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Copy Protection Firms Encourage Piracy?
Ars Technica has a reflection on the revelation that StarForce had linked to pirated versions of Galactic Civilizations II. From the piece: "It's not hard to see why the publishers use the stuff; after all, no one wants to spend a couple of years on a project only to see their efforts rewarded by flat sales and a robust pirate market. Still, in the quest for better protection, these copy protection schemes have grown in both sophistication and invasiveness. Some schemes now install their own hidden device drivers that monitor your computer's optical drive access, trying to prevent copying and other unapproved uses. (If this sounds familiar, it should. Game copy protection, after all, is just another form of DRM.)"
They sell a product that solves (or at least claims to solve) a "problem".
They have an interest in making that problem as large and as wide-spread as possible.
While this tactic might be unethical, they are certainly behaving legally- it's allowed for me to tell people where they can download software. Now all the makers of Galactic Civilizations need to do is link to where people can illegally download Starforce-protected games with the protection removed. Turnabout is, after all, fair play.
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
That'd be like letting a consortium of automobile and oil companies buy all the public transit companies so they can dismantle them.
Next thing you'll be telling me that the President is Schicklegruber.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
But I'm buying Gal Civ 2.
Try a pirated GalCiv 1 and you'll see these guys make great games.
It's addictive like civilization...
They are going to be sucessful and it scares the crap out of Starforce and the other DRMERs.
GalCiv2 does have DRM of a type; you have to install StarDock in order to unpack the game data files. Think of it as almost like Steam.
You also need an official CD key in order to download patches and other additional content.
GC2 allows (and encourages) you to install a copy of the game on as many computers as possible. I even got instructions in the official IRC channel (irc.stardock.com #galciv) to make it easier to move the files between PCs.
The only other commerical game I can think of that has no real DRM is Falcon: Allied Force. The only time you need the CD is when you install a patch. There is no CD key and the game is huge online. If you ever wanted to learn more than the common person wants to know about the F-16 Fighting Falcon, grab Allied Force and a joystick.
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
I'm not sure that copy protection encourages pirating but I won't install a bought game on my machine without a no-CD crack, etc. as well. The original games are safest when in the jewel case packed in the box on a shelf.
Trolling is a art,
The article speaks about the invasiveness and general irritation that DRM causes and I think when they state that DRM may be contributing to the problem of piracy, it's the same thing where legit Windows buyers have to jump through the Product Activation hoops and rigamarole. I know of at least one person who legitimately bought WinXP but installed a pirated version to avoid the hassles. Legitimate, law-abiding users pay the price.
I'm all for the Valve's Steam method of distribution. It's the wave of the future...
"They sell a product that solves (or at least claims to solve) a "problem"."
OSS
"They have an interest in making that problem as large and as wide-spread as possible."
Proprietary Software.
Fact: Anti-Piracy software developers are doing the same thing that regular software developers are trying to do: sell software.
Fact: Anti-Piracy software does not stop piracy.
Fact: Anti-Piracy softare adversely affects legitimate players.
Fact: Not everyone who pirates a game is a guaranteed sale/loss of a sale.
Fact: Pirated software is another model of distribution which helps create product recognition with your audience.
Partial Fact and Opinion: Many people, myself included, use access to pirated software as a tool for determining what games are worth our monetary support. I can not count the number of times that piracy has either
a) saved me from buying a horrible piece of software that marketting led people to believe otherwise, and
b) caused me to buy a game (many, many times) that I would have otherwise never looked at or had a chance to try in another form.
I wish everyone had this state of mind. Obviously that's not the case, but I also feel that the latter group of individuals also encompass the demographic that would not grant your title a sale even if they did not download the title. That is, they are usually either downloading it for the sake of downloading it, or have no access to the funds to purchase games regularly.
There are as many beneficial reasons to piracy as there are negative aspects. The lies given by anti-piracy software developers are underhanded scare tactics, and not worth a publishers time. I hope the majority of educated individuals agrees when they weigh the facts in.
I work on a computer all day. I rip all the music I buy so that I don't have to carry around loads of CDs or bother swapping them around all the time. Digital media is more valuable to me than physical media, but I will only buy CDs because a) I want some kind of physical master copy in case my hard drive dies or anything like that and b) I want lossless compression.
So what does the copy protection do? Lock the thing I value most away from me. If I'm lucky, I get crappy MP3s on a data layer. No thanks. You know what I do if I find out an album I want is copy protected? I download it.
