German Appeals Court Sides With RapidShare Against Atari in Copyright Case

[Logan Westbrook]

German Appeals Court Sides With RapidShare Against Atari in Copyright Case

Rapid share already does more than the law requires to prevent copyright violations, says spokesperson.

A German appeals court has put an end to Atari Europe's efforts to force hosting company RapidShare to take greater responsibility for making sure its users weren't downloading Atari's copyrighted material.

Atari was worried about people downloading Alone in the Dark [http://www.amazon.com/Alone-Dark-Inferno-Playstation-3/dp/B001CSPRJI/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1294436865&sr=8-1 ], and had demanded that RapidShare block any such attempts. The courts in Germany originally sided with Atari, but RapidShare appealed the decision, and the Higher Regional Court of Düsseldorf overturned the ruling.

RapidShare spokesperson Daniel Raimer said that the company was pleased that that court had recognized that Atari's demands were unreasonable. He added that the ruling demonstrated that RapidShare was doing a lot to prevent copyright violations, and was confident that rights holders would eventually come to realize that.

This is not the first time that RapidShare has come under fire for copyright violations by its users, and it's unlikely to be the last. RapidShare isn't taking the assault lying down however, and has hired the lobbying group Dutko [http://www.dutkoworldwide.com/] to argue its case before the US Congress in an effort to try and prevent further suits from rights holders.

Source: Ars Technica [http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/01/ataris-copyright-attack-on-rapidshare-unplugged.ars]




Permalink

 

[Something Amyss]

Pretty much guaranteed any way to share files will come under attack, even if it's already doing strong work to prevent illegal activities. That's the age we live in.

 

[Wolfram23]

File sharing, it's like a donut. We all want it but we really shouldn't have it.

 

[MikailCaboose]

If it exists on the internet, there isn't a damn thing you can do to ensure that it's completely secure.

 

[The Cheezy One]

Don't worry Atari, I wouldn't worry about people downloading Alone in the Dark

 

[Motiv_]

Honestly, Rapidshare and other file sharing sites have no control over what's uploaded on their site, even if they had to manually approve each and every upload, there's nothing to stop the uploader from simply changing the name or burying the pirated material in dozens of folders filled with pictures of kittens.

Go after the uploaders, not the site.

 

[JoshGod]

Alone in the dark. Wasn't that game really bad? Who would download it?

 

[vrbtny]

People Illegally downloaded Alone in the Dark?

I feel more sorry for the pirates than anyone else.....

 

[UnravThreads]

I have the collector's edition of Alone in the Dark.

I'm going to go over there and cry.

 

[Thyunda]

and was confident that rights holder would eventually come to realize that.

*Pedantic misspelling notification*

 

[Therumancer]

The ironic thing here is that for all the fighting and the big lawyers they are hiring, the games industry hasn't done the one big thing that could change all this: lower their prices.

Really, for all the defenses about how games "aren't that expensive" or about the increasing development costs, the bottom line is that games cost a decent chunk of change out of the pocket of the person buying it. There is also a lot of risk on the part of the consumer because if they don't like a product, they are more or less stuck with it. Whether it's a digital download, or physical media, you pretty much can't return games on the PC. The cost, and the risk of winding up with garbage, are probably the primary motivation behind piracy.

Now if the games industry in general lowered it's prices to the point of one of the winter sales on STEAM as a standard, people would be a lot less wary. Dropping $5-$10 on a game is a far smaller risk than dropping $50 or $60 on a game under the circumstances. Also to be entirely honest I don't think this is impossible to do while still making a profit, it's just that I think there are some people in the gaming industry that would have to give up their big paydays. That might even mean going so far as a "gaming apocolypse" where current game developers and coders pretty much quit and are replaced by up and coming ones who will work for more reasonable fees.

