CD Projekt Admits Writing Letters to Pirates Doesn't Help

Milanezi

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craddoke said:
Mromson said:
The world is a pretty simple place: convince people to give you money for the hard work that you've done. If enough people don't purchase the things you like, then the things you like won't be made anymore. Crying that pirates aren't paying for products does nothing. Either enough people pay for content they like, or the company should go bust. Free market people. It might suck sometimes, but that's life.
Free markets do not work without laws and regulations - like those governing intellectual property rights. One can argue that the laws we have are less than ideal - and it goes without saying that the enforcement of them is barbaric - but it is asinine to claim that creators should just put there stuff out there and hope people pay them without any legal recourse when their rights are trampled.
By the way, that reminds me of that e-book thing Stephen King released: he would write chapter per chapter and you would pay IF you wanted and as much as you wanted. It proved that things couldn't be done by trusting the fans, most people would read and not pay at all. Obviously Stephen King did this because he is BIG and the "project" couldn't potentially make a dent in his fortune, but if it was a small author, it might have meant the end of his business.
 

Neonit

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lancar said:
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.

its a strange game.... the only winning move is not to play.

OT: i can see why publishers would hate the idea of piracy, but to be honest, at this point i think they should "write it off" as marketing budget, and save on the DRM costs.... DRM is a system - the first thing that people must know about systems is that none is 100% fail-proof and every system can be broken.

in the end, you waste money, piss off your customers, and AT SOME POINT it will still be cracked, 9 out of 10 times it will be a simple exe to be copy pasted - much simpler for pirates than customers who have to jump the hoops to play the game they bought.

yes, you could argue that if it is easier (as in, no drm at all) more people will pirate, but come on, at this point cracking a game is so easy im pretty sure its of no concern.

and threatening people will post.... i dunno, it just seems silly to me.
 

Milanezi

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cynicalsaint1 said:
Milanezi said:
Heh, I don't feel they were doing wrong at all. Why were fans with LEGITIMATE copies angry? (not going into the "they might get me by mistake" scenario) I mean, fact is piracy is ILLEGAL, this is not a game under the Creative Commons rules, CD Projekt OWNS the rights, and just like anyone has every right to sue someone who, say, damages their property or the fruits that come from it in any way, so does CD Projekt carries every right to sue the pirates for infringing the law.

If the pirates "steal" the software to resell it at a lower price, then they are smuggling it, and using CD Project's PROPERTY to create their own fruits (profit from sales in this case), this means trillions of people enjoying The Witcher 2: Assassin of Kings and no accurate feedback to the owner, which might prove to be a worse matter than the profit itself, since it might give the wrong impression when it comes to the success of a game in the market.

Maybe the pirates will just take the software, nut not profit from it, which is the famous "Robin Hood" scenario, they're doing it for the good of all who can't buy the game at full price, blahblahblah, fact is, again CD Project gets damaged, say 3000 people are playing the game, they're loving it, but only 1000 bought it, so as far as feedback goes, CD Projekt only "reads" 1000 purchases, which might mean the failure of a franchise depending on the damage and size of the company.

All in all, CD Projekt is not acting against the law, I don't understand how acting within the boundaries of law gets negative response.
There are a couple of issues with this practice really:
1. There's always the issue of proving that the person actually pirated a copy of the game. IP addresses can be spoofed and such.

2. The whole practice of the "Pay us or else" letter is pretty shady in general. Especially considering that much of the time the people who're sending them out probably can't actually afford to prosecute everyone they mail the letter out to.

3. Furthermore if there are false positives the cost for someone defend themselves against the claims will probably out weigh the cost of just paying up, meaning its a lose-lose proposition for anyone who gets falsely accused.

Its at best shady as hell, at worst extortion.
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.

It's not a matter of "pay us or else", that would be extortion, it's a mater of "we can try to reach an agreement (which legally implies an arbiter AND a contract that will prove that everything has been settled) OR we will see you in the court (which as said before, might mean no cost at all for the accused)". That is the way everything works in the world. If anybody ever crashes into your car you can settle personally at any given moment, but if the person refuses, you will most surely SUE the bastard, after all, it was an ILLEGAL act.

Problems with identifying IP will lay with CD Projekt, usually, if the accuser has no proof he has no case, even worse, in terms of IP, you can almost say he has no way to IDENTIFY the author of the crime. Most countries will then simply go on investigating, and eventually drop the case, all the accused part must do is DEFEND from the accusations. That said if you say "Milanezi hacked my account", the law will reply "Prove", once you (or the cops or anybody) show up with acceptable proof the lawsuit will be built and I will be required to defend myself of your accusations and nothing else. That's the big deal with Pirate Bay doing the whole cloud thing, they might have become impossible to grasp. Finally by saying the proof must be acceptable it means that it can't come out of illegal means, such as torture, or infiltrating a computer data without legal authorization, etc, if one does that one IMMEDIATELY loses EVERY single proof that derived from it, and most likely ends up with an extinguished lawsuit (it's nicknamed "theory of the rotten apple").

So yeah, I recognize it might be hard to pinpoint who it is, and I recognize the NSA won't get their staff looking for game pirates. But that doesn't change the fact that CD Projekt is merely protecting their property, they aren't the villains, actually they seem to be pretty light headed, most companies everywhere, in all areas of any industry wouldn't be going through all that trouble and would just be locking the product with all sorts of safety precautions not to have the trouble they are having, like that Blizzard token and such.
 

lolobar

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First of all respect to CD Projeckt for admitting their "error".

I understand what they tried to do and this is against their good willed nature.

I'm trying to put myself in their shoes. It's difficult to defend against piracy and at the same time not to create problems for paying customers.

