Net Journalist Prosecuted For Warez Crimes

Andrew Burnes writes "A fellow Internet games journalist will shortly plead guilty in a Connecticut court room for being involved in the warez scene, following his apprehension in April as part of Operation Fastlink. Here is a slice of his email to various press and editorial professionals: 'I am very sorry for what I have done, and after I serve my sentence, I hope I will be able to continue my career in the game industry, and move on with my life. This last year has been incredibly hard for me emotionally, facing the consequences of my bad choices, and I am hopeful for your support, but I'll understand if you want nothing to do with me.'

Comments

I feel safer already...

[ShamusYoung]

Another dangerous criminal apprehended!

Does it go the other way as well?

[pnice]

I would like to know how much this works in the other direction. Sometimes a illegal copy of a game will show up on some warez release list and then about the same time a review of the game will show up on an video game review site. Like maybe some of the net game journalists don't have access to pre-release review copies like the big boys so they get a pirate version of the game from the net so they can be up to date on review, information, screenshots, etc. They may not be the ones distributing but it's still illegal I would think.

Good...and bad

[miyako]

I have to say that I have positive and negative feelings about this, and about game piracy as a whole.
Overall, I've always thought that games are one of the things that there is very little justification to just strait out pirate. I mean, there is no real requirement that you have game X (as opposed to say, certain Operating Systems or Office applications that such a large portion of the world uses that if you don't have it, in some cases, you are basically screwed), and I've always thought that games as a whole were fairly reasonably priced.
On the other hand, in some cases, piracy probably helps the game companies sell more games than they might otherwise, and in the end I think rewards companies who make good games (there are a number of games that I've purchased because I downloaded a pirate copy of a game that I wasn't really interested in, and then realized that the game was in fact quite good, or ran better under wine than I expected, and I ended up going out and paying for the game).
In the end though, regardless of whether or not this guy was doing the game industry a service or a disservice, it seems to me that if you are in a position like this guy was in, warezing games is a pretty boneheaded move just because it seems like an "insider" is a lot more likely to get caught than John Q. Cracker.