The simple fact of the matter is that, where copy protection is used, anonymous pirates provide a better service than the music labels. And the sad thing is that this isn't due to the record companies falling short in some way, it's because they actively choose to harm their own product.
The reason they can get away with this is because there is no competition when it comes to media. I'm not talking about the RIAA cartel, I'm talking about the basic nature of copyright. If somebody owns the rights to a particular song I like, then no competition exists for that song. I either buy it on the terms the copyright holder chooses, I don't buy it at all, or I obtain it from a black market.
For a free(r) market to exist, with competition acting the way it should, artists should be legally prohibited from signing exclusive contracts. Reduce the record labels to investors and publishers instead of the people with all the power, because right now, the situation is upside-down.
Two words: Notebook, CD-Check.
There's a strong trend towards notebooks as the everyday computer of most people, replacing desktop machines. Once you have a notebook, you use the mobility. Whether you go into the living room for a comfortable surf or take it with you on the train.
And all these stupid CD-Checks force you to carry a bundle of CDs with you all the time? How stupid is that? Not to mention that they're all fooled, cracked, broken in less time than it takes them to write new versions.
Like I said before: If game developers would save the money for copy restriction stuff and instead pour it into writing better games, they'd probably sell more.
Those who pirate always have, always will. Mostly it's the kids who couldn't afford more than one game every other month anyways if they had to buy them. Most of the pirated copies would not have been sales with harsher laws, better copy restriction or whatever else to prevent copying. They would simply be less people playing the game, not more people paying for it.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Penny Arcade news post on StarForce thugs
The comic will briefly be available here,
And later it will appear in its permanent location: Penny Arcade comic on StarForce thugs
(I wonder if they'll ever sort out their flakey software.)
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
Honestly, the best way to stop piracy of all kinds (for all mediums) is to adopt a new marketing model. Consider digital distribution as a model ...
... at $1 per song people are still willing to hunt the music down and steal it ... at $0.25 why would you bother?
For the average game it will probably cost less that $1 (definately less than $5) per copy sold to deliver the game to the customer via download through the internet; at the same time you no longer need an expensive distribution network nor do you have to cut a retailer in on the sale. This means that the only people who have to make money on the sale of the product are the developer and publisher (and in the case of a console the licence provider); Publishers tend to take in the money at $5-$15 per title and then give the developer their cut (licence providers [like Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft] tend to get $5-$10 per title). This means that you could sell the average game for between $10-$25 and still make the same ammount of money. If you could buy the average new release for $15 why would you bother to steal it?
If you look at music
You shunta wan' anythin' to happen to it. We can mak' sure it don't, for just a small fee. Oh, what's in the violin case? (wink) Just a violin. Call me Guido, cuz I'm sure we're gonna be buddies.
Antivirus software companies write viruses...
Microsoft codes venerabilities into Windows, then patches in the next major version of Windows, coding different venerabilities into it...
Congressmen ignore their constituents once they get elected...
More at 11.
I installed Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory (contains SF), and my computer exploded, blinding me, and then the president of SF came and kicked me in the shin.
People should really look at what all this SF fuss is about: read what they ACTUALLY did and judge for yourself whether it's worthy of all this media attention. Hint: It's not.
(Basically, some guy proved a point that it's easy to find pirated copies of a game that wasn't copy-protected. So what. A 13 year old with three minutes on a 56k can do that... it's not like they hosted and distributed it)
I use Alcohol 120% to make images of all games that I buy. Not only does this help keep the original cd in good condition, but the game loads faster and I don't have to spend time looking for the cd I just misplaced. I was looking forward to Doom3 for some time. I had followed its development and read each new scoop on the game as soon as it became available. When the game released I purchased it the second day of its availability. I felt good. I was getting a new game and doing the right thing when I new many others would be pirating it. I get home and find out that it refuses to run until I disable Alcohol. I had been so looking forward to the game I hadn't even made a copy yet. Alcohol just had an linux bootable cd I was building open. Definately legit. I then began the full realization that I would have to shut Alcohol down every time I wanted to take a break and play. This pissed me off so much that I wound up locating the pirated version just like so many others. It worked easier. By giving over my money for the legal copy, I was the one being penalized. What kind of crap is that? To this day, I still refuse to have anything to do with that company. You penalized me for being a good consumer. Bite Me! You will not see a single dollar from me again. On the other hand, just hearing about the complete lack of pain, brow beating, strip searching, and unwarranted monitoring in the protection scheme for the new Galactic Civilizations caused me to go check out the details on that game. Guess what? You got it. That's where my money is going. So in a nutshell, the copy protection in Doom3 caused me to encourage pirates by downloading their warez for the game as well as sending my money to a different company. So ID has it worth it? I'll bet Stardock thinks so.