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? :p
 

Staskala

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SmashLovesTitanQuest said:
I still don't see the problem...? I mean, how much money were CDProjekt asking?

If it was reasonable, I think they're being too nice here. I don't see anything wrong with telling people who pirated your game to cough up some money or be forced to.
As a German you should really know better than to support these kinds of C&D practices. In the countries where this legal way is possible (i.e. just this one) the system gets abused to hell.

In short:
1) They don't have to prove anything to send you a C&D letter. You get the burden of proof when you go to court. And good luck, you'll need it thanks to
2) Störerhaftung
3) Even if you're innocent and actually managed to prove it, you still had to get a lawyer, take a day off, travel through half the country, etc. which makes the right way - going to court - the worse decision. You're better off just paying, guilty or not.
4) They always demand more than what they could accomplish in court (100? is the default for minor copyright infringements - they demand upwards of 700?, which far exceeds any lawyer cost)

The whole thing might have made sense at some point in time, but by now it's nothing but a farce. There's an entire C&D industry which does nothing but send thousands of letters. The cases are often shoddy and they demand ludicrous amounts of money, all riding on the hope that people pay out of shock. And it works.
The fact that most people, like you, don't even know how it works is another problem. If the government introduces shit like Störerhaftung or the idiotic specifics of the Impressumspflicht (you put the legal site notice of your facebook fanpage under "Info"? Congratulations, you're fucked) the least they could do is teach people about it.
 

Bleidd Whitefalcon

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lolobar said:
First of all respect to CD Projeckt for admitting their "error".

I understand what they tried to do and this is against their good willed nature.

I'm trying to put myself in their shoes. It's difficult to defend against piracy and at the same time not to create problems for paying customers.

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? :p
How would that work with digital downloads? I like the idea but it only seems to work for physical copies.
 

Staskala

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SmashLovesTitanQuest said:
Fair enough. I didn't know they were asking 700 Euros, hense the "If it was reasonable". (Plus C&D is bullshit anyway, I knew that, dunno what the fuck I was thinking when I posted that.) After reading your post I can see that it clearly wasn't. Thanks for educating me a little on this.
Ah sorry, I was talking more in general. I don't really know how much CD Projekt demanded, but I think it's safe to assume that they relegated the task to the usual suspects who wrote the usual letters. Okay, I just checked anyway, they wanted 750?.
It's a topic I get somewhat emotional about, because no one seems to care. Sure there's petitions, but they're pretty much useless.
Schnarrenberger promised to amend the law, but that went absolutely no where (guess that's the FDP for you).
Even the pirate party is more interested in absurd debates about the very nature of copyright law in general, than actually tackling real world problems. Frustrating stuff, man.
 

KeyMaster45

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Milanezi said:
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.
 

Grabehn

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While I know piracy is an issue, I alwats hate when people reffer to it as "we're losing money" which is false, they are not losing, but earning less, and there's always people willing to pay, if the product's good enough. I myself download games before buying them, either because of "demos" not telling precisely how a game really is, and other times because of not knowing how a game will really work on my computer, afterall, not all people that pirate games stay like that.
I love how they realized that going the "EA" way was a bad idea, and can't wait for their next game.
 

Farther than stars

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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.
 

Zombie_Moogle

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Even when CD Projekt is apologizing for an arguably dickish move, they still sound like Game Industry Saints. Awesome
 

Kargathia

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tautologico said:
That's a downside of having this image of being "gamer-friendly". They can't do anything about the pirates, even if it hurts their profits. It's one thing to say DRM isn't good because it inconveniences paying customers. Saying "copy our game all you want, we will do nothing about it" is something completely different. But I guess they have no choice now, if they don't want to sacrifice some amount of the "good will" they have with gamers. Funny to see how this good will didn't help much with piracy.
It mostly seems to be an admission that "doing nothing", and "introducing ridiculously restrictive DRM" tends to have a suspiciously comparable result.

Personally was no fan of the letter-writing either. The concept isn't bad, but in reality IP addresses turn out to be falling short of providing reliable identification when it comes to individual persons.
That, combined with the whole "pay us or we sue for real" clause makes it little more than bullying people for their lunch money.
 

Asehujiko

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lolobar said:
First of all respect to CD Projeckt for admitting their "error".

I understand what they tried to do and this is against their good willed nature.

I'm trying to put myself in their shoes. It's difficult to defend against piracy and at the same time not to create problems for paying customers.

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? :p
Sounds terrible. The production costs per copy go through the roof, it is impossible to digitally distribute, the consumer now has to keep track of the usb device instead of just the disk itself and pirates have a tiny modification to the game .exe that points it at an equally tiny .dll pile with the same algorithm on it. What you are proposing is ubidrm but reliant on millions of usb devices, which is even dumber then a single server somewhere.
 

StriderShinryu

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tautologico said:
That's a downside of having this image of being "gamer-friendly". They can't do anything about the pirates, even if it hurts their profits. It's one thing to say DRM isn't good because it inconveniences paying customers. Saying "copy our game all you want, we will do nothing about it" is something completely different. But I guess they have no choice now, if they don't want to sacrifice some amount of the "good will" they have with gamers. Funny to see how this good will didn't help much with piracy.
That's my thought exactly.

Some of the most often used arguments to advocate piracy are reliance on just shoveling out poor PC ports of their games and publishers/developers treating players poorly with EULA issues, DRM, etc. Yet in the case of CDProjekt, here's a company that puts PC development first and has an absolutely great relationship with their fans. Given a large portion of pirate logic, no one should pirate their games then, right? Nope, they still probably get hit just as hard as anyone else.
 

dyre

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Yes, good, forget the pirates, just give us more information on Witcher 3 so us legitimate customers can throw more money at you :|