This has been argued back and forth before between me and others here, so it won't really reach much of a resolution, but the bottom line is that you shouldn't need tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to pay a team of guys for a couple of years work. One of the reasons why I tend to call BS on a lot of the claims made by the industry related to costs is that they oftentimes refer to the cost of hiring voice actors and the like, but I also know that those guys work for a lot less money than they imply from having read a bit about the business back when I followed Anime. Sure hiring "The Rock" or Patrick Stewart to do voices is expensive, but at the same time is that really nessicary?

Think about it some time, office space and computers will probably set you back a couple of million dollars. But when your getting tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in a budget the rest of that is pretty much going towards paying human resources. The loans/production money is largely based on what the developers want to pay themselves for the time the production is going to take. Also, every once in a while you'll notice general headings like "catering by" in a video game. What that incidently means is that the guys fed themselves off the game development budget, rather than say buying their food out of their own pockets/wages. All of that kind of stuff adds up, I generally don't care, until we see the costs passed on to me (the consumer) on a noteworthy level.

Without getting into it further, the bottom line is that I think the gaming industry can lower it's prices, and in doing so would deal with a lot of their problems. Piracy *IS* wrong, but it's also hard to be sympathetic with an industry that expects me to gamble a decent chunk of change every time I buy a product that I can't return.

 

[Ghengis John]

The ironic thing here is that for all the fighting and the big lawyers they are hiring, the games industry hasn't done the one big thing that could change all this: lower their prices.

No price beats free. Strawman destroyed.

 

[ionveau]

Therumancer you have to understand that the % of people that will pay almost anything for a game is higher then people that wait for the price to drop, if you want to make the top dollar you want the game to be sold to the people willing to pay anything.

The people that wait for the game to drop are fewer then the mindless sheep willing to pay through there necks to have the newest game,

Heres an example COD 4 5 6 7 are all the same game with constant weapon changes

but people still buy why? if cod 5 6 7 where never made i wouldn't even care

if a person was able to buy all games made every year that person would just get board and the game studios would need to work harder to make better games.

 

[Therumancer]

The ironic thing here is that for all the fighting and the big lawyers they are hiring, the games industry hasn't done the one big thing that could change all this: lower their prices.

No price beats free. Strawman destroyed.

Well, free is when something costs nothing. This isn't really "free" since it is being stolen any way you look at it. I think that detail means that a lot of people who want to play games who might be stealing them because of the price and return policies (a lot of money to risk) would be inclined to buy a legitimate copy for a lower price.

Also consider the risks involved in piracy, and the effort involved. Right now the risk of being targeted for pirating something (as the end user) is pretty minimal, especially with such suits being impractical for companies to pursue, though it does exist. A pirate also runs the risk that the guy who is providing the software/torrent loaded it with viruses, spyware, or other things. While I'm not sure if any have gone through with it, rumors persist that companies releasing games have been putting "pirate copies" up themselves loaded with "poison" to nail/discourage pirates, and there are companies like CD Projekt that have announced the intention to do exactly that with their stuff.

I think a lot of people will risk $5 or $10, especially for a copy of a game they know will work without any special manipulations, as opposed to the above *IF* games ever fell to that level.


Now so much a "straw man" as a combination of opinion and theory.

 

[Vie]

I take it that the god awful download speeds and long waiting times are part of their anti-piracy measures?

Downloading mods from that place is always a pain in the arse.

 

[Ghengis John]

I think a lot of people will risk $5 or $10, especially for a copy of a game they know will work without any special manipulations, as opposed to the above *IF* games ever fell to that level.

You ever hear the phrase "It's a sin to steal a pin?" That's because people will steal anything, even something that costs next to nothing. As a matter of fact, when you devalue it that just makes it seem all the more acceptable. I might also add:

No price beats free. Reanimated Strawman destroyed. You have gained 50 xp. Collect 200 gold

But instead of being a dick I'm just gonna run some figures by you man. And see what you think when I'm done. The Team behind "Breath of Death" (XBLA indie title), Zeboyd Games is very candid about their financial statistics. They are a team of two men. They sold their first game for 1 dollar a copy. They sold 40,000 copies. Pretty good right? Their final profits were 21,000 dollars. Their game, while not a bad game by any means, looks like this:

You would propose to make a game that looks like this:

With a development team that looks like this:

Project Director Casey Hudson
Lead Designer Preston Watamaniuk
Lead Writer Mac Walters, Drew Karpysjyn
Art Director Derek Watts
Lead Programmer David Falkner
Senior Project Manager Yanick Roy
Cinematic Animator - Lead Parrish Ley
Cinematic Animator Carlos Arancibia, Ed Beek, Carl Boulay, Jonathan Cooper, Tony De Waal, Tim Golem, Suhas Holla, Bartek Kujbida, Thierry Labelle, Greg Lidstone, Joel MacMillan, Marc-Antoine Matton, Hugo Morales
In-Game Animator - Lead Brad Kinley
In-Game Animator James Humphreys, Stefano Marchesini
Technical Animator Cristian Enciso, Ray Lim, Kiaran Ritchie
Add'l Animation David Wilkinson
Character Artist - Lead Jaemus Wurzbach
Character Artist Ben Carriere, Leroy Chen, Ken Finlayson, Kolby Jukes, Francis Lacuna, Rion Swanson
Concept Artist Ben Huen, Mikko Kinnunen, Matt Rhodes, Brian Sum
GUI Artist Nelson Housden
Level Artist - Lead Mike Trottier
Level Artist Don Arceta, Casey Baldwin, Lee Church, Graham Kelly, Andrew Knight, Rohan Knuckey, Mark Linington, Noel Lukasewich, Boyd Mackenzie, Neil McKnight, Young Park, Danny Rodriguez, Chris Ryzebol, Marcel Silva, Neil Valeriano
Technical Artist - Lead Jeff Vanelle
Visual Effects Artist - Lead Trevor Gilday
Visual Effects Artist Terrence Kim
Add'l Art Kelly Chow, Mike Hong
Director of Art & Animation Alistair McNally
Asst. Director of Art & Animation Dean Andersen
Audio Design - Lead Rob Blake
Audio Design Steve Bigras, Real Cardinal, Jason Cushing, Vance Dylan, Terry Fairfield, Joel Green, Jordan Ivey, Michael Kent, Jeremie Voillot
Add'l Audio Implementation Andrew Gray, Nathan Willis
Voice-Over Producer/Director Caroline Livingstone
Asst. External Producer Melanie Fleming, Steve Lam
Localization Project Manager Ryan Warden
External Producer John Campbell
Director of Audio, Localization, & External Resources Shauna Perry
Audio Director Simon Pressey
Localization Producer Jenny McKearney
Cinematic Designer - Lead Armando Troisi
Cinematic Designer Vanessa Alvarado, Edward J. Douglas, John Ebenger, Samuel Irwin, Leo Lucien-Bay, Paul Marino, Nathan Moller, Jonathan Perry, Guilherme Ramos, Zachariah Scott, Robert Stoneman
Gameplay Designer - Lead Christina Norman
Gameplay Designer Noel Borstad, Jason Attard, Corey Gaspur, Eric Fagnan
Level Designer - Lead Dusty Everman
Level Designer Raylene Deck, Alex Elsayad, Dave Feltham, Matthew Fisher, Bastiaan Frank, Keith Heyward, Jos Hendriks, Miles Holmes, Rick Knowles, Patrick Moran, Thomas Perlinski, Matthew Resmini, Jon San Agustin, Kris Schoneberg, Graham Scott, Davod Stenton, Gary Ian Stewart, Bjorn Taylor, Joshua Wilson, John Winski
Writer Malcolm Azania, Chris Hepler, Brian Kindregan, Luke Kristjanson, Chris L'Etoile, Jay Turner, Patrick Weekes
Editor Cookie Everman, Dan Lazin, Karin Weekes
Add'l Design Jason Booth, James McVinnie, Vincent Napoli, Michelle Pettit-Mee, Cathleen Rootsaert, Jay Watamaniuk
Director of Design Matt Robinson
Producer Adrien Cho, Jesse Houston, Nathan Plewes
Project Manager - Lead Corey Andruko
Project Manager - PC Lead Ryan Ward
Project Manager Marwan Audeh, Scylla Costa, Michael Gamle, Dorian Kieken, Robin Mayne
Co-Director of Production Benoit Houle, Duane Webb
