Thursday, July 26th 2018
Thinking Outside the DRM: Denuvo Sues Founder of Piracy Group "REVOLT"
What do you do when your main product keeps being bypassed in the eternal cat and mouse game of DRM versus piracy groups? If you're with Denuvo, you think "outside the box" and look for slightly different ways to eliminate the competition, such as actual legal action.
Following this legal action and a collaboration with Bulgaria's police, the justice system has managed to identify Aka Voksi as the founder of scene group "Revolt", seizing his personal computer - events that resulted in Voksi stating he would be dropping all piracy-related activities immediately and for the future (a wise move considering the circumstances). Reddit and piracy-focused websites have already begun fundraising efforts to prepare for Voksi's defense.
A statement from Denuvo's parent company Irdeto follows:
Source:
ETeknix
Following this legal action and a collaboration with Bulgaria's police, the justice system has managed to identify Aka Voksi as the founder of scene group "Revolt", seizing his personal computer - events that resulted in Voksi stating he would be dropping all piracy-related activities immediately and for the future (a wise move considering the circumstances). Reddit and piracy-focused websites have already begun fundraising efforts to prepare for Voksi's defense.
"A 21-year-old Bulgarian man. Aka Voksi, from Dimitrovgrad, Bulgaria. Allegedly responsible for the hacking of a number of games carrying Denuvo's Anti-Tamper software. Has been arrested following a collaboration between Irdeto and the Bulgarian Cybercrime Unit. Following an initial investigation by Irdeto into the hacking of Denuvo Anti-Tamper software. The findings were passed to the Bulgarian Cybercrime Unit. And resulted in the raid on a premises in Dimitrovgrad, Bulgaria on Tuesday. During the raid, computers and other items suspected to have been used in the piracy of a range of titles were seized by police."
106 Comments on Thinking Outside the DRM: Denuvo Sues Founder of Piracy Group "REVOLT"
everyone of your arguments has been debunked over and over over again(no I will not google for you)
as much as certain people use flawed logic to attempt to present it as such, piracy is not theft it's never been theft it will never be the legal definition and you can kick and scream about it all that will not change, its why we have copyright law (which is badly broken and constantly abused)
I am for piracy for one simple reason it keeps vendors in check, the good vendors don't give it any thought. there product stands on its own without any help and they know people will support them
the greedy stupid ones ... there the ones that cry about it and there the ones that deserve to be pirated into non existence in fact I would much prefer they die a slow painful death and never make anouther game ever again, the gaming market is saturated enough nothing of value would be lost if battlefield or COD or no mans sky suddenly disappeared and nobody ever heard anything from there publisher/developer ever again
< Proud owner of a 4K Blu-Ray drive.. that doesn't work, except with an Intel GPU and Kaby Lake and HDCP.. AND Intel Software Extensions enabled in the BIOS (enabled.. not software controlled) AND you had this BIOS set up with the extensions WHEN you installed Windows from scratch. Only then can you use like ONE product (Cyberlink) to play your damn 4k discs you already paid for... on a drive you already paid for.
HDCP has been completely broken for so many years thats a pretty thin point
again it keeps the vendors in check and it keeps the bs to a minimum well maybe not a minimum but its leverage
it all goes back to what the pirate bay said years ago when you stop treating your customers as potential criminals and treat them as customers, you don't have half the problem people respect you and like your products and that = sales
in short vendors need to stop fighting back and then the war would be over, there fighting a lost cause and all they are doing is increasing the casualties
why ask you do the vendors need to be the ones that put down there virtual laser rifles, because they escalated it and they continue to screw there customers over AND OVER AND OVER with underwhelming over hyped products that aren't worth half there asking prices in a fair share of cases
agree with it or not pirates are the good guys trying to do the 'right' thing in a world where the people that are supposed to be doing right are doing wrong .... Mostly as with all things exceptions apply
But yeah, I'm one of the casualities. I happily pay for things.. but they still have to be difficult either way. And while I don't support piracy myself, like I said, they deserve what's coming to them and more.
As for games, I'm not sure how much it affects performance, but I'm very dilligent and OCD-ish about what gets installed in my computer. So I hate this too.
DRM is malