Slashdot Mirror
Game Makers Accusing Innocent People of Piracy In the UK
eldavojohn writes "It's a topic that a lot of game makers like Atari don't want the public hearing: game makers wrongfully accusing clearly innocent people of piracy. From the article, 'According to Michael Coyle, an intellectual property solicitor with law firm Lawdit, more and more people are being wrongly identified as file-sharers. He is pursuing 70 cases of people who claim to be wrongly accused of piracy and has spoken to hundreds of others, he told the BBC.' If only a few are coming forward after receiving extortion letters ('Pay £500 OR ELSE!'), what's the actual number of those out there being wrongfully accused?"
Lawyers figured out this is a way to print money. Why am I not surprised?
Its cheaper to pay them off than hire a lawyer and defend yourself. Many have no other choice.
Send out letters, receive money. Such a deal. Par for the course for for lawyers.
Proudly trying to match or outdo the US in hostility towards own citizens, since 2001.
There seems to be so much shit going on with the Internet these days that I am seriously going to get rid of it when I finish university!!! This, the pornography witch-hunt and the Interception Modernisation Programme - it's all getting ridiculous.
They have been accusing innocent people of copyright infringement for years. Although this was limited to just their customers and potential customers. Of course when sales drop you have to expand your target audience.
He is pursuing 70 cases of people who claim
Of course they have been wrongly accused! Why would anyone see a benefit in copyright infringement? Nobody uses peer to peer file sharing software either. Certainly not them, and certainly not me!
(Seriously, as long as they haven't been tried and the evidence found suggests they have indeed not downloaded any copyrighted content, why is it surprising that a number of people hit by such a lawsuit claim they've never heard of such a thing?)
Shared methodology of most content makers lately:
Old plan: Compete and make a better game. Get people to part with their money on the basis that your content is best. Convince them your game will improve their life.
New plan: Produce garbage no one wants. Restrict it so much it's unusuable. Treat your customers like criminals when they don't buy. Sue people almost indiscriminately (on the flimsiest evidence) to make up for short fall.
What the fuck happened? It feels like I'm in the twilight zone!
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
And this amount of "70 cases" is relevant how, seeing that of course, the world only consisting of honest citizens, everybody rightfully accused of filesharing copyrighted content, would immediately admit to it?
I can either fork over £40 for the latest greatest multiplayer online game extravaganza, and suck at it.
Or just fire up Nexuiz for free and suck at that.
I BUY all my games. I even have games that were only installed for an hour or less and are sitting on my shelf. This DRM crap, these accusations, this treating the customer as a criminal is fucking outrageous. I bought Far Cry 2. I could have downloaded it at least a week before it was even released. And, yet, me--the legal customer doing the right thing--has all these stupid DRM restrictions. I can accept that. If worse comes to worse I will get a pirated version of the SAME GAME, because I paid for the damn thing and I will play it on my computer any damn way I fuc*ing feel like. Why am *I* being punished for giving the game companies money? It's one of the most ridiculous situations in the gaming society. My LEGAL copy of Doom 3 I cannot play online 'cause someone (probably using a keygen) has MY serial number. I am sick of it. I am sick of the game companies hiding behind this masquerade. I am sick of being treated like a 2nd class citizen because I do the right thing.
I'm gonna sue because someone else used my IP address of 127.0.0.1 in their anti-piracy logs.
Take Nobody's Word For It.
IWFALF!
It could have been possible to simply self-certify that you have purchased the DVDs, and self-certify that you have lost your serial code and generate a new one online. That way Blizzard would have saved money on customer admin, which could have been spent on the game.
Instead, they treat people as potential thieves and liars, by forcing you to prove that you have paid for the DVDs. If you lose your serial code, you are SOL, or if they are feel very generous you may get away with proof of purchase.
If there is such a backlash against "game makers who treat their customers as thieves", why has this not hurt Blizzard in the least?
What, precisely, is the downside for ATARI's troll? Yes, they could have to pay [taxed/controlled] defense legal costs. But the defendant would have to put up all the money first, then try to recover the judge's award included in the verdict.
Please tell me again, what is the downside? Judges may well fume. But they can do nothing. The letters are not extortion, but an "offer to settle" that might even be excluded from evidence as such!
The UK legal system mostly works because of self restraint. And poorly when that fails. Sometimes you can find a barrister who doesn't mind egg on his face. Solicters live there.
There's no excuse for the grandparent's ignorance of technology that's been around for 15-20 years.
It seems that Atari has taken a leaf from the book of the RIAA (Righteous Inquisiton Army of America) and decided that it's much easier to make money by suing people rather than, you know, making good games.
I Wank Freely And Laugh Faggotly?
Whether it's Slashdot or Arstechnica, selective outrage from online geeks concerning subjects like this is a given. When companies or trade organizations slip up, the online community is convinced there's hell to pay. But when pirates continually steal products and rob content producers of their hard-earned revenue, there's barely a peep from you guys. If anything, there's outrage that developers, artists, and studios should expect be compensated at all. And to top it all off, some ISPs have the audacity to insist that the access it provides not be used to deliver stolen content. It's no wonder to me that PC gaming is in decline. If I wrote games for a living, the last thing I'd do is provide a product with a low level of return. So, guys, quit your griping. If you steal PC games, this is what you should expect. Long waits for tech support? Blame the pirates. Broadband caps? Pirates. Higher product prices? Pirates, again. DRM? Take a wild guess. Other than pure greed and selfishness, it appears the reasons you guys applaud such behavior is that somehow it's equivalent to taking to The Man. The evils of capitalism with its faceless corporations and well-paid legal teams can't be trusted to do things in the consumer's best interest. I, on the other hand, would argue that it is a significant number of consumers who can't be trusted to respect the rules of the game regarding the consumption of goods and services. Yes, there are companies that break the law, but it's overshadowed by the enormous number of Joe Six-Packs who perceive it as their god-given right to committ theft via Lime Wire. If you think your side occupies the high moral ground, think again. Who is The Man? Are they the companies that voluntarily provide products and services that you can choose to purchase or not? The same companies that provide jobs and attempt to deliver shareholder value over the long term? There's freedom to choose inside this context. There's mutually beneficially outcomes when the rules of the game are observed. That's not The Man. You know who The Man is. He's the one that reads your e-mail and monitors your communications. He's the one robbing you and others blind of your privacy and civil liberties. He tells you what you can and can't do and always manages to extract payment, regardless of the consequences. He started the Iraq War and conjured up a bailout package close to one trillion dollars. No freedom here, folks. No mutually beneficial outcomes that I can see. It takes guts to truly stick it to The Man, but it doesn't take any at all to be a simple, petty thief whining and complaining that his ability to rob and steal is somehow unjustly being intruded upon. Who is worse, after all? A drug dealer, the owner of a brothel, or your typical pirate? In the first two cases, products and services are being provided which should be legal in the first place. The pirate provides nothing in the context of the marketplace.
Ironically, the DRM schemes designed to protect against piracy are more and more likely to make honest customers turn to piracy. The whole thing lends credence to the idea that what the game makers REALLY want out of DRM is to remove first sale rights, not combat piracy.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
There are computers I've built for them loaded up with emulators for all their old consoles, freeware, and flash games.
How do they dump their authentic Game Paks so that they can use them with emulators for old cartridge-based consoles? What brand of, say, NES dumper do you recommend?
But even the (unskippable) cutscenes in Mario Galaxy which I played for the first time this week were so annoying because when I play, I just want to play.
In the case of Super Mario Galaxy, it isn't really a cut scene; it's a loading screen that's rawther tastefully done. Would you rather stare at a black screen? Or would you rather have all the meshes and textures in the game at N64 resolution so that they look like droppings on even a basic HDTV?
I'm quite happy to wait until everyone in the world has played New Cool Game X and sells it off cheap
Is this the case even when the publisher turns off the matchmaking servers required for remote multiplayer? This has happened for EA Sports titles with older rosters, it has happened with Sony's Frequency for PS2, and it has happened for several MMORPGs.
Maybe it's because I'm from an era where "multiplayer" meant people in the same room
That's still true in some circles: see Super Smash Bros. Brawl. But unfortunately, the major publishers of PC games seem to think there aren't enough people who own both a PC and an HDTV or other sufficiently large monitor and are willing to buy USB gamepads, so they make their games require one PC, monitor, keyboard, and mouse per player, or they publish games designed for a gamepad exclusively on one or more consoles.
You know you are getting old when your instinct is to argue with that.
Actually, the older I get, the more strongly I believe in opposing measures like that [the curfew].
Whether or not any one person enjoys or otherwise benefits from something is not the point, and must never be allowed to become the point. The important thing is that everyone should be free, by default, to do absolutely anything they like. Restrictions should only ever be imposed by law on behaviour that is actually harmful in some way, and any restrictions that are imposed should only ever be proportionate to the harm that would be done.
This is probably the important principle of any fair justice system, because without it, governments are free to set arbitrary laws for their own political (or worse) purposes. This leads to blanket laws, such as (to pick some common, controversial examples): speed limits and banning mobile phones while driving, instead of prosecuting dangerous or inconsiderate driving; trying to ban whole electronic communications networks, rather than either going after people who abuse those networks to infringe copyright or mandating restrictions on the networks that are reasonable and consistent with prohibiting just the illegal behaviour; or, as in this case, restricting the freedoms of a whole group of people on account of the unacceptable behaviour of a small minority (which is effectively guilt by association).
In each of those cases, the law probably does do some good, in the sense that it does inhibit harmful behaviour by some people. The problem is the collateral damage: the law also catches people whose behaviour would not have been harmful and punishes them anyway, which is unjust. Of course, it's easier to impose blanket laws, both for enforcement (increasingly mechanically; whatever happened to "man shall not be judged by machine"?) and for scoring political points ("Speed kills! Look, we imposed a new low limit to make the road safer outside your home, so now your kids don't have to stop, look and listen before they cross").
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Yodeling Rectal Ocelot?
Honestly. Nowhere can I find what the hell YRO stands for.
Some of them are senior citizens who don't know what a game is
"Back in my day, we didn't have these fancy "games".. we played with dirt! and we liked it!"
We do realize that this story is about the UK right? and that the last two letters in riaa and mpaa stand for Association [of] America, Right?
"Your Rights Online"
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
"Pirate Bay makes no secret of the fact that it inserts the random IP addresses of users, some of who may not even know what file sharing is, to the list of people downloading files, leading investigators up a virtual garden path. "
As I pointed out in another forum this is as far as intent akin to the "human shield" tactic. Just because people don't get killed doesn't make it right.
Now on to the main story. I'll point out that it's a courts job to determine guilt or innocence. Not the court of public opinion which this story without supporting information is.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
The BBC article makes the claim that IP addresses are unique to a particular computer. That hasn't been true in general for a decade or more! Many savvy users have routers (wireless or otherwise) which allow multiple machines on a private network to share a single public IP using NAT. And most ISPs recycle IP addresses, even for broadband users -- I can guarantee you my public IP address changes every few months, sometimes more frequently.
I bet Atari knows that Race07 isn't as successful as they want, so they turn to negative advertisement to spread the word. I think most of us at slashdot knows that the more a game is pirated, the more popular it is.
"What the fuck happened? It feels like I'm in the twilight zone!"
This old meme again. "If they'd only do what I want then piracy wouldn't exist". Sorry but the fact that people are downloading and downloading lots shows that indeed the content has merit and is worth going out onto a legal limb to get. Impress me with your argument by showing me a public that not only doesn't buy but doesn't consume and I'll retract my statement.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"