Assistant Lead Programmer Don Moar
Programmer Chris Blackburn, Doug Demyen, Mike Devine, Blake Grant, Prashan Gunasingam, Brenon Holmes, Ryan Hoyle, Mark Jaskiewicz, Chris Johnson, Carson Knittig, Matthew Komsthoeft, Rob Krajcarski, Jocelyn Legault, Yuri Leontiev, Dominic Mathieu, Chris Orthner, Shawn Potter, Thomas Roy, Brent Scriver, Zousae Shaker, David Street, Leah Vilhan, John Wetmiller, Darren Woytiuk, Justin Yong, Tom Zaplachinski
Localization Programmer Chris Christou, Andy Desplenter, Christopher Mihalick
Add'l Programming Devin Doucette, Andrew Gardner, Matt Peters, Chris Sharp, Graham Wihlidal, Don Yakielshek
Director of Programming Aaryn Flynn
QA Principal Lead Kim Hansen
QA Design Team - Lead Billy Buskell
QA Design Team Daniel Barrett, Luke Barrett, Chris Buzon, Darren Clark, Mitchell T. Fujino, Darren Gilday, Garret Haynes, Matt Henderson, Scott Horner, Kyle Hubbard, Scott Langevin, Ivan Mulkeen, Barrett Rodych, Chris Schanche, Kim Stolz, Decard Timmermans, Daniel Trottier
QA Story Team - Lead Arone Le Bray
QA Story Team John Epler, Frank Gordon, Carlo Lynch, Tom Trachimowich, Stanley Woo
QA Technical Team - Lead Brian Mills
QA Technical Team James Costanzo, Steven Deleeuw, Jack Lamden, Gabriel Leung, Boldwin Li, Brett Kudwig, William Mah, Nathan Matichuk, Michael Nemish, Edward Pollard
QA Programmer - Lead Alex Lucas, Sam Johnson
QA Programmer Daniel Busse, Chester Szeto, Dave Schaefer, Jay Zhou
QA Focus Test Coordinator Iain Stevens-Guille
Add'l QA Nathan Frederick, Caleb Kan, Costa Zervos
Director of QA Ron Clement
Senior Product Manager Jarrett Lee
PR Matt Atwood, Heather Rabatich
Online Marketing Manager Derek Luke
Online Marketing Isa Amistad, Jeff Marvin, Nadia Phillipchuk, Chris Priestly, Jeff Rousell, Jesse Van Herk, Colin Walmsley, Jay Watamaniuk
Senior Director of Marketing Ric Williams
Director of Business Development Richard Iwaniuk, Robert Kallir
Executive Assistant Teresa Meester
Director of Finance Kevin Gunderman
Finance/Payroll Vanessa Potter
Director of Human Resources Mark Kluchky
Human Resources Celia Arealo, Theresa Baxter, Leanne Korotash, Chris Pangrass
Director of Information Systems, Facilities, and Administration Vince Waldon
Administration Office Manager Keri Clark
Administration Amy Fraser, Leah Hollands, Nils Kuhnert, Jeanne-Marie Owens
Application Support Manager Lee Evanochko
Application Support Julian Karst, Robert McKenna
Desktop Support Manager Chris Zeschuk
Desktop Support Dave McGruther, Jeff Mills, Brett Tollefson
Facilities Manager Mike Patterson
Facilities Kelly Wambold
Infrastructure Manager Craig Miller
Infrastructure Sam Decker, Wayne Mah
Company 1 BioWare
Co-Founder Ray Muzyka, Greg Zeschuk
Cast - Admiral Shala'Raan Vas Tonbay Shohreh Aghdashloo
Cast - Samara Maggie Baird
Cast - Kal'Reegar Adam Baldwin
Cast - Mordin Solus/Add'l Voices Michael Beattie
Cast - Admiral Xen/Add'l Voices Claudia Black
Cast - Grunt/Add'l Voices Steve Blum
Cast - David Anderson Keith David
Cast - Legion/Add'l Voices DC Douglas
Cast - Thane Krios/Add'l Voices Keythe Farley
Cast - Jeff "Joker" Moreau Seth Green
Cast - Commander Shepard Jennifer Hale
Cast - Edi Tricia Helfer
Cast - Captain Bailey Michael Hogan
Cast - Garrus Vakarian Brandon Keener
Cast - Jacob Taylor/Add'l Voices Adam Lazarre-White
Cast - Commander Shepard/Add'l Voices Mark Meer
Cast - Aria T'Loak Carrie-Anne Moss
Cast - Illusive Man Martin Sheen
Cast - Tali'Zirah Vas Neema Liz Sroka
Cast - Miranda Lawson Yvonne Strahovski
Cast - Jack/Add'l Voices Courtenay Taylor
Cast - Admiral Han'Gerrel Simom Templetom
Additional Voices Jocelyn Ahlf, April Banigan, Ashley Barlow, Steve Barr, Shannon Blanchet, Brian Bloom, Jessica Bogart, Wes Borg, Wendy Braun, Kimberly Brooks, Lora Brovold, Natalia Cigliuti, Belinda Cornish, Jim Cummings, Jon Curry, Josh Dean, Casey DeFranco, Grey Delisle, Michael Dorn, Collin Doyle, Alistair Duncan, Chris Edgerly, Jeannie Elias, Gideon Emery, Dannah Feinglass, Dave Fenoy, Keith Ferguson, Quinton Flynn, Peter Giles, Jesse Gervais, Zach Hanks, Ali Hillis, Roger L. Jackson, Martin Jervais, Peter Jessop, Phil LaMarr, Lex Lang, Yuri Lowenthal, Stefan Marks, Vanessa Mitchell, Anndi McAfee, Naomi Mercer, Jeff Page, Cara Pifko, Chris Postle, Francesco Quinn, Bill Ratner, Cindy Robinson, John Rubinow, William Salyers, Raphael Sbarge, Dwight Schultz, Carolyn Seymour, Armin Shimmerman, Jane Singer, Jason Singer, Jan Smith, Keith Szarbajka, George Szilagyi, Fred Tatasciore, Jon Ullyatt, Mick Wingert, Stephanie Wolfe, John Wright, Gwendolyn Yeo, Frederick Zbryski
Company 2 EA
Chief Executive Officer John Riccitiello
Chief Operating Officer John Schappert
Executive Vice-President & Chief Financial Officer Eric Brown
Executive Vice-President, Business & Legal Affairs Joel Linzner
Executive Vice-President, Human Resources Gabrielle Toledano
Senior Vice-President & Chief Accounting Officer Ken Barker
Senior Vice-President, General Counsel, & Corporate Secretary Stephen G. Bene
Company 3 Games Label
President Frank Gibeau
Chief Financial Officer Mike Williams
Chief Operations Officer Bryan Neider
Chief Technical Officer David O'Connor
Senior Vice-President Jeff Karp
Vice-President, Human Resources Mala Singh
Vice-President, Marketing Jeff Karp
Group General Manager & SVP Ray Muzyka
Group Creative Officer & VP Greg Zeschuk
Group Operations Officer & VP Rob Denton
Group Marketing Officer & VP Patrick Buechner
Int'l Project Manager Inés Hernández Ramiro
Asst. Project Manager Daniel Harty
Engineering Project Lead Rubén Martin Rico
Engineering Senior Danilo José Guerrero Rodríguez
Engineering Lead Fernando San Nicolás
Engineering Alberto Abad Ballesteros, Irene Chillón, Tomás Martínez Cortés, Juan Comesaña Fernández, Sergio Moreno, Daniel Martin, Ignacio Rodríguez Rodríguez
Coordination Álvaro Corral, Mathieu Donsimoni, Marcel Elsner, Alexander Faißt, Sergey Kolesov, Stéphane Lemelle, Julien Murria, Mária Nagy, Jan Staní Ek, Anna Maya Tomala
Localization Testing Project Manager Fausto Ceccarelli
Localization Testing Junior Project Manager Hugo Rivalland
Tester Pierre Attali, Wojciech Baran, Óscar Cruz, Cristan De Frassine, Claudia De Pasquale, Timothée Even, Ángel Fernández, Paolo Giunti, Damien Haimovici, Nadia Krupko, Max Matta-Fletcher, Antonin Ménard, Vasilijs Mercalovs, Panlo Ministral, Maciej Oginski, Antonio Orlino, Sarka Pechociakova, Jaroslaw Radzio, Ekaterina Samolyak
Post-Production Joaquin Aicart
QA Manager Derek Fitzgerald
Senior QA Project Lead Keith Chen
QA Project Lead Todd Desgagne
Tester Arman Abounourinejad, Ezequiel Alsina, Cecilia Alvarez, Wade Anderson, Luis Badano, Kenneth Banadyga, Matt Bliss, Tomas Borzi, Valentin Brega, William Brewer, Michael Brown, Corey Bussey, Craig Charlesworth, Cristian Diaz, Jessica Dohery, Guillermo Duarte, Andrés Gadea, Karl Germyn, Dalmiro Grañas, Chris Hamilton, Cristhian Heiderscheid, Kellie Hett, Francisco Isidori, Navpreet Lalli, Rudy Mankovits, Derek Mann, Sergio Marcelino, Seth Mayer, Jamie Milman, Rob Nickerson, Paola Parra, Marc Poirier, Greg Priebe, Kevin Quan, Daniel Reichert, Axel Rolon, Patricio Rovito, Jerónimo Shannon, Pablo Sojo, Jimmy Sou, Charles Wagner, James Wang, Danny White, Trevor Wong, Irwin Wong-Sing, Sam Yoo, Ramiro Zapata, Angel Zapiola
EA Global Online Producer Lars Smith, Shawn Stafford
Product Manager Dan Windrem
Project Manager Karen Clark
Programmer Michael Sop, Ryan Butterfoss
QA Chris Buffett
Art & Animation Liquid Development LLC.
Add'l Animation Liquid Development LLC
Axis Animation Liquid Development LLC
Additional Art Liquid Development LLC
3D Scanning Eyetronics-3D Inc.
Additional Compositing Faction Creative Effects Ltd.
Motion Capture EA Worldwide Motion Capture Studio, Giant Studios Inc.
Geopolitical Evaluation Englobe Inc.
Original Score Wall Of Sound Inc.
Lead Composer Jack Wall
Composer Jimmy Hinson, Sam Hulick, David Kates
Music Implementation Brian DiDomenico
Voice-Over Direction Chirs Borders, Ginny McSwain
Voice-Over Production Services Tikiman Productions Inc.
Voice-Over Recording Technicolor Animation & Interactuve Service
Dialog Editing Wave Generating Inc., Wolf Willow Sound Inc.

And sell that for 5 dollars?

EA will not disclose how much the game took to make. However many private analysts take the development costs for other games like it and estimate the development took 60 million dollars. And that does not include after production costs like shipping, publishing and marketing. Let's say we forgive those costs. If half the people who owned Xbox 360's, a user base of 50 million people bought the game (a generous figure) at 5 dollars then the game would gross 125,000,000 dollars. Which would be nice until we realize there's 65 million dollars left over to green light Mass effect 3, assuming the same if not higher costs with a 5 million dollar profit margin. A profit margin of 4%. FOUR PERCENT. That's horrible. One flop or canceled project and a studio would be finished. What do you think that would do to experimentation by major studios? Obsidian? Alpha Protocol. Dead. Blizzard? World of Warcraft Adventures. Dead. Starcraft Ghost. Deader than dead. Rockstar? Red Dead Revolver. Red Dead Dead. Think of the games all those studios made after those flops, and now with your perfect pricing scheme they never happened. Epic MegaGames had a flop on it's hands with the story driven Unreal 2. If they had died then there would be no unreal 3 engine. And the list goes on and on. Almost every great studio has a flop or some vaporware in it's closet and with such a risky low-yeild investment it's unlikely you'd see new studios arise anyhow. A freaking COD pays 5% on maturation and it's FDIC backed. Why would anyone with any capitol (and sanity) want to make a game?

Where could we cut corners? Well let's look at the voice cast. Our big stars here are Seth Green, Keith David. Claudia Black and the lovely Yvonne Strahovski. All respectable folks to be sure, but nobody in the tens of millions of dollars range. Maybe we can have the staff do all the voice acting? That's sure to maintain quality. In fact no matter how we look at it, something would suffer.

In short the fantastic games you can now enjoy are made possible by those high prices you so abhor. 5 and ten dollar steam sales are perfectly acceptable only after major sales have been covered and will make a good game some extra cash or help a bad game recover it's studio some of it's miserable defeat. Speaking of which anyone can wait for these sales, so there's no excuse to pirate at all right? You say at 5 or ten dollars everyone would buy these games, well they do sell for five or ten dollars if you just wait long enough. If the the pirates would only wait they too could play the same game for 5 or ten dollars so why don't they wait?

No price beats free. Strawman destroyed.

No low price will stop piracy. It doesn't now. Do a torrent search for the "Adventures of PB Winterbottom" This is a game that costs 50 cents on steam man, 50 CENTS! And people are pirating it. I hate to sound like a dick but your opinion and theory aren't supported by the facts. At least as I see them.

Consequentially Here's Zeboyd 's new game "C'thulu Saves The World":

This new game retails for three (YES THREE!) dollars and while clearly closing in on the development standards present in mass effect 2 it also surely makes Zeboyd all the more evil and deserving of piracy.

 

[SL33TBL1ND]

Don't worry Atari, I wouldn't worry about people downloading Alone in the Dark

Exactly what I was thinking.

 

[NLS]

I'm against Rapidshare on this one. The whole business is built around making huge profits by selling premium memberships. What are premium memberships? They allow you to upload and download at nearly unlimited speeds and use the help of download managers. Which means you can easily download bigger files such as games and movies in few clicks and minutes.

I used to pay for Rapidshare Premium, with the thought that "the monthly price of premium is cheaper than buying all these products". True, I probably saved some money. But in the end I got sick of the thought of Rapidshare making huge amounts of money, while the original copyrightholders didn't get a single penny from me. No matter how much Rapidshare says they're acting against copyrighted material on their servers (and they do act as well, but not enough), they probably all know deep inside that without the widespread piracy and sale of premium, they wouldn't be in such good and big business.

Previously, they even rewarded big uploaders with gifts and prizes, but that has now been removed "to avoid the impression it rewarded its users for uploading copyrighted material"

And also, trying to blame this on "we don't have the resources to check all the content" is just silly. Of course, they might not have the resources to do that, but then perhaps they shouldn't be doing such a big business out of it. If they can't be responsible for something they own and profit from themselves, then perhaps they shouldn't be doing and allowing it in the first place.

 

[Baldr]

Most Indie games have a pirate ratio almost the same or more as AAA games mostly because they lack DRM, even if the prices are half or lower that of a AAA game. Prices are not the issues.