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Activision Goes After Individual Game Pirates
brunascle writes "Activision has begun suing individual pirates of console games. Edge Online is reporting that they are going after a New York resident for allegedly copying Call of Duty 3 for the Xbox 360 and other games, seeking $30,000 to $150,000 in damages for each infringement. GamePolitics has also uncovered six other lawsuits with settlements between $1,000 and $100,000, in five of which the defendant was unrepresented."
Activision's lawyers specifically told GamePolitics that the lawsuit wasn't targeting file-sharers, so they probably mean that the alleged pirate was reproducing and distributing physical copies of the game. The court complaint is available here (PDF).
Going after filesharers INSTEAD of pirates is completely nuts, looks like Activision has the right idea. /.ers are software pirates (correctly used here, look up the word if you feel like complaining).
I really don't see how this is "your rights online" unless you assume all
> Doesn't Activision have the right to recover their development costs and profit from the risk they took to produce the game?
NO. They have a right to TRY. They do not however, have any right to deny people their fair use rights, nor any other right they have.
On the other hand, this doesn't seem the case here (assuming the information from Activision is correct).
Undoubtedly.
Nobody is contesting their legal rights in this case- at least, not me.
I am, however, contesting how *wise* this decision is. Game companies produce a lot of crap. The signal to noise ratio is extremely low, especially when considering just how many games are produced for the PC every year. So how do we know what's good?
Well, we could seek reviews- but many reviewers are paid for their submissions, have an agenda, or simply have different tastes. Or we hear about it from friends. Or... we pirate them and see for ourselves. If the game is crap- nothing wasted. If the game is good, we're going to want its expansion pack/online play/multiplayer/box art/full colour manual/bragging rights/etc.
In almost all cases, such "piracy" doesn't constitute a lost sale. Either the "pirate" couldn't afford it anyway, or wouldn't buy it if she couldn't "pirate" it. Think students, working mums, etc. Not all of them are- but most.
But these pirates give you something money can't buy- legitimate word of mouth advertising. You can't buy it, it's the BEST form of advertising short of beaming ads into people's dreams and it's generally free. And it's one of the three ways people decide if a game is good or not- and as stated earlier, it's generally the most telling.
So: you can excuse acts of individual not-for-profit piracy and write it off as free advertising. Or, you could hunt down anyone who pirates even a single game and charge them for a crime with punishments quite often worse than rape.
Are people going to buy more of your games, or fewer?
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If it's not related to file sharing and, presumably, is targeting people who make copies _for sale_, then good - they should be sued. As soon as you make a profit from someone else's copyrighted work, without their permission, you don't have a hint of a leg to stand on. You deserve to be sued and, hopefully, the copyright holder will win. You can make whatever argument you want about it being acceptable but, as soon as you turned a profit from the piracy, every argument you make is false. You're a crook and deserve to be punished. Period.
The reason being is that copyright law was setup to fight off larger scale pirate operations, back when reproducing material was alot harder.
Good-bye
The penalties for copyright violations were actually written for cases like this. The assumption is that someone selling a pirate game/movie/book/CD has sold many of them, and they're doing it to make a personal profit. The only way to stop the crime is to take the profit out of it - if he sold them for $20 each, and the fine was only 500 bucks, he'd only have to sell about 25 to make up for each time he was caught. He probably sold a hell of a lot more than that, if he's like many of the pirated goods dealers I've seen.
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?
Because the fines for copyright infringement aren't based on how many of Album/Game/Book X you copy, but the infringement of the rights of the copyright holder.
Put it another way; if you steal someone's stuff and sell it, the punishment isn't "pay for what you stole and we'll leave it at that". You have to go over and beyond that to deter people, otherwise it'd just be a sale through force.
I write bullshit
Hey, don't complain, with ideas like mine I could easily run for office and at least I haven't done that .... yet.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();