Um ok. A guy, who is part of a company who works to stop pirating, provides an easy access to a pirating source for a game isn't worth this media attention? Ahem, think again.
.Net? Microsoft believes Linux is inferior? Person buys books only to read them? Sorry to disappoint, but highly public hypocrisy will always be worthy of that attention. People who walk the line they preach rarely will.
> Basically, some guy proved a point that it's easy to find pirated copies of a game that wasn't copy-protected,
Wrong, here showed how easy it is to find pirated copies of games. Whether or not it originally had protection is irrelevant. 0 day warez of protected titles attest to this.
> So what. A 13 year old with three minutes on a 56k can do that...
This wasn't a 13 year old. It was someone who (supposedly) actively supports prevention of piracy. Then he helped it by posting a link to a pirating source. Tell me, if a firefighter turned out to be an arsonist, would you also say ho hum? What would be worth media attention to you? Sun doesn't support
So I played a lot of games, wich I bought. Still got a huge stack of CD's. The floppys were thrown out a few years ago as I figured if I ever wanted to replay one of them I would just download them.
Recently I haven't bought a lot of games. Why? Well I was starting to feel screwed. Hard. In the ass. By a big black guy.
While I am from amsterdam I still did not enjoy that feeling.
What was giving me that feeling? An increasing number of games that were to short, to buggy, to kiddy and just not worth the high price charged.
Lucasarts is for me the perfect example. Their early games were all near perfect. I had little doubt about buying x-wing and its expansions and sequels. Their adventures? Who needs a review when it got the lucasarts label?
Then came games like that horrible Monkey island with the moronic 3d interface that was a bitch to control. Yuck. Fun but ruined by some kind of need to use 3d in the marketing bullshit.
Worse was still to come. Forgot the title that was the galactic bit version of the current Empire at war release. Or howabout that RTS eh? The first one that was not based on the age of empire engine?
Crap games, that were buggy and just not fun to play and certainly not worth full price.
Even the x-wing series went downhill as it became less and less dogfighting and more and more missle dodging.
I feel less and less inclined to buy the new releases as I know that what awaits me is a poorlyb designed game riddled with bugs.
FEAR was great but is a 8 hour game really worth full price? Not in my book.
But there was anoter problem as well. That is copy protection. Why is it that the PAYING public has to mess around with game-cd's, impossible to read keys, non-working drives etc etc when the pirate can just download a far better game that just runs, with the update and isn't slown down by constant CD accessing?
An old sequel to elite, frontier something, took the absolute price in stupid copy protection. It stopped every 20 minutes or so to ask you to look up a word in the manual. Gee thanks, for that lovely experience. It was still BBS for me in those days but finally a friend gave me a cracked version of the game that skipped that stupid check. My first pirated game. Going from constant interruption to trouble free gaming by NOT paying 79,- guilders.
Current game protections would be like having a DVD that forces you to watch a 10 second segment warning you not to pirate the movie that ofcourse no ripper includes so only the persons who do not pirate see it. You would have to be completly insane to do that to your paying customers.
I still got money to spend, just that if I go to a game store today I just don't see that many games worthy of my money. The few that I still buy seem to insist on rewarding me for buying them by giving me a harder time then the people who pirate it.
Oh, and none of the copy protections work anyway. Empire at war has starforce and all you had to do for hassle free, free play was to wait till a proper group got around to crack it.
The game is indeed a current lucasarts game. CRAP. Worth about 3 euro in the store. Not 49.95
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Steam is a bad comparison. Steam is invasive, and if you buy a game that uses Steam, you do need Steam to play the game.
If you buy Galciv2 on CD, however, you don't need Stardock Central to install it. And while you need the CD key to get patches, updates and extra stuff, you can get them manually if you really hate SDC. Stardock Central just makes it much easier to get patches and other updates. That's really all it does.
Haven't heard of National City Lines, have ya? This is exactly waht they did in 1936. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_City_Lines
The end result was the destructon of 100 public transportation systems and replacement with their own product -- their buses that use their fuel and their tires... Cost the local governements has been estiamted at billions.
"Between 1936 and 1950, National City Lines, a holding company sponsored and funded by GM, Firestone, and Standard Oil of California, bought out more than 100 electric surface-traction systems in 45 cities (including New York, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Salt Lake City, Tulsa, and Los Angeles) to be dismantled and replaced with GM buses... In 1949 GM and its partners were convicted in U.S.district court in Chicago of criminal conspiracy in this matter and fined $5,000." -- http://www.bilderberg.org/nclchoms.htm
Instead of "Copy Protection Firms Encourage Piracy" it might be more accurate to title it "Russian Software firm re-invents 2nd-oldest profession, extortion ala 'protection racket'."
Gee, mister, it sure would be a SHAME if your store BURNT DOWN. Perhaps if you were to share your profits with us, we would MAKE SURE something like that WOULDN'T HAPPEN. If you choose not to participate in our generosity, who KNOWS what MIGHT happen?
Sounds like someone could use an axe-handle across the knees.
-Styopa
People should really look at what all this SF fuss is about: read what they ACTUALLY did and judge for yourself whether it's worthy of all this media attention. Hint: It's not.
He posted a link to illegal copies of a game that didn't use their protection, suggesting that this proved that lack of protection meant more piracy. Then someone else pointed out that he could just as easily post a link to pirated copies of games that do use StarForce. Then another employee of StarForce pointed out that doing so would be illegal and would get him banned from the forum.
Can you say "double standard"? Or, for that matter, "protection racket"?
Another reason switch to open-source games. Unfortunately there aren't any good yet.So hacks,warez and NOCd loaders will stay for awhile.
The best advertising for a game that I've ever experienced has been a stable prerelease pirated version. If the pirates can put out a solid release, then that bodes well for the final product and encourages me to go out and buy the real thing -- which I have done about 20 times over the last two years. Of course, if the copy protection is nasty enough that the pirates can't break it within a couple days, it's nothing I want on my computer anyway. I use virtual drives legitimately for mastering, and video games have no business messing with my setup. /rant
Anyway, yeah, since copy protection folks are in the business of doing nasty things (supposedly to pirates, not customers), building up a healthy "threat" of piracy probably would be within their companies' ethos.
This most certainly is worth the attention that it is getting, but I have a feeling you are just one of the many StarForce stooges prowling various forums and doing damage control. As stated by the others it is their hypocrisy that is causing all this attention. They violated their own forum rules about posting links to illegal content and then left the link up until well after the intial news post on Stardock's site about them doing so. Anyone else making posts like that or posts too critical of their product sees their post promptly edited or outright deleted by the moderators and this was one of their own admins who posted the link in the first place. They left their own link up for a week though until the influx of users from Stardock's forums, Slashdot and Digg brought them a lot of bad publicity. I went to their forums after the story posted here on the 11th and the link was still there and working.
There was also another admin in a different thread requesting scans of a PC Gamer magazine article that mentioned their product because the editor had problems with their protection and wrote a piece on it. This is a company selling products to protect copyright, yet they have no qualms against violating copyright themselves. One of their admins, sage386, also advertises his ties to the cracking group UCF. You can google him and find his name listed in nfo files. This should show you the type of company we are dealing with here and why it is important to get this news out and let the publishers know we do not want to support them if they use StarForce on their products. Since the linking to the torrent they have already lost the support of one publisher, with hopefully more to come. Aspyr Media will not include StarForce in the North American release of Spellforce 2, even though the demo currently uses it.
I am NOT a StarForce employee or supporter in any way - I'm a strong privacy advocate, and when I first read about all this StarForce fuss I immediately went and checked for it on my system. So don't make me out to be some stooge - I'm not. But at the same time, it's ridiculous to have such a hoopla over one employee posting something in a company forum. Yes, not removing it was a poor decision. But at the same time, his actions weren't so outlandish to support being posted on every news agency on the net.
To reiterate: I do not like StarForce. I do not like the company, I don't like the practice, I don't like their market sector to begin with. But what one employee posted to prove a point was not worthy of any of this. Look at the screenshot:
http://www.galciv2.com/temp/starfo2.jpg
Is that the world's most threatening thing ever? No! It's a valid point: he's showing that despite someone's (obviously flamebait) post that a game could get along fine without the company's protection, it was right then being downloaded thousands of times. He was proving his point, not encouraging people to download. Look at the screenshot and tell me that's not something you could see yourself posting in his place. It's not that epic.
If you happen to check out that screenshot more closely, you'd realize that JM is posting as an administrator of the starforce forums, and I think he should be held to a higher standard than "if you were him, would you have posted ___".
To be honest, if I was him, I wouldn't have posted a link to a pirated torrent download of _anything_ on an official copy protection software forum (or anywhere else).