm
But what Garcia Maruez did finally is he modified the final chapter of the book so the book in the street does not have the same ending than the published book. Quick reaction and probably a very good publicity campaign for boths, the pirate version and the published version
Please post bittorrent links.... thanks!
Meh.
Another dupe.. and a day late also..
But on another note why is this making news.. Every single xbox,pc,gc,ps2 etc etc game is cracked/released, and normally before retail dates.
Just because they big name games does it actually matter.. This has been going on since the days of the zx81 (and prob before).
This happens with every single game that comes out. Why all of a sudden is this huge news? Back in the days of doom and quake games were pirated days and weeks before their release. Granted, lately it's been sometimes the day of or a day after the game has been released to retail that a game gets pirated, but this isn't news people. It's been happening for 10+ years. One thing that has changed, is how easy it is for people not involved in the "scene" to get these releases. Before you used to have to know the right people, nowadays all you need to do is load up the latest p2p app and anyone can find it.
However, it is already clear [...] piracy is becoming an increasingly common and serious problem for both gamers and the games industry.
I have never condemmned piracy, but "a problem for gamers" - what kind of tripe is this?
Actually, I see their point. The game publishers try to combat piracy with more draconian copy protection. This *is* a problem for gamers. The gamers who legitimately paid for their game. Not for those who download a cracked version.
My religion forbids the use of sigs.
A thieving opportunist has stolen a van of my latest publication hot off the press! But that SPANKED-up idiot has left the rear doors open and now my, artistically violent, tastefully desctructive video game is being dropped all over the Internet. Persue that trail of illegal copies diligently and aggressively collecting evidence as you go. When you've followed the trail to that thieving SPANK-head, waste him.
But sometimes it moved like the wind.
I used to love cracking BBC Micro games. I remember when FRAK! was released, it had some rather good (for the time) copy protection. It took me hours to crack, but eventually lady luck smiled on me and it was cracked.
I gave a copy to a friend of mine on the Monday.
On the Friday I went to see some old chums from Uni. about 150 miles away. Guess what? They had my cracked version!
And during the course of the year, every single copy of this game I cam across was my cracked version.
I later went on to develop and sell some of my own copy protection and had great fun hearing people bitch and moan about how they couldn;t crack it. Blew their mind when I told them I was the author.
Fun days.
Look, I know a guy who's working on it, a really decent man. He has a wife, a child, and another on the way. If you copy this instead of buying it, you're contributing to putting him out of a job just when he needs one the most.
This isn't a theoretical issue. Rockstar aren't some faceless cartel. Please. Do the right thing this time.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Please. Lets come back to this discussion after we see how many copies of Halo 2, Half-life 2, and GTA: San Andreas are sold. I guarantee you they won't be sparing the champagne at the developer's launch parties this year.
"I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar."
-Hoban Washburn
Prepare for a "If a tree falls in the woods and no one is around" question...
So, hypothetically, if Half-Life 2 were to be pirated, I download the game, and I already have it paid for via Steam, is it illegal?
Bryan R.
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance, or $12.50 as seen on eBay.....
The only viable copy protection is similar to that used in Quake III, where you're banned from any Internet servers if you use a duplicate key. There's no killer solution for software that doesn't require the Internet to run (even Q3 would always work in single-player mode).
But hey, look at how many people downloaded the warezed copy of Doom 3, and Activision still sold a metric shedload of CDs. I wouldn't cry too much - piracy is going to hurt the publishers of weak games worst, 'cos everyone can find out that it sucks before it goes on sale ;-)
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
ok, so its not the latest and greatest
but Rockstar has made the orig GTA free for dl
Grump
Is it true that more people vote for the winner of American Idol, than vote for the president? -Ali G.
It's just Pacman with a bow.
The only effective copy protection I've ever seen is to make a compelling online-only game such as Counter-Strike.
Once you have the gamers online you can weave in connections to a centralized server where you can pull all sorts of tricks to insure that they are using a CDKEY that you issued, only once, with software that matches MD5 checksums/etc.
It's still possible to crack this, but AFAIK there is no effective multiplayer counterstrike crack, and given that the game has been out as long as it has been you would figure someone would have come up with SOMETHING by now. Even if they do, Valve would just issue a systemwide patch to combat it.
