Will DRM Finally Beat Piracy? Notorious Cracking Forum Says Yes

[Aeshi]

Except this absolutely hasn't been proven. Just because someone has illegally downloaded a piece of software does not mean that, if they couldn't get that piece of software illegally for free, that they would buy it.

I'm calling BS on that. If they truly placed that little value on the software in question they wouldn't be bothering to pirate it in the first place. The mere fact that they willfully chose to spend what could possibly be an hour or two torrenting it (depending on software size and/or local connection speed) as opposed to something else shows that they evidently place some value on it, even if said value isn't the same as the full asking price.

It'd be like complaining how a certain painting is trash and how you'd never like it and then immediately turning around and spending a day or two forging a perfect copy to hang in your house.

 

[LordLundar]

I've seen this argument play out before. Almost identical in fact. The DRM was Starforce. It had a decent status of "uncrackable" as well. Then people put the effort in to beat it and down it went.

 

[Pickles]

Except this absolutely hasn't been proven. Just because someone has illegally downloaded a piece of software does not mean that, if they couldn't get that piece of software illegally for free, that they would buy it.

I'm calling BS on that. If they truly placed that little value on the software in question they wouldn't be bothering to pirate it in the first place. The mere fact that they willfully chose to spend what could possibly be an hour or two torrenting it (depending on software size and/or local connection speed) as opposed to something else shows that they evidently place some value on it, even if said value isn't the same as the full asking price.

It'd be like complaining how a certain painting is trash and how you'd never like it and then immediately turning around and spending a day or two forging a perfect copy to hang in your house.

I think your assumption there is absolutely ridiculous. Torrenting something doesn't take effort, if someone is even remotely curious about a game they don't immediately want to buy they can press a few buttons then play it hours or days later, depending on their net and the game in question.

And the comparison you made doesn't hold up at all, if you were forging a painting you are putting in the time and effort creating it yourself, not spending a minute or so starting a torrent then not having to do anything until its finished.

 

[CaitSeith]

Isn't Denuvo infamous for hurting performance and is even an alleged cause of hard-drive damage? Oh wait I forgot, fuck the paying consumers! We need to make sure those pirates actually buy the game! Even though their is no proof that a pirated copy is a lost sale...oh wait I forgot, logic be damned, pfft, my mistake

The pirates themselves debunked those rumors.

 

[Hairless Mammoth]

Funny thing, playing a game at friends house that you didnt pay for is technically illegal under DMCA.

Really? That sounds ridiculous even for such an anti-consumer piece of filth law, but it wouldn't be surprising if the puppets politicians who wrote it accidentally or purposely worded it to take away another basic consumer practice.

 

[Paradoxrifts]

They fought the capitalism, but the capitalism won. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KsS0cvTxU-8]

I think the idea they're trying to communicate is that the piracy arms race has escalated to a level where the rising effective cost to counter increasingly complex DRM is beyond the ability of individual and small cadres of hackers to counter both freely and relatively quickly.

It is only through active and informed resistance to the implementation of anti-consumer technologies that companies are eventually forced to adopt policies and technologies that are more consumer friendly then the policies and technologies they could and would implement if someone didn't pick a fight with them over it.

I would certainly say that I wholeheartedly support these virtual pirates, if the forum moderators didn't have a policy of punishing or disciplining those who advocated such a position.

So I totally don't support and in fact condemn those magnificent bastards.

 

[BoogieManFL]

If the day comes where DRM wins and pirates lose prices won't lower and quality won't improve and in general nothing will change for the consumer. All the stories about lost sales and such that they love to toss around will be forgotten. They will still be charging $60+ and milking every dime they can with DLC and microtransactions.

I'd bet that even employee wages and benefits don't even improve much, if at all. Just more profit for the guys at the top.

 

[Vigormortis]

Yes, the distinction is crucian. Piracy is copyright infringement, which is NOT theft, because you do NOT steal anything. It is not theft neither legally nor morally.

Depends on the method with which you acquire the data.

 

[FalloutJack]

Sounds like a feint to lull people into a false sense of security...

