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ESA Praises Sting of Game Software Pirates
Next Generation reports on the arrest of 19 software pirates in Chicago. The ESA sent along their congratulations to federal law enforcement officers, who took down the warez dealers as part of a task force titled 'Opereration Site Down'. From the article: "The international piracy warez group known as 'RISCISO' reportedly pirated $6.5 million worth of games, software and movies since it began operations in 1998. The group maintained several servers that contained 23,000 CD ROMs worth of pirated material, according to the ESA."
The more pirates will slip through your fingers...
In 2000, there were only 17 pirates left.
Now we are in negative figures just watch as global average temperature become uncontrollable.
Repent your sins.
The end of the world is nigh.
http://www.venganza.org/
liqbase
Sorry, I can't imagine 23'000 CD-ROM's worth of information, how much is it in the standard Library of Congress format?
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
I guess the RISCISO group was website based. I hadn't heard of them. I've seen the ones that use Usenet to distribute to anyone who wants the software.
Even those Usenet groups are dying down. The last time there was a sting, the volume of posting dropped from about 25 titles a day to about 10 titles a day. About 2 months ago, it dropped again, to about 2-3 titles a day it seems. This is probably why.
Even without those types of pirates, I think you will be seeing a lot of software stop being pirated. The more titles require on-line play with servers to connect to, the easier for the software companies to make sure there is a digital handshake that would be hard to get around.
Besides, you see a lot of the software companies releasing games that have major bugs in them, requiring a patch that has to be downloaded. I am suspecting that this is one of their methods to defeat the ISO type pirates. Sure, someone can download their game. However, it is basically a free demo that will crap out on you about 5 hours into gameplay due to a major bug. In order to fix said bug, you have to download the patch, which re-installs whatever copy protection the ISO type pirates removed. A simple process, but effective.
Secure-ROM 7 apparently also seeks out such programs as Daemon Tools and refuses to let the application run if it is installed. Even people using stuff like Blind Write and other tools that try to hide applications like Daemon Tools are failing to mask their usage.
Personally, I am kind of tired of the pirated software stuff. The software companies are going to harder and harder methods of protection, and it can and does catch paying customers in their path.
I own a copy of Atari's "Dungeons & Dragnons: The Temple of Elemental Evil". I had played it when it first came out, and not really played it again. I had used Daemon Tools to hold an image of the original CD 1, so I didn't have to swap so much. (I'm an admitted game junkie, and I'm tired of swappings CDs when I want to play Half-Life 2, as opposed to Sacred, as opposed to NWN, etc.) A HD crash more than a year later wiped the CD image out. When I went to re-install, there was a new patch to put in, so I installed it when I loaded the game again. The problem is, they added new protection in the latest patch, and said protection told me that my original game CD was not valid. Calls to Atari were a joke. They refused to fix it because when they asked for a diagnostic to be run, it identified that Daemon Tools was found in the registry. Even uninstalling it, they refused to help. I offered to mail them the original game box first, and they could return me a new box with new CDs. No dice.
Many game companies are offering free demos of products available to download from places like fileplanet. So, there is no need to pull a full cd image from some place that is going to require a patch that will re-enforce the pirate's efforts, anyways. But, people that buy the games can suffer, and find their software is ruined years later by a patch the are supposed to need.
Personally, I think half of the patches for Blizzard's Diablo II: Lord of Destruction that have been done over the years is to reinforce copy protection.
if they will notice that despite all these piracy busts they do, their profits still remain the same.
This ESA is probably Entertainment Software Association.
Strange that the articles doesn't say, as most of us probably think of ESA as European Space Agency
Some company(anything like the BSA?) is praising cops busting people.
This reminds me of(in Clerks) when Randall kicked out some customer out of the video store and Jay goes "YEAH!@#". Ie he contributed absolutely nothing. Rhetorical!