Tim, funny thing is that most publishers see secondhand sales to be as bad as piracy. They won't say this for fear of losing sales but many still feel this way.

Companies should go after seeders and those who do it on a large scale. Going after small fish only means you end up accidentally targeting innocents because life isn't black & white and there's a LOT of grey in-between.

The reason they go after little fish, is because they're easy to scare, easy to find and blame and in general, it's a lazy way to do it. It won't solve the problem at all and won't send a real signal either, except that this company uses shady companies to make money by using threats and extortion. In the end, a bad rep can do far more damage than piracy - especially since a bad rep can massive increase the amount of piracy.

Yes, but you see: you don't get it. They can have the MAC address and then what? A MAC address denotes an ethernet connection so if it's a laptop, simply hide the laptop. If it's a computer, replace the motherboard or network card. MAC addresses are ONLY of use if they had directly got the police to ring their door bell and seize every piece of hardware.

And if you think these details are that simple - ISPs wouldn't give out those details to a company like that. If it went to court, yes. But as has been said before, court is very expensive - that company gets enough money from its extortion racket to be able to afford to, but most people can't afford a lawyer and expensive legal fees.

Then it's up to CD Projekt to respond and to clarify. The fact that they're very quiet worries me. But I've yet to hear of any such company that isn't using sleazy means to make money. The fact is, that they use unsure evidence to blackmail people. In the past, there were examples of a woman who didn't even have a computer, paying the fee because she was scared shitless for being taken to court when she couldn't afford it.

No you can't prove that easily - that's nonsense. These companies don't track how much you download, just track IPs - only your ISP could show the amount of data that went through a certain port and even then, they'd have to log it (and, clue, most don't) AND then it would be hard to distinguish between different torrents. In short, it's not easy at all. Anything on your hard drive you can't use as proof anyway since it could be tampered with.

I think you're being too naive about how these extortion rackets work. These companies KNOW that it's a lot easier for them to extort money even if their evidence is shady - because going to court means a lot of hassle over a lot of time and even innocent people would feel it easier to just pay the fines than to go through a nightmare of legal procedures. That's why it's a racket.

I don't disagree with that. Going to the source does better job with curbing the piracy, as then all the small fish will be yelling helpless on torrent forums "seed please! I'm stuck at 80%!". It also lowers the chance of wrong alarms.

So, maybe they really should just stop using the scare letters, and sue the pirates where they feel the case holds. I'd be fine with that.

Hi,

here on pc-gamer, there is an interview of the CD-Project CEO, that clarifies their opinion about piracy.
http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/11/29/interview-cd-projekts-ceo-on-witcher-2-piracy-why-drms-still-not-worth-it[/url]

No where in the article the CEO metioned bullying strategies by lawyer firms as tool to fight piracy. He blubbers some marketing blub about high value of product and sort:

We did not give up, but came up with new strategy: we started offering high value with the product – like enhancing the game with additional collectors’ items like soundtracks, making-of DVDs, books, walkthroughs, etc. This, together with a long process of educating local gamers about why it makes sense to actually buy games legally, worked. And today, we have a reasonably healthy games market.

He has not mentioned legal ways of fighting copyright infringement. So he is not a lyer but did not come out with the whole dirty truth,. Two faced yes, lyer not so much. But in the case of CDPR i take stands for them. They delivered a bug free amusing twitcher 2 without DRM. So they have my sympathies.

But i would like them to stop taking legal actions against torrent seeders. You never catch the big fishes and you can not stop copyright infringement by these methods. Its like bullying younger kids on the schoolyard for their money. Its only about the quick buck. And most of this money does not go to CDPR but to the lawyer firms taking the legal actions. So no one profits but some sharklike human-shaped aliens = lawyers.

Have a nice weekend.

That would be the easiest way to track people trying to download your product ;).

I'm guessing some companies might employ this method.......it's also well known that police also host honeypots to catch criminals as well.

I must admit I am rather torn on the issue.

On one side I tend to be more lenient with CPD when compared to other companies because of their usual customer friendliness, but on the other side I find that using this king of tactics never is a good thing.

First most of the companies like Logistep, handling the "tracking" part as mostly incompetent and using methods of dubious legality. Logistep for example was notorious for that sending letters to peoples who downloaded the full game or the demo alike, or peoples who weren't even online (vacation, etc...) at the time of their "crime" and also keeping the information they gathered and tried to sell them to other rights owners. Maybe the company used by CDP is more competent but seriously I doubt.

Also like others have already mentioned the tactics used fell uncomfortably like racket, sends plenty of threat letters and hope that enough peoples will be scared enough to pay.

And the worse is that it work, I asked my legal counseling insurance (not sure of the English translation) and they told me that if that happened they won't care if I you are innocent or guilty they will simply pay (and of course if that happens too often they will brake your insurance contract) because it much cheaper and easier for them to simply pay rather than trying to fight back.

Most likely, you have to remember that, most of the time, what they are after is not "downloading" but "uploading/distributing" and when you use a torrent you are doing both (unless you disable uploading which often results in much lower download speed).

Owning could be used as an excuse for downloading the game (and even then the result will depends of the country), but not for "sharing" the game.

*reads article* *skips rest of discussion*
Actually I am deeply disturbed by this.

