Introversion's Approach to Piracy

[Asuka]

http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/43678

Good read.

 

[AmishSlayer]

It's kind of like what the music industry does with programs like Kazaa and whatnot. They flood it with their songs that have like the first 10 seconds normal then it goes nuts and makes crazy loud noises the rest of the track.

 

[Gray Fox]

I do not see it working that great for bittorrent sitrs, because most of them have comments section plus whole sites dedicated to reviewing torrents. But it will work for emule/kazaa/limewire.

 

[Core407]

I do not see it working that great for bittorrent sitrs, because most of them have comments section plus whole sites dedicated to reviewing torrents. But it will work for emule/kazaa/limewire.

Yes, something like that would be deleted on any good torrent site and chances are only a handful of people would download it.

 

[Asuka]

They said it worked best on torrents rather then kazaa and emule...

 

[EEngi]

the participants can comment on the torrents too to confuse people up

 

[Ennui]

torrents are more likely to spread fast because they require people to host while downloading so a lot of people can get it at once before one person can reveal what it is

 

[Space Farm]

Arundel also comments on more intrusive copy protection systems, noting that many of them detract from the experiences of legitimate gamers. "We can't win the war on piracy, but if you work smart, you can definitely reduce it," he said. "The golden rule I think is to keep things simple - especially for the legitimate user."

I hope that a lot of companies read this. It's the same as DRM protected content. All it does is end up hurting the legitimate owners of the game/mp3/product.

Every single time a new copy-protection system comes out it's usually cracked within a couple of days and spread on filesharing networks, so what's the point?

 

[destrukt]

I hope that a lot of companies read this. It's the same as DRM protected content. All it does is end up hurting the legitimate owners of the game/mp3/product.

Every single time a new copy-protection system comes out it's usually cracked within a couple of days and spread on filesharing networks, so what's the point?

You have 2 good points though your second one is a little iffy.

While a lot of DRM is cracked [quickly], it's not always used, let a lot even known about by the 'average' people who buy files which have DRM. It's just mostly us geeks/whatever and our [lucky ? lol] friends who we tell.

Of course, a lot of piracy-related things are adopted by mainstream, so who knows.

 

[Space Farm]

Well what I mean is this, for example (a similar example was used in the article that was posted).

A gamer goes down to the store and buys a game. He comes home, installs the game only to find he has to insert the CD every single time he plays the game. Now our gamer plays more than one game so he is continuously swapping over CD's everytime he switches games, a somewhat slightly annoying process. Also, as the article mentions, you can't listen to a CD when you play games (MP3's always work though!)

But what I'm getting at is that it's a hassle to play these games. It's all designed to stop pirates but it ends up annoying legitimate users.

Whereas on the the other hand we have another gamer who goes to Torrentspy, searches for his game. After a day of downloading he extracts it to a folder and off he goes playing. No CD's involved, no copywrite protection systems that do hidden installations on your computer (What was that junk released a few years ago, some Starforce variant? The one that forced users to uninstall programs like CloneCD?). So it's far easier to use cracked games.

While that's just a little example, you get what I mean right?

It will probably get worse than swapping over CD's. Remember earlier this year with Sony's rootkit? I bet there will be a lot more painful countermeasures against pirates that these companies will start to consider using.

Kind of related, I just found this in one of my RSS feeds:
http://www.engadget.com/2006/08/25/fairuse4wm-strips-windows-media-drm/

Another crack...

 

[Dog--]

There are legitimate cracking sites ( http://www.gameburnworld.com/pcgamefixes.shtml - it tells you that you must own the original game, so it is legit.) that I use for the games that I bought, it's a hassle to change the CD's, so I just crack it..

Also, I think it's really stupid that you have to change CD's, first of all there is a crack for EVERY game out there, and there will be for future games, so whats the point of making it require a damn CD to play? Geeks WILL crack EVERY game that comes out..

Second, it wears out the CD, scratching it and all that, and then you've got to buy another game if you like to play it alot? That's your punishment for liking the dev's game?

 

[Space Farm]

Exactly. And I can only imagine it'll get worse.

 

[CyberPitz]

Ahh GCW..great place. I use it for my games all the time. Great site.

 

[destrukt]

Cracks to stop needing a cd-key are pretty freaking easy (Seriously, any of you could do it).

I think I'm yet to be annoyed by copy protection, well, a tiny bit with Starforce and X3.

GCW + Megagames are good.

And yup, WM DRM was cracked as was iTunes [again] in the past week.

 

[Dog--]

You don't need a crack to disable CD-keys, you can get like 50 CD keys for a game with google...

 

[StardogChampion]

They seem to think this is the first time someone's tried this. Movie companies try this all the time. It won't work. All it'll take is a comment from someone on a BitTorrent site that it's the fake version, then it'll get removed.

A real version from a trusted source will get out there in a flash.