CD Projekt Admits Writing Letters to Pirates Doesn't Help

[Sonic Doctor]

I for one think it is bizarre how people think it is right for CD Projekt to have to apologize for going after pirates, when the were actually going after pirates and not paying customers.

How is it not sane for them to send a letter to people they know that are pirates and played their products without paying and saying they will sue if they aren't compensated?

If anything, true fans of CD Projekt should be throwing their full support and praising CD projekt for going to get the money they are owed.

I think CD Projekt was in the right here, as far as policy goes. The way they played those policies (i.e. politics [read: pandering to the public]) goes against the innovation of creative enterprise. I think it's honourable that they tried to do the right thing, but the fact that they didn't stick with their convictions makes them spineless and I'm not sure what's worse; if they would have let pirates get away with it in the first place or giving up in the end.

I think the worse part is that they are saying they are sorry for going after pirates for stealing their products, and saying it was an error on their part. They have every right to sue people that steal from them.

(To people thinking of arguing about my "stealing" remark. Don't even try to convince me that pirating/downloading a free copy of a game isn't stealing. You will never change my mind on that subject. I will always have the stance that I will always know as fact that taking something without paying is stealing, no matter how you try to wrap the crime with newfangled labels and such stupid stuff. If you don't pay, you have stolen stuff. Physical or not, by doing such, you have experienced something you have no right to if you haven't paid.)

 

[Doom972]

When will software companies learn? Every pirated copy is NOT a guaranteed lost sale! NO PRODUCT IS TAKEN OFF THE SHELVES! NO SALES ARE LOST!

Some of them are guaranteed sale, in the case where pirating wasn't an option. I admit that some probably don't have the money or just don't buy stuff other than necessities and tasteless ornaments, but many of the pirates would've bought it if that was the only way of playing the game.

 

[Gilhelmi]

I wish pirates would just go and bury themselves to be honest, it's annoying to see good people bending over backwards to accommodate them and going through all this hassle and doing stupid things that annoy the fans, all because some people want to be able to have things they can't/won't pay for

Amen brother.


I actually take great offense at legal gamers defending pirates.

If I break down their door, and steal their stuff. I wonder if they would be upset?

 

[Sonic Doctor]

When will software companies learn? Every pirated copy is NOT a guaranteed lost sale! NO PRODUCT IS TAKEN OFF THE SHELVES! NO SALES ARE LOST!

It's better that people don't play because they can't pay, than not pay and unfairly get to play.

It doesn't matter if nothing was taken off of shelves. That isn't even the matter at hand. People that pirate/download a free copy, are getting to experience something that they had no right to.

They stole the experience.

Whether a person was going to pay or not doesn't matter. They did something illegal. Other than packaging and launching media, a physical copy of a game is no different than a digital one, they both contain the same experience.

If I sneak into a movie theater and watch a movie without paying, that is stealing an experience. There was no product taken off a shelf, but it is illegal because I didn't pay for the experience of watching the movie. It's just like people not paying for the experience of playing CD Projekt's games.

I will never understand how people think it is wrong for a company to go after people for experiencing something that they had no right to experience because they didn't pay.

If people were experiencing something I created, without paying, when I had set a price for getting the experience, then I have every right to go after them for not paying.

 

[jmesch04]

This is just sad. CD Projekt was absolutely right, they just need to change their approach. In the letter they just need to write that we believe you have stolen our game. Ask them for a reasonable amount "Value of game" or then they can ask for more. If you are worried about this they just include a line in the letter that says if you are being wrongly accused please login online with our customer service and show us through which service you made the purchase. If you bought it online you will always have the visa/paypal receipt, so no big deal. Then if they did wrongly accuss you they can offer you like 5% off another game title of theirs in the future. Or even 5% off a game at GoG, since they are a distributor.

Pirates need to stop taking the moral highground and start taking it more up the behind.

 

[Jack_in_theGreen]

Well, the Escapist's "contributor" really only posted THE LEAST interesting part of the interview by PCGamer, which included very neat details abouot the Cyberpunk 2077 working title...

http://www.pcgamer.com/2012/10/24/cd-projekt-red-interview-cyberpunk-2077-witcher-2-piracy-windows-8-and-more/

I mean, if you are just gonna copy-paste another media's interview, why dont quote the WHOLE THING, not just the part that is A YEAR OLD. The "piracy policy and its debate with the fans" bit is old news, guys...