Same goes with MMORPGs and XBOX live/etc.
Every other form of copy protection is a plague on gamers. Granted Counter-Strike's cd key system has its own problems, but it's not as harsh as say, disabling the use of daemon tools or requiring a dongle or whatever. I predict that when net access becomes ubiquitous enough you'll see every game/application hit the net for authorization before running, on PC or consoles. Sad but true.
...unfortunately no one can be told what The Mat^H^H^HGoatse is...they must experience it for themselves...
By me copying and downloading and then spreading their product I haven't denied them of anything.
Amazingly ignorant comment. You are denying them the profit they have a right to. No one has a right to possess a copy of the game if they have not received it through legit means. This whole theft/copyright infringment argument is tiring, because the end result is that people are breaking the law. Theft is not the wrong word to use, it's just that the definition of the word is dated. Good luck trying to bring webster's dictionary into court to try and protect yourself.
Grow up. Piracy is wrong and it does cost the industry jobs and a lot of money (although not as much as they claim).
I've just signed legislation that'll outlaw Russia forever. We'll begin bombing in five minutes.
In order to steal the game, you have to beat up enough cops and hookers in your town, and run over a few pedestrians on your way to work, and then you will be approached by a mysterious stranger who will send you on a mission that will result in your getting a bootleg copy of GTA:SA.
the profit they have a right to
A word of advice, steer clear of flawed statements like this. Nobody has a "right" to profit.
However, by infringing their copyrights (getting the game without paying for it), you have obtained their game _illegally_, and if you are participating in mass copyright infringement, it's a _criminal_ offence in the UK.
Theft _is_ the wrong word to use. Theft is a completely different crime from copyright infringement. You will not be prosecuted for theft. If you go to court, they won't say "theft" or "stolen" once. They'll prosecute you for "copyright infringement", and they'll use phrases like "massively infringed" and "duplicated without authorisation".
Copyright infringement is a much better phrase than "theft" or "piracy", because it also works for Free Software. Only copyright law stops people from taking free code and making it non-free. If we tried to say they "stole" our code, they'd retort "hah! how can you steal something that's free?". As you can see, "steal" is an extremely poor word choice for copyright infringement.
If you were to actually steal GTA, you'd do that by going into the shops when it is released and physically stealing the box from the shelf or the game discs from the stock drawers.
I've spent the last two days solid in French language immersion on my XBox.
I remember a few years ago you would have NEVER heard of a pirated game make the news. And really, for all those in the know, games were routinely released in warez form weeks, sometimes months, before the actual release.
I think this is all a bunch of scare tactics by the media. Game companies know these sort of activities only have a marginal effect on their bottom lines. It's always been a constant. Hell, sometimes it's like free marketing.
Besides, most of the people who are into trading these leaked games are kids who can't afford to buy them anyways.
Don't get me wrong, it's not a good thing that games get pirated, but it's been happening since software was invented. Don't beleive the media hype, because sooner or later there's going to be a story about "The pandemic of software piracy".
Great - another corporations-have-a-right-to-profit thinker. Corporations don't have a right to profit; they have a right to do business but whether they make profit depends on how they do it - it's not their guaranteed right that they will! They don't have a right to any sales revenue either if people decide not to buy their products.
So are the corporations. Who makes non-compete agreements? Enforces illegal trade restrictions? Lies with creative accounting practices to avoid paying equal share of taxes? Is a member of a cartel, and engages in price-fixing taking customers' money by illegal means?
How many times have those corporations' actions been discussed in the news recently compared to the mp3 music "thieves" and "pirates?" How many times has Congress proposed any legislation recently to combat the situation compared to what they have proposed and enacted to combat the "pirates?"
Gimme a break - next thing you'll tell me is that corporations have a right to break the law. Because we already know they have a right to bribe the Congress to enact new ones, making common sense illegal.
OK, maybe "theft" is the right word to use. After all, corporations in the entertainment industry alone have stolen 100s of millions if not billions in U.S. dollars over time from consumers using illegal means.
Look, I am no "piracy shop" supporter, and I don't know much about the Rockstar and its products or how all this applies in this case, but, for a general statement that you are making, having a one-sided view as if corporations' "rights" to profit are being violated is very ignorant of the whole situation.