In that PC Gamer interview linked there (which I had also read and linked to when it was posted) it was said "I do not believe in forcing anyone to buy our game. If they do not want it and they pirated it, it means we did not have the right offer for them." and also "Witcher 1 was originally released in 2007, then in 2008 we released the Enhanced Edition. In the first year we sold 1M units, and most of it was in the area of $30-50, while the other million (we just reached 2M) was sold over the next 2.5 years. This shows that if you care for your game and gamers, they will support you. I am sure that lots of these guys played TW1 in a pirated version first. I am really happy they liked it so much that when they had a chance and could afford it, they decided to get a legal version. That’s how we treat piracy."

Kept promoting and praising GOG and CD Projekt recently and now I'm feeling quite played and betrayed.

When I saw what appeared to be their attitude so far I said it's the correct one and as a result, as long as they stick to it, I'll also be fair and never play any game produced or distributed by CDP pirated, period. (Before that there had only been a few specific games on that list, those I thought were good enough and not burdened by completely unreasonable DRM, by which I understand anything more than simple disk checks and/or an one-time activation.) As a result, I didn't play any of their games at all so far (there goes that lost sales idea). But when I see them going the same route as the "bad guys" (ie: nearly everyone else in the business), it really ruins that, shall we say, trust.

But do we have any official comment on this?

I knew you'd be American when reading this because it's illegal in most of Europe and called "entrapment". It's considered unethical because you basically create a situation where someone could feel pushed into doing something which they usually wouldn't.

There's tons of creepy stories about US cops really being assholes and pushing and pushing people to commit a crime - that's the reason it's illegal in the first place, because it's so easy to manipulate people.

One clip I once saw, taken by cops as "evidence" that was later leaked, saw a woman on the streets looking for a job to feed her kid. She was holding up a sign that she'd do menial jobs for food. Cop pulls over (acting as a regular guy of course) and he says "I'll pay you $200 for sex" and she goes "no I don't do that anymore" - so he keeps pushing, following her with the car, reducing it from sex to a "short blowjob" and basically pushes a mother, feeling guilty that she can't feed her baby, into performing a sexual act on him .. and when she finally says yes, he arrests her. It's disgusting - guys like that deserve a good beating.

So yeah, entrapment is illegal here - even as a citizen, you can't do it. If the court finds out you were the one hosting the material, guess what? You can kiss any fines goodbye.

Apparently the law firm Reichelt Klute Aßmann is sending out the cease-and-desist oder in the name of CDP and has been doing so since, at least, early July. They have been doing the same for other games, like Batman: Arkham Asylum, Dead Island, too.

The following German "article" has the most informations about the cease-and-desist order:

http://www.rechtsanwaltskanzlei-urheberrecht.de/news/Abmahnung_CD_Projekt_RED_Sp._Z.o.o._RKA_The_Witcher_2

I disagree. Scarcity is relevant. I wouldn't give a shit about your apple if another apple grew instantly every time you picked one. I think I might start to go in circles here so I'll draw my conclusion for now. Maybe if something else comes up I'll respond.

My goal was to show that copyright-infringement is not theft. It's just that, copyright-infringement. My goal was also to show that copyright is not natural, it's an artificial creation of state force. Copyright creates artificial scarcity.

What is copyright to me? The accepted reasoning for copyright is that if we (the people, so it's an agreement between the rest of us and the creator) give content creators limited-time monopoly privileges, they would be more likely to create. You could also argue that copyright is used as censorship and control (like trying to control what version of the bible was printed when the printing press was made) but I'll stick with the accepted reasoning.

The original length of copyright before a work went into public domain was 14 years during a time when it was much harder to distribute works. So I'd think the copyright length would decrease when the process of distribution became easier, right? Wrong. What is it now, the author's life +70 years? Thanks to Disney? Orcish makes a good point when he says "So since the content industry has in their possession what should be nearly the entire US public domain they are thieves? I'm okay with that. Seriously, how does anyone get off defending people stealing a whole bank while castigating the dude stealing a candy bar? I don't fucking get it."

Copyright-infringement isn't theft, and yet you could be fined up into the millions of dollars for infringement. This is just fucking ridiculous. Now let's say people start getting letters in the mail saying to pay $1,200 USD for alleged copyright infringement or else, well, have you heard of Jammie Thomas? Now the people are outraged about this. Allowing extortion is NOT why they made a copyright agreement. Since they made the agreement, and the content industry is abusing it, the people have every right to say we're not allowing you to do this anymore, bunch of thugs. They want us to pay just for even looking at their damn content. What's more, I won't even be able to use any of the content I see within my lifetime.

Now I start to doubt if copyright even accomplishes its accepted goal. I look at the apparel industry. There's no copyright in that industry, and yet I have regular, everyday Joe Shmoe friends who don't make a whole lot of money that go buy $100 jeans (in USD) and $60 t-shirts when they could buy $20 jeans that are just as good. I've found some jeans that are utter crap, but yes I have found $20 jeans that last. There are all kinds of variety of clothes to buy here in the U.S. It is not lacking creativity.

Let's quit calling copyright-infringement "pirating" and "stealing" and call it what it is; copying and sharing using your own resources, no one else's.