 

[tautologico]

When will software companies learn? Every pirated copy is NOT a guaranteed lost sale! NO PRODUCT IS TAKEN OFF THE SHELVES! NO SALES ARE LOST!

This is as simplistic as saying "every pirated copy is a lost sale". Probably none of those two extremes are true in practice.

Some pirated copies will definitely affect sales. Some won't. How many in each case? I don't know, and it may be hard to determine. But I'm quite sure the percentage of lost sales due to piracy is neither 0% nor 100%.

 

[Strazdas]

1. advertise your product by claiming you are anti DRM and cuasing media havoc - free advertisement.
2. after you made money try to make mroe money by persecuting people that wouldnt have bought anyway.
3. after social backlash to your stupidity, admit to be wrong to save face, while keeping the damage you done to humanity.
4. profit.

This is as simplistic as saying "every pirated copy is a lost sale". Probably none of those two extremes are true in practice.

Some pirated copies will definitely affect sales. Some won't. How many in each case? I don't know, and it may be hard to determine. But I'm quite sure the percentage of lost sales due to piracy is neither 0% nor 100%.

well according to study done in Latvia and Lithuania (both though to be pirate havens, and i know about those cause im from Lithuania), piracy actually encourage sales while otherwise people wouldnt have seen the game, liked it, and didnt buy it. In low-income countries piracy is more advertisement than theft.

 

[Bostur]

Those kinds of letters are pretty shady. In case of a false positive what would the recipient do? Most would probably throw the letter away and hope that they wont prosecute, but some would pay anyway because hiring a lawyer and proving oneself innocent is more expensive than just paying the bill.
The law firms specializing in these letters know that fact, making the whole ordeal very questionable.

The idea of scary letters is to get a small percentage of people to pay, guilty or not that doesn't matter. CD PRojekt probably believe they don't make false positives but they can't know for sure.

 

[Mycroft Holmes]

Am I the only one who does not really understand why what CD Projekt did was a bad thing? If they are legitimately going after people who stole their game, as they seemed to have been, why does anyone care? It's not like they are a greedy developer trying to shaft people. I mean these are the guys who gave me a bunch of new free content for my game months after it was released.

I don't know if this is feasible, but i would implement a system like a usb pass. Meaning that every copy of the game would have a piece of hardware that has a hardwired algorithm. The algorithm on the usb will be used for many parts through the game. If you don't have the usb keycard, the game will be broken.

The usb though will not be a flash drive. If it is a flash drive then just copying it would break the system. In my imagination it would be a piece of hardware. Making it hard to replicate.

The paying customers buy the game with the usb pass. They install the game put on the usb and everything's fine. This works for as many years as you want.

The pirate may get the game, but cannot have a usb pass unless they construct, or buy one.

Sounds good right?

That's the same principle as always online style Ubisoft DRM. It's a less harsh implementation but it's essentially the same idea. And here's the problem with it:

Once you have anything on your computer, it's basically yours as long as you have enough technological experience to understand how to get it. Those websites that won't let you download a picture they have hosted make me laugh. Its on my computer now and I can just do a print screen and paste it into MSPaint. A song coming through your speakers on Pandora can easily be downloaded with a audio stream ripper. There are hundreds of ways to grab the content you are seeing, save it, and reproduce it; and there always will be. Videogames are no different than any other form of media, they only have better locks usually.

When they made people connect to an Ubisoft server, all the hackers had to do was figure out what it was transmitting to the game to say 'everything is ok with this game copy.' Then they constructed their own local server emulator that pretended to be Ubisoft but ran off of your computer. When they uploaded the game they simply uploaded the fake server as well, and viola system broken.

There are already programs out there to emulate fake disk drives, CD/DVD drives, and yes USB drives as well. So what you have done(if you pursued such an option) is made your programmers do extra work, and the hackers do extra work to create a proper emulator for the fake USB 'key.' Which costs you money, and the hackers don't care anyways because they are doing it for the sport; they already bought their copies legitimately so they could hack the code.

Stopping pirates is not necessarily an impossible task(for the dumb ones anyways.) It's just not a cost effective one. Which is something most developers have yet to figure out.

 

[rapidoud]

So, basically, no matter what you do to combat piracy, you automatically lose?

While I can see how that might be true, I can't help but feel a bit sorry for CD Projekt. They're actually experimenting a bit with different takes on fighting it instead of the usual "punish customers instead of pirates" method that so many others use by default.

