Looks like we won’t be playing Super Street Fighter IV Arcade Edition on the PC anytime soon. (Meh: we’re all busy playing Civilization V and F1 2010.) Capcom blames piracy, as always. → Read More
The Business Software Alliance wants you to stop pirating software. A fair request, sure, particularly coming from the BSA. As such, the group has updated its “Faces of Internet Piracy” Web site to include three more “good guys,” people who are negatively affected by unscrupulous pirates worldwide. Take Jason Calhoun, of Rosetta Stone, the language learning software. You pretty much cannot throw a stone online and not run into pirated copies of Rosetta Stone all over the place. → Read More
More on that vast, European anti-piracy raid that went down yesterday. The big news: it’s very possible that the main UK topside was taken down in the raid, which, if true, would actually be a pretty big deal—certainly a big blow to “the scene,” as it were. → Read More
This Android app is charmingly anachronistic. Instead of simply letting you transfer files to others over the internet, Yves Raimond built an app that uses actual locations to provide downloads. Using the phone’s GPS, you cache the file to specific coordinates or an address, and anyone else with the app can download that file if they’re in the same place. Useless, yes, but also cool. → Read More
Sony may have already started to block the various methods of cracking the PS3 wide open, but that doesn’t mean release groups haven’t taken advantage of the situation. A quick search on any type of “release” site will reveal no less than 20 ripped and fully playable PS3 games. → Read More
A raid on file-sharing servers in the early hours of the morning has conspiracy theorists talking. The raid, which took places in various European countries including Germany, the Netherlands, Hungary, and Sweden (among others), targeted peer-to-peer service providers. What has the tin foil hat wearers wondering is: why was one Wikileaks’ Swedish providers caught in the crossfire? Is “the man” out to get Wikileaks? → Read More
Let’s imagine a scenario where somebody releases a bit of open-source code that allows you to run homebrew—that is, non-pirated software created by indie developers—on your PS3. Let’s imagine that the name of that software is psgroove. The question is, do you download it, and do you go out of your way to run unsigned-but-not-pirated code on your system? How badly do you need PS3 homebrew? → Read More
Years ago, the music industry could have blamed falling album sales on piracy. “Nobody’s buying the latest Chingy because they’re just downloading a 128CBR rip from Suprnova~!” What’s the excuse now when people have loads of legitimate digital options—iTunes, Zune, Pandora, Spotify, Rdio, etc.—at their fingertips? Oh, right: it’s still piracy. Please update your act. → Read More
Last night was the first big test for the stream police after Zuffa, parent company of UFC, had subpoenaed Ustream and Justin.tv last week for the IP addresses of its users caught illegally streaming pay-per-view events. A quick look around the Internet during last night’s UFC 117 event showed one thing: streams haven’t gone away. → Read More
A few days ago we learned that the UFC had subpoenaed Ustream.tv and Justin.tv for the information of people who had ilegally streamed pay-per-view events. Having spoken to these people in the past, I knew they weren’t sitting around in their offices, rubbing their hands together as intellectual property was being violated all over the place. No, these are legitimate businesses looking to cooperate with companies like UFC whenever necessary. → Read More
Nefarious pirates looking to, um, pirate StarCraft II are running into a bit of a problem: one of the more popular torrents that purports to be the game is actually nothing more than a conduit for a nasty bit of malware. I know $60 for a PC game may seem a little expensive to many of you, but would you rather pay the money (and earn Light Side points) or try to pirate it (and earn Dark Side points) and have to deal with cleaning out your system? → Read More
The importation, sale, or advertising of the R4 card, sometimes (often?) used to pirate Nintendo DS games, is now illegal in the UK. Defendants tried to argue that the R4 shouldn’t be demonized, much less made illegal, because it can also be used to play homebrew software. The High Court disagreed. → Read More
If this were the AP, the following would be the lede to this next story: “UFC President Dana White wants to put pirates in a kimura.” (That, of course, assumed the AP funny lede guy even knows what a kimura is!) Man, those soft ledes are terrible. Moving on… yeah, Dana White is upset at pirates. The promotion has subpoenaed Justin.tv and Ustream.tv, demanding to know the names of people who stream UFC pay-per-view events. → Read More
Nothing like helping out your fellow man. As you know, copyright infringement, known as “theft” by people looking to spread FUD, is the worst crime a person can commit. I mean, you can be in charge of financial intuitions that rip off people’s money, you can be in charge of an energy company that randomly drills into the planet then feigns ignorance when something goes wrong, but hey, whatever—there are people out there downloading “Oh My Gosh.” This must be stopped! → Read More
Famous rock band Guns N’ Roses released their latest album, Chinese Democracy, in November, 2008. It had been in development for an astonishing 15 years. That’s partially why Kevin Cogill got into so much trouble. You’ll recall that he was caught uploading tracks from the then-unreleased album in June, 2008. While he managed to doge jail time, Cogill was given a year of probation and two months of home confinement. He was also supposed to take part in a public service announcement on behalf of the Recording Industry Association of America&mdas;public enemy number one in the eyes of young people around the country.
So here we are in July, 2010, and we’re left wondering: what happened to that PSA? → Read More
The first Hurt Locker lawsuits are a-flyin’. Were you one of the lucky winners? → Read More
“We need our development teams focused on content and cool features, not anti-piracy technology.” Thank you, finally! See, Blizzard gets it. The company’s co-founder, Frank Pearce, recently told the good folks at Video Gamer that he thinks the fight against DRM is misguided. Not that he supports end-users going around torrenting his games till the end of time, but that the way to “beat” piracy is to embrace gamers and treat them like complete jerks. → Read More
Anyone else tired of video game publishers complaining about piracy? Like, human nature is such that you’ll always have a bunch of knuckleheads who will hop on BitTorrent and download away. Forget them, they’re jerks. Just focus on the non-jerks out there and go about your business. Anyhow, today the spotlight falls on Epic Games, makers of Unreal and Gears of War. Seems those guys think that all the money these days is in consoles, so PC gamers will have to get used to crummy ports or nothing at all! → Read More
Hope you didn’t download The Hurt Locker with BitTorrent because it looks like the film’s producers may be coming after you. They’re looking at a multi-million dollar copyright infringement lawsuit that would target “tens of thousands” of users. Let’s discuss this for a moment. → Read More
Well this is interesting. A person far cleverer than any of us here decided, on a whim, to look at the main executable of the Steam version of Max Payne 2 in a text editor. Because that’s what you do, you know? Anyhow, a funny little thing appears: the ASCII logo of famed release group (now defunct) Myth. In other words, it sure does look like Rockstar uploaded a cracked (PIRATED OMG OMG OMG) version of the game to Steam’s servers! You can’t make this stuff up. → Read More
