CD Projekt demands Witcher 2 pirates pay up, '100% sure' it's targeting properly

@Johnnynumber5 is powered by cell How many German pirates are they going after?

@KGameLover1

I think that this is just another waste of time like most measures against piracy.....how they are going to prove that the owner of the account downloaded the game??? this has been done millions of times and those "john dove" demands only end in waste of legal resources....it´s sad to see this kind of things but piracy is here to stay and everybody knows it, there isn´t a lot that it can be done against it.

@Hunter141072

Has it really? Looked up the Hurt Locker case and saw that 90% of the cases have been dismissed, but that means 10% are still up for trial. It's not like these people are stupid, and you can bet that there's been progress in ways to differentiate between actual offenders and possible red herrings.

In any case it'd be great to see this make actual headway. The best thing you can do to pirates is to give them a good scare so most of the casual offenders go away.

@Muu

maybe, but it hasnt scare the casual pirates... at least not the ones who work at Sony, Universal and FOX......


http://torrentfreak.com/busted-bittorrent-pirates-at-sony-universal-and-fox-111213/

@Hunter141072 It's not really hard when the cable company confirms that the user at that address was sending those packets and they have the logs on the modem and the data center to prove it...

Sure there's some people out there behind proxies but not everyone is that smart.

@Hunter141072 Yes there is..

STOP MAKING GAMES FOR THE PC.

@StarcasM

Yes, because console games are never pirated...

@KGameLover1

Wrong. It does pay.

@Mopo Console piracy definitely exists, but other than DS and PSP piracy I don't think it's anywhere near as big as piracy on the PC.

@Hank Hill
You'd be surprised at the number of modded Wii's out there.

@jsx92

they cannot not use that information to press charges because i believe that the only way for to obtain that information is illegally. at least in the US, that is probably why they are prosecuting people in Germany.

@Lukeyo
I have family in germany. Trust me on this, most of the young over there either hack systems themselves, or get someone they know to do it. I know 3 people, , that have 100's of games that are all pirated. My daughters friend wanted to set her up to play pirated games on her phone and her comp and ps3. Thankfully she refused. At least my kid is loyal to the gaming world. I can understand maybe a pirated video that was never released, like the original Fantastic Four movie, which a buddy of mine had till the tape wore out on him, (the idiot). But simply put, piracy will never be stopped. It's just too easy, and too much money to be made.

@CARmakazie
$1180?

How about $49? As in, the actual cost of a copy of the game at the time it was downloaded?

Maybe if CD Project, Hollywood, RIAA et al would send notices to people it suspects of piracy saying "you owe us the retail amount of what you downloaded." instead of "you owe us $239,308,00 per download per item per minute per byte plus legal fees and new yacht fees" people would have more sympathy for them. As it is, trying to hit someone up for $1000 for a $49 game makes you look like a gigantic cock.

@chargen
It's gotta be significantly more than the retail cost. Enough to actively further piracy. A slap on the wrist does nothing to solve the problem, especially since 90% of the cases will be dismissed.

That much more than the retail cost might be a bit overkill, but at the end of the I can't say I feel much sympathy for the pirates.

@chargen
How is the *possibility* of having to pay the same as amount every law-abiding person, assuming you are found out, any sort of deterrent to pirates? The "gigantic cocks" are the ones who steal games, they deserve the legal actions that entails. And this is coming from someone who has paid for stupid actions like that.

@chargen So under your system, why should I not pirate? If the worst that happens is that I have to pay what I might have had to pay anyway, it's better to just pirate and hope I don't get caught. If I do, ah well, I'm just paying retail price now.

@chargen

"$1180?"

Before The Witcher 2 was released, CD Projekt outright said that they would be watching torrents and that they would be suing pirates...yet no one believed them. So now that they're actually starting to make good on their word, people suddenly have a problem? $1180 is a lot of money to most people, and that's the point; in order to provide incentive to not pirate a product, people need to be hit in the one place they generally care about the most. This isn't, "We want $600,000+ dollars and we'll sue your dead grandma's estate because you yanked a Pearl Jam album off of Napster" that RIAA typically goes for, this is, "We're going to hit you in the financial testicles because that's the only way you're ever going to learn."

There is ZERO reason to pirate the game. It's been available worldwide since day one. GOG offered a DRM-free version and then patched it out of each version weeks after release. It also sells between $20 and $40. People were warned well before launch what would happen...so forgive me for not espousing much sympathy for those effected.

@chargen
How about the costs to pay the external company that developed their method to track the pirates down? Or whatever cost their own company had to put forth on their own end to follow through tracking? Or the legal costs to pursue prosecution?

But maybe you just assume all that stuff comes for free, as the piracy generation has lead people to expect.

@chargen

Oh god.

Lets say I stole your wallet and it had $20 in it.
Police arrests me and they say my fine is $20 dollars.

thats surreal.

Now imagine if I murdered someone...

@chargen Do you think when you steal something from a store they just say "Oh, we caught you but it's totally cool if you just pay us for what you stole, no penalty needed."?

@CrabBattle No, instead if you steal something, the vicitm doesn't necessarily get repaid and far more more money than the thing you stole is worth is spent to punish you.

CD Projekt Also assumes pirates were going to buy the game in the first place.