Valve might actually have the only viable strategy against it.

A strategy yes, but viable? No way. They run a distribution service that gets away with selling products dirt cheap and getting essentially 30% profit on everything sold as their server costs are handled by others and they have the tiny programming team behind valve to pay for. The publishers bear the costs of doing dirt cheap sales where steam can just rotate in new games to keep people coming back without them actually losing anything to it; if a publisher's game doesn't sell well even after going on sale valve suffer no consequences besides a little potential revenue loss.

Steam is a very widely pirated platform to the point where many games you can play online using the zerogear appid, and many pirates have fake versions of steam that lets them get any games they want. I've never seen a system more compromised than steam is, and piracy dents all publishers except valve have steam to back them up anyway even if a game became massively pirated.

So no, Steam is HORRIBLE against piracy.

 

[lancar]

So, basically, no matter what you do to combat piracy, you automatically lose?

While I can see how that might be true, I can't help but feel a bit sorry for CD Projekt. They're actually experimenting a bit with different takes on fighting it instead of the usual "punish customers instead of pirates" method that so many others use by default.

Valve might actually have the only viable strategy against it.

A strategy yes, but viable? No way. They run a distribution service that gets away with selling products dirt cheap and getting essentially 30% profit on everything sold as their server costs are handled by others and they have the tiny programming team behind valve to pay for. The publishers bear the costs of doing dirt cheap sales where steam can just rotate in new games to keep people coming back without them actually losing anything to it; if a publisher's game doesn't sell well even after going on sale valve suffer no consequences besides a little potential revenue loss.

Steam is a very widely pirated platform to the point where many games you can play online using the zerogear appid, and many pirates have fake versions of steam that lets them get any games they want. I've never seen a system more compromised than steam is, and piracy dents all publishers except valve have steam to back them up anyway even if a game became massively pirated.

So no, Steam is HORRIBLE against piracy.

I see where you're coming from with the susceptibility of easily accessible copies the hacker groups use to crack their releases from. Quickly after a game is released on steam, it's also available on Torrents "de-steamed".
However, don't forget that even before steam there was never any problem to access copies to crack. Steam may have simplified it for the crackers, leaving only one form of DRM to tackle and quick digital downloads to get it quickly, but in the past "0-day releases" were still frequent, so no real difference there.

What steam does isn't prevent piracy. It doesn't block it by any means, nor does its DRM have any tangible effect. However, to update a pirated copy you still need to manually fiddle with it, you still need to manually install it, and you still need to manually configure all the other support libraries (.NET, DirectX, and all the other odd bits and pieces devs like to use).
It's not hard. Hell, it's a fairly straightforward affair that anyone with basic computer knowledge can do. I could do it without thinking.

So why don't I? I'm dirt poor, a diehard gamer and unemployed. I have every reason to go and pirate all my games. I got the knowledge, I got the time and I got a good reason (lack of money).

But, just like everyone else, I'm also lazy. I'd rather spend my time gaming than fiddle with every mechanical detail in order to coax a game into working with the latest patch. My Harddrives are full with all kinds of crap, and I'd need to free up more space (AGAIN!) if i were to keep enough space available to store all those games im not currently playing. Sorting harddrive content is the pits. It's not hard, its just boring as hell.

So... I fire up steam, and click the game I want to play. Thats it.
I am lazy and want convenience. It's the same reason people used to choose consoles. And steam caters to my laziness in the most insidious way possible. By reducing the tedium of starting up a game, ANY game, installed or not, to a mere click. I didn't want to believe it, but steam made me WANT to pay for my games.


And THAT is why steam is a viable strategy.

 

[cynicalsaint1]

Blah blah blah blah

A few things:
1. Okay - go ahead and prove to me that everyone who could have possibly gotten one of these letters could totally get free legal defense. I know I sure as hell can't in civil case cases.

2. This exact practice is a large part of the reason why the RIAA is vilified as much as it is.

3. With you supposedly being a lawyer and all one would think you familiar with the concept of 'Trial by Jury', and you know the actual truth of matters not mattering quite as much as what you can convince the jury of. Same thing applies here - much of the public sees these kinds of practices as shady as hell for the reasons I listed; to the point that enough have spoken out against it as to convince CD Projeck that "Yeah, when you put that way - it is kind of shady, we'll stop".

You asked why the practice got such a negative response and I answered that. I'm not trying to make out CD Projekt to be a bad guy - in fact they should be commended for actually listening to other people's arguments on the situation and considering them.

 

[M920CAIN]

So instead of DRM they're data-mining pirates now? ... so much for privacy.

 

[snave]

Exactly. While companies like CD projekt, Valve, and similar companies are infinitely more decent...

I'd not be so hasty as to hold Valve up so highly as a publisher. These guys are really starting to push their luck with the Steam side of things. If you're American, well go pat yourself on the back. For the rest of us, we're getting shoehorned with exploitative prices and sometimes even game sales that cannot be played due to store regionalisation gaffes.

 

[Sylveria]

So, basically, no matter what you do to combat piracy, you automatically lose?

While I can see how that might be true, I can't help but feel a bit sorry for CD Projekt. They're actually experimenting a bit with different takes on fighting it instead of the usual "punish customers instead of pirates" method that so many others use by default.

Valve might actually have the only viable strategy against it.

Id feel more sorry for them if there weren't many, many, MANY incidents of people who owned legal copies of the game getting the threatening letter.

 

[blackrave]

I read the article twice
Still can't understand what was that "awful" thing they did
CDProjekt are anti-DRM, not anti-piracy
So going to pirates and saying that they know who they are and they want to get payed isn't that big a deal.
I personally support their attempts to fight piracy by other means than punishing the paying customers

As for pirates, it would be awesome move to pirate their games only 3-6 months after release
You know, give them time to earn their money
Just a little gesture of appreciation for their anti-DRM stance

Also, I'm really waiting for Cyberpunk

 

[Alandoril]

Chasing the pirates is fine, as long as you're only asking that they pay the price of the game rather than snuffing out most of their bank accounts.

 

[Milanezi]

The constitution of most countries carry a certain principle where EVERYONE has a right to "access the judiciary", which means: as soon as you prove that you cannot afford a lawyer the State MUST pay you one, with no losses to you in terms of legal costs whatsoever (unless it rests proven that you acted out of malice, that is, knowing for sure that you were wrong/have no reason), so you'll always be legally protected. I'm a lawyer, believe me, in most countries, no matter what the fuck happens, you are legally protected.
Just to make it clear, you might LOSE, and still not have to pay ANY legal bills other than the amount the judge decides is to be executed to repair the damages.

Wrong.

You have the right to an attorney in criminal cases, not civil which is the kind of case CD Projekt would bring against a suspected pirate. In a civil case if you can't afford a lawyer then you're shit outta luck; you either have to settle or wait for a summary judgement against you. The settlement is still better because the judge will just rule to give the plaintiff whatever they're asking for since you were unable to mount any kind of defense.

Maybe in your country, but in mine (Brazil), that right exists, as a matter of fact I used to work on that area, back then I was still graduating, and the lawyers who did this service were my bosses, mind you, it was set for minor causes such as car crashes, consumer rights, etc. but it was all built on the right that everyone has for a lawyer. Here you CANNOT go to court without a lawyer and a case like CD Projekt's specially so due to the hiposuficiency of the defendant, meaning, the consumer (gamer) is SO weak - as you said it yourself - in face of the accuser CD Projekt (since it's a relatively large company), that any settlement without a legal professional, if latter contested in court could be deemed void. But that's Brazil, and Brazilian law was built on north-american and european law civil-wise and heavily on German law criminal-wise (by the way, here a piracy case would most likely configure a CRIME, "acquiring something one knows to be, or should know to be, born out of an illicit act", it's a very low level crime that would not reach a common court).
You COULD go without a lawyer, but that means the comoany would also have to go without a lawyer, but then the hiposufficiency rule would STILL apply, making a sttlement weak unless in front of a Judge, and anyway, companies NEVER do anything without a lawyer, because they have nothing to lose money-wise.
Gotta give you somthing, that's how it works here in Brazil. In the USA, some laws will vary depending on the the State, something that doesn't happen here, I know that in the US you CAN sometimes not hire a lawyer, which I personally think is absolutely brutal to the defendant, for the reasons you said it yourself. But then the point is, we're talking about a company from POLAND suing people in... ??? Which twists the matter into the gray area of International Private Law, meaning there will be treaties to take into account and local laws regarding, for instance, which countrie's laws will be valid materialy and formaly....