Category: Pirating

EA Doesn’t Think Pirated Copies Of Spore Mean Lost Sales

EA may have the whole DRM thing wrong but they seem to be on the right track when it comes to they’re opinions on piracy.

An EA rep:

“Stepping aside from the whole issue of DRM, people need to recognize that every BitTorrent download doesn’t represent a successful copy of a game, let alone a lost sale…. We’ve talked to people that made several unsuccessful attempts to download the game and ended up with incomplete, slow, buggy, or unusable code. In one case, a file identified as Spore contained a virus.”

Well, they’re half right. On one side they are correct not all and maybe not even most of the people who download Spore from Bittorrent represent a lost sale, but they are clearly wrong by making it seem like a lot of the people who download it end up with the game not working.

It’s not difficult to download Spore from a BitTorrent network and have it working in just a few hours and anyone who downloads it and ends up with a virus should really spend a couple of minutes looking around before they download the first torrent they see (which by the way, if you search for “spore” on The Pirate Bay, the first result is in fact a working copy of the game).

CrunchGear

Spore Already Cracked And Available on BitTorrent

Shortly after news that some stores in Australia broke the street date for Spore we hear that Spore has already been cracked and is now being traded on BiTtorrent networks (*cough* The Pirate Bay *cough*).

The cracking group called RELOADED didn’t seem to take that long to crack the SecuROM anti-pirating software used by Spore. There are now thousands of people downloading it and it’s 3 days before it is even supposed to be for sale in North America.

GameViper

MPAA Pirates a Film

Sorry about the language in this one, I try to keep things clean but this is just such a great video I couldn’t help myself.

Zune DRM has been Cracked

The digital rights management that is used by all of the music in the Zune market place has been cracked. A new version of the cracking software FairUse4WM is floating around that claims to be able to remove the DRM from the music files.

“This post introduces a new tool for uncovering the individual keys from Microsoft’s DRM blackbox components (“IBX”), up to version 11.0.6000.6324. Lacking the source code to the extant programs, I can only offer this output of my own efforts.

To actualize fair use rights with the new IBX, first run ‘mirakagi’ which will enter the IBX keys into the FairUse4WM blackbox-keys.txt text file.
Next, you should use the attached version of FairUse4WM, 1.3Fix-2. This includes an important fix for a video corruption bug, often seen in scenes affording high compression.

If problems occur, please provide the program text. IBX versions after 11.0.6000.6324 are not currently supported.

This version should be capable of interfacing with both Windows Vista and Zune software versions.”

The hackers versus the DRM makers will go on forever as a cat and mouse game until one of the two groups gives up and all I’m going to say is I highly doubt that the hackers are going to be that group.

Doom9 Forum

244 Copies of Windows Vista Sold in China

According to newlaunches.com only 244 genuine copies of Windows Vista have been sold in China. The software piracy in China is so rampant that almost all of the copies of Vista that have been sold are pirated. In some places you can find Windows Vista on the streets for as low as $1.

I don’t really have much to say other than that I don’t understand why no one has just switched to Linux instead of Windows. It seems like Linux would be perfect for countries with high piracy rates because for one thing they can stop doing something illegal and for another they can still have a good stable operating system.

I guess the only thing really stopping them would be the PC game support is not on the Linux side but on the Windows side.

Newlaunches

DMCA Takedown Notice for BackupHDDVD

The software that is used to help decrypt and backup HD-DVD’s has been taken down from SourceForge after a DMCA take down notice was recieved. The reason that the software was had to be taken down is because the software did contain decryption keys, SourceForge said that they would be willing to host a version of the program that didn’t contain the keys.

SlySofts AnyDVD HD is still available from slysoft.com although it does cost money.

More on the Format Wars

RIAA’s top 25 Pirating Colleges

It seems the RIAA doesn’t want to do anything but make people angrier and angrier. Now they have posted a list of the top 25 Colleges that pirate, well at least those that pirate and get caught doing it. This is just one more thing to make you think, hmm, why aren’t they making it easy enough for people to listen to the music they want to cheaply, then people wouldn’t pirate because if it is easier to pirate then it is to legally buy music and do with it whatever you want (similar to a CD with less cost) then people will do it. And don’t even get me started because then I will go off on a tangent on how much they say the music that is pirated is worth. Why can’t they just make the people pay $15 for every month that they have pirated or listened to pirated music and then make them buy a Zune. Wouldn’t that make everything better?

[List Via Engadget]

Copyright notices sent out in the 2006-07 academic year.

  1. Ohio University – 1,287
  2. Purdue University – 1,068
  3. University of Nebraska at Lincoln – 1,002
  4. University of Tennessee at Knoxville – 959
  5. University of South Carolina – 914
  6. University of Massachusetts at Amherst – 897
  7. Michigan State University – 753
  8. Howard University – 572
  9. North Carolina State University – 550
  10. University of Wisconsin at Madison – 513
  11. University of South Florida – 490
  12. Syracuse University – 488
  13. Northern Illinois University – 487
  14. University of Wisconsin at Eau Claire – 473
  15. Boston University – 470
  16. Northern Michigan University – 457
  17. Kent State University – 424
  18. University of Michigan at Ann Arbor – 400
  19. University of Texas at Austin – 371
  20. North Dakota State University – 360
  21. Indiana University – 353
  22. Western Kentucky University – 353
  23. Seton Hall University – 338
  24. Arizona State University – 336
  25. Marshall University – 331