So, it's kinda like if you were convinced that they took a 20 from your wallet and then they get fined 1000$ bucks because of that.

@(Unverified) - "CD Projekt Also assumes pirates were going to buy the game in the first place."

I don't see them assuming that anywhere. In fact the PC Gamer article that is linked to in this post even addresses the people who will never buy the game, basically saying if that's the case, fine but we don't want you playing our game if you're not going to pay.

The "A lot of them were never going to buy it anyway" defense only works when companies are trying to claim how much was lost due to piracy.

It's not a valid defense for pirating a game.

I'm never going to buy a Ferrari. Does that make it ok for me to go steal one?

@Vesuvium
It has been done this way for a decade now. >1% are sued, and of those %90 of the cases are thrown out. This has deterred piracy?

So if you buy a copy of a DVD from some shady guy on on the street, a film still in theaters, and cop finds you with it, is he going to treat you like you stole a DVD from a store and arrest you? Is he going to fine you you $100,000? Is he going to do anything other than confiscate it and question you about who you bought it from? No he is not.

Jesus people, it looks like some of you drank that koolaid piss from the MPAA. Some of you idiots actually believe that purchasing or downloading a pirated copy of a copyrighted work is equivalent to stealing a ferrari. MPAA, you should be proud. These kids' brains are mush now.

Absolutely pathetic.

@Marshillboy

Wow, read the comments on the Torrent Freak site, so apparently CD Projekt RED are a bunch of douche bags for suing the "Fans" that pirated it. Even though they removed DRM, which is what EVERY pirate complains about, now they start questioning the legality and the morality of the Developer.

/facepalm

@ComedyInK But when the music industry did it we verbally crucified them over it. Now suddently just because a good developer is suing random people who may or may not be pirates they get a pass? It's the same damn method the music industry is using to shakedown people.

@JohnDM Except they aren't customers, they are thieves. They are treating thieves like criminals, you have to buy the game to be a customer.

@CandyCaptain Opps ma bad lol. Mis-read the comment lolz!

@JohnDM

Man, your logic... So it's bad that a court treats someone who has stolen property as a criminal?

Makes sense to me. *no sarcasm*

@Frostblade10

And by "Makes sense to me", I mean that it makes sense to me that people are being treated as criminals, not that you make sense.

@Frostblade10
I think what he's saying is that by not using DRM they are treating the paying customers well, but still going after the criminals in another way that doesn't affect the people who legitimately bought the game.

@Frostblade10

Comprehension is hard.

@Nook

Very well.

I used to condone piracy, but then I got a cease and desist letter. Now, I'm a good little gamer.

@The Ogre Pretty sure the civil court would care about whether or not the claim had merit.

@greyseal
I remember reading a story about some no-name band who went into a rage after finding out that their album went "Pirate Platinum," except their figures were completely false.

@greyseal 4.5 million is probably the result of looking at various trackers and seeing how many times the game has been fully downloaded through the tracker. They publicly show these things, you know.

@Rather Dashing
No, that isn't how they arrived at their figure at all. It was pure bullshit pulled from their ass. Seriously. They didn't look at completed downloads but seeders/leechers and then pulled some fantasy math on it to make the rationale that 4.5 million pirated.

It may be more, it may be less, but fantasy figures do nothing for anyone. All it does is hurt the industry and create further confusion and skepticism on both sides.

It should be as simple as going to the top 100 public torrent sites and top 100 private torrent sites and look at COMPLETED downloads, add it up, along with the CONSOLE version. If the difference isn't more than 25%, it's a non-issue. But no one wants to systematically do that. I have no idea why, perhaps they're afraid that the results wouldn't be as dramatic as they would like. Perhaps they'd find out just how many people grab 360 games.

I have done some simple looking around from time to time on popular games, like fps, and I have seen GENERALLY that 360 and PC are pirated pretty equally when looking at COMPLETED downloads and not seeders. Seeders/leechers mean nothing. It's the completed download that matters. Yeah, say you didn't download the nfo most trackers wouldn't count that as a completed download but it's more reliable than assuming every leecher/seeder at every tracker is unique because they're not. Nor is the "rate" reliable. Nor is a completed download a 1/1 lost sale.

Of note, PS3 gets pirated the least, consistently - obviously, and yet it's not a darling in sales. Steady and solid, but it's not number one so I guess piracy isn't the whole equation then, is it.

@Mmmmz I remember the math being something like averaging a certain amount of downloads per day during a certain week, then multiplying that times the amount of days the game has been out. Actually, it was more in-depth than that. It's out there on the Internet somewhere. Check RPS or Kotaku.

@DustbinK
"There are no stats available, but let’s make a quick calculation. I was checking regularly the number of concurrent downloads on torrent aggregating sites, and for the first 6-8 weeks there was around 20-30k ppl downloading it at the same time. Let’s take 20k as the average and let’s take 6 weeks. The game is 14GB, so let’s assume that on an average not-too-fast connection it will be 6 hours of download. 6 weeks is 56 days, which equals to 1344 hours; and with 6h of average download time to get the game it would give us 224 downloads, then let’s multiply it by 20k simultaneous downloaders."


Fantasy.Math.

@Mmmmz

Not fantasy, applying logic to seen facts.

@greyseal

Man. Brilliant. Just brilliant. You're absolutely right.