 

[Strazdas]

Funny thing, playing a game at friends house that you didnt pay for is technically illegal under DMCA.

Really? That sounds ridiculous even for such an anti-consumer piece of filth law, but it wouldn't be surprising if the puppets politicians who wrote it accidentally or purposely worded it to take away another basic consumer practice.

It is ridiculous, which is why noone tried to enforce this yet. hopefully, noone ever will.

Yes, the distinction is crucian. Piracy is copyright infringement, which is NOT theft, because you do NOT steal anything. It is not theft neither legally nor morally.

Depends on the method with which you acquire the data.

Copyright infringement requires you to copy the data. Hence the name copyright. Since you copy the data, the original is not being removed. because original is not being removing, it is not theft. Now dont get me wrong, it is still very much illegal to infringe copyrights, its just that the action being done is different than that of theft. Also note: Theft is a criminal charge while copyright infringement is a civil charge, a distinction worth mentioning for US people (TPP actually want to make it a criminal charge btw)

 

[immortalfrieza]

You know, call me nostalgic, but whatever happened to the days where not being able to afford a piece of entertainment just meant you didn't buy it and got on with your life?

Those days never existed. bootleg copies were always around. even before we had printed word there were people illegally making copies of books manually. piracy is as old as media.

And for most of human history the ONLY way most people could get most products in any practical manner were to make bootleg versions. Especially outside major population centers for millennia people had to make everything from books to spoons to entire buildings by hand just to be able to have them at all, and professional work was far too expensive and impractical for the average joe up until mass production started to become practical.

There was also a time when most people made things simply because they wanted to help people, for the love of the craft, or simply out of necessity, rather than because they wanted to make money. Whatever happened to the days where everything wasn't jacked up to unreasonably massive prices and seeking a profit wasn't the reason anyone ever made and sold anything?

In the end, piracy is just the inevitable result of progress and as always happens the old guard try to do everything they can to squash the fruits of that progress so they can stick to what they've always been doing. Just like when cassette and VHS tapes, CDs, cars, whatever were invented and made other products worthless companies are simply refusing to get with the times and work with rather than against a new technology that is rapidly rendering their business model obsolete and instead are fighting to stick with that model even as it slowly sinks under them. We now have the power to make a literally infinite amount of anything digitally downloadable for no cost, and that scares these companies into drastic actions like DRM because they know that eventually they aren't going to be able to make money hand over fist controlling many of their products anymore now that there are many that are digitally downloadable, that now consumers have another option besides taking it in the rear ends from these companies if they want something that is digitally downloadable. I'll bet anything that far in the future the day the human race invents a genuine Star Trek style Replicator and thus can make an all but infinite amount of anything for next to nothing we'll still be dealing with this same artificial scarcity crap as we are now, simply because those that are rich and powerful would rather do everything they can to stop human progress if it kept them rich and powerful.

 

[Buckets]

With the advent of steam, I have not bothered downloading a dodgy title in years. The steam sales generally make a game more accessible to me by price so I wait.
With console games I usually watch a few reviews before I commit, except for some 'must buy' titles, but normally I'd wait for a pre-owned title.

 

[Aeshi]

There was also a time when most people made things simply because they wanted to help people, for the love of the craft, or simply out of necessity, rather than because they wanted to make money. Whatever happened to the days where everything wasn't jacked up to unreasonably massive prices and seeking a profit wasn't the reason anyone ever made and sold anything?

Er, Money happened? We stopped relying on Bartering and started using Currency. There may not have been any monetary transactions when some medieval craftsman was going "I'll help those farmers build a shed to help them out, they'll give me some food to help me out." but it was hardly done purely out of the saintly goodness of their hearts.

Anyone who spouts that "You should do it for the art/joy of helping/whatever" stuff should try doing their own job for no payment for a year or two and see how well that works out.

(That's not even touching on the pro-Piracy crowd - A group whose core tenet is: We deserve every game ever for free. - complaining about how greedy people are these days.)

