Alleged Call of Duty pirate sued by Activision

"And if you are going to get sued, at least go with Call of Duty 4, OK?"

...agreed. :\

Does it count that I pirated CoD4, enjoyed it, and went out and bought it?

So, are they suing people who just download and seed a game on Bittorrent here, or is this going after people selling illegal copies? I'm all for taking down the people that try to make a business from selling illegal copies of other people's work, but I think it's totally ridiculous to sue people for tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars for downloading a $60 game. Same concept applies to the music lawsuits, which I feel are absurdly high in demanded compensation for something worth $.99 on iTunes.

While I'll admit to pirating games in the past, I'm not saying this simply because I don't want to get sued, I just find it unfair and unreasonable to demand such large sums of money. This won't affect me anyways as if I do pirate a game (very rarely), it'll be via a method which I won't be caught and won't be distributing it to others. I think companies tend to blow piracy out of proportion.

Yes, I pirated the original Half-Life when I was much younger and couldn't afford it. Now I own Half-Life 2, CS: Source, Episode 1, and a handful of other Steam games as well as Orange Box for Xbox 360. Yes, I pirated FEAR when I was short on cash and was curious to see if the game lived up to the demo. It did, and I recently spent over $1000 building a new PC specifically so I'll be ready to purchase and play Project Origin on its (sadly delayed) release day.

Anyways, my point here is that if Activision is just suing individuals on file-sharing swarms, they should reconsider this practice.

I still find it funny that old pirates were known for greed and hoarding their treasure (booty)
whereas today's pirates are those who share their booty

I pirate games that I've already bought in some form before, or if they have been abandoned by their developers. For example, I bought morrowind and oblivion for my xbox/xbox 360, but later on I got a gaming computer. I wanted to play with mods on my comp, so I pirated those computer versions, becuase I had already given bethseda my monies.

If a games dev team has gone out of business before the game comes out (like what happened with DoW soulstorm) Ill pirate that too cause I know those hard working devs arent missing any $$$.

But selling pirated copies for $$$ is beyond wrong...

I'm sure this is a backdated lawsuit. I doubt CoD 4 was out when the events in question actually happened.

Shawn Guse,one of the thieves nabbed by Activision has been trying to censor the fact that he was stealing. He sent me this email: "My name is Shawn Guse and you have my name posted on your web site without my permission and I want it removed or changed to “A Washington man”, and I also want the link to the settlement removed if you have one. Please don’t contribute to the crucifixion of my name. If you are so kind as to remove the whole article that would be great. I have contacted many other web sites that are posting this and they are gladly removing it due to my request."

So I wrote another article about him: http://www.bruceongames.com/2008/09/25/shawn-guse-software-thief/

Shawn Guse,one of the thieves nabbed by Activision has been trying to censor the fact that he was stealing. He sent me this email: "My name is Shawn Guse and you have my name posted on your web site without my permission and I want it removed or changed to “A Washington man”, and I also want the link to the settlement removed if you have one. Please don’t contribute to the crucifixion of my name. If you are so kind as to remove the whole article that would be great. I have contacted many other web sites that are posting this and they are gladly removing it due to my request."

So I wrote another article about him: http://www.bruceongames.com/2008/09/25/shawn-guse-software-thief/