Slashdot Mirror
Ubisoft Steals 'No-CD Crack' To Fix Rainbow 6: Vegas 2
Ariastis writes "UbiSoft has long been against No-CD patches. Referring to them on their forums would get you warned or banned. But now, they have just officially released a patch for Rainbow 6: Vegas 2, which, when opened in a hex editor, can easily be identified as coming from the RELOADED scene group, not from UbiSoft programmers. A picture of hex analysis is shown in the story. See? Piracy isn't that bad! It saves you from having to code fixes for your own games! (Watch the drama on the Ubi Forums before it gets scrubbed clean.)"
Someone was either being very lazy or thought it was funny. I'm glad they didn't censor the forums to hell and back ala Apple...
Last post from the now locked thread:
There is copyright. All copyrightable works are automatically protected by copyright, no matter if you display a copyright symbol or not. Registering your copyright can make it easier to prove your ownership, but is not compulsory for protection.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
Well, Ubisoft is French, so it's not exactly a case of someone saying "whatever is retarded is French" so much as "it's French and therefore retarded". You may still disagree with *that* statement, but it's still a vastly different one than what you said.
Remember, open source is free as in speech, not free as in bear.
OK. But don't people accidentally post images/whatnot on public forums occasionally, only to find out they have no rights to it.
Yes. They've unintentionally violated copyright.
When an author uploads a torrent, is that file considered to have entered the public domain?
No, not anymore than if an author gives a free copy of a book away, that book enters the public domain. Authors (assuming they haven't sold their rights away) are allowed to distribute their own work as much as they want, and in whatever form they want. When someone else does it, they're in violation of copyright (unless they are licensed or copyright has been explicitly waived).
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
CD cracks aren't just for stealing games.
One of the first things I do when I buy a game is download the CD crack so I don't have to keep track of where the install disks are.
I bought the game, it's mine. I can do whatever the fuck I like with it, including disabling annoying shit like DRM.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
One of the reasons that many Americans were reluctant to get involved in World War II was their experience with World War I. After World War I, British propaganda was publicly exposed as a pack of lies, a cynical effort to mold public opinion at home and abroad, and to get America to enter the war. This destroyed the credibility of European news sources with many Americans, who felt that they had been duped by Allied propaganda.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
That aspect of EULA's has never been tested in court. It's quite possible that it would be deemed null and void.
Really? Because I seem to recall having this discussion with someone else on Thursday, and pointing to a number of court cases where it has been decided.
You should also read the informative response to my post (since I was only directly answering a specific point and not attempting to cover the entire issue).
In other words, it HAS been tested in court, but courts are disagreeing on how to interpret the issue.
Reloaded has existed for quite a while and as far as I know they've never put malware in their cracks.
No cracker groups of any consequence has ever put malware in anything as far as I know, it's 99% others using a virus-adding tool and distributing their own trojaned version of their cracks. Still, it's not easy to tell one from the other.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
The key is not to download cracks if you can help it. Instead, download mini images (on gamecopyworld.com as "fixed images"). These are disc images for the games, with copy protection intact, that are only a few megabytes large as they only have the crucial bits. Then, use a program like Daemon-Tools to mount the image, and you're set. This works for online games like Battlefield 2 as well, where cracks usually fail.
And as an aside, I actually had to do this to run Battlefield 2, as the copy protection apparently doesn't agree with my DVD drive (even though other EA games work). I emailed EA support and never received a response.