 

[mrdude2010]

That's a fucking awful idea. Way too few people have the bandwidth, let alone the ping, to properly play a game like that. With modern MMOs, you still have pretty much the entire game on your hard drive. It's only your interactions with it that are being sent back and forth between the server.

Well, I didn't say that it'll be done right tomorrow - in 5-10 years this model will be the future - the most perfect way to combat piracy.
And if you don't have a bandwidth for that - well, you won't play any games then, not my problem.

It will be the video game manufacturer's problem, because they'll need to spend a lot of money on server maintenance, not to mention the lost sales from people without regular internet access. With how slowly internet infrastructure is improving, I can't see it being remotely worth it.

 

[Magmarock]

Fuck DRM. I have a really strong passion about this. I hope I can talk about pricy in this thread without getting into trouble. Piracy is of course something you want to avoice and you want people to buy your games. However I feel that DRM is one of the worst thing and I refuse to deal with it. I purchase almost all my games exsluvily from GOG.com However there are some games I see on Steam that I must have. In such a cases I will buy it, but only on the condition that there is a way to circumvent the DRM.

As fair as I am aware if you own the game legally you are allowed to have a backup and there are no set rules or guidelines for optioning that backup. In theory you should be able to download a warez version of a game that you've bought for the sake of a DRM free backup. I'm not sure on the legitimacy of this though and it varies from country to country. This could all be soled however if devs just stoped using DRM. Witcher 3 didn't use and it hasn't seemed to have hurt them at all.

 

[Magmarock]

I find this idea... vaguely possible. The idea of making copy protections so frustratingly hard to crack that pirates stop bothering with it certainly has a non-zero chance of existing. The other scenario is for video game piracy to be similar to movie piracy, in that you have to wait months for a good version (or any version at all).

The question here is if GoG will keep its no-DRM policy in place if this really takes off.

I believe that a lot of people turn to warez to get away from DRM if there's any positive from this it might mean better busyness for GOG

 

[barbzilla]

It is just another version of Denuvo, which has been cracked before and will be cracked this time as well. Denuvo is notoriously hard to crack because they feed bits of code into other parts of the game, so the pirate would have to spend a large amount of time hunting them down and figuring out how to remove them without damaging the game play any more than Denuvo has already done.

Another thing is, I can't stand Denuvo. Even with a fairly high end system, I can only play on medium on Just Cause 3 because of this horrid DRM, and even then it lags out occasionally. I have a feeling that the developers will eventually get tired of having to fix their code and implement extra optimization code just to counterbalance the crap that the DRM is doing in the first place. Dragon Age Inquisition was the same way, but shortly after Denuvo was cracked for the pirates, EA was suddenly able to release a patch that optimized the resources.

 

[boag]

That's BS. Every one knows that the only true way to stop piracy is videogame streaming.

For those that don't know: Imagine yourself, that all game data of your bought game is on a centralised server. The server takes 90% of the hard work on itself and the player is just getting a pretty picture on his screen - much like Steam Link, actually, but works like modern MMO's

While this type of DRM is also not invincible, it's simply too hard to crack - you as a pirate literally will have to catch every single byte of server information and/or reverse engineer them by yourselves which is too long and costly. There's a reason why MMO's are notoriously "pirate proof".
Oh, and also - you can't play the game without being always online, but tough shit poor people - it's the inevitable future.

Yeah thats gonna be fun when the internet goes back to the AOL business plan of pay per internet usage, now that the TPP has been passed.

 

[MrCatchTwenty2]

I would hope that non-existent piracy would mean a better experience for the paying customers. If that was the case then I would be happy to see unbeatable anti-piracy measures, as long as it doesn't mean my game stops working if the company doesn't want to pay for it anymore.

Then again, I do have a rather black and white opinion of piracy. Basically: if you didn't pay for the game, then you shouldn't get to play(except borrowing or free games). And like I do with anything that I have a radical or non-nuanced opinion on, I'm gonna stay out of it. The world has enough radical opinions out there trying to get unreasonable things to happen without my help.

Nothing's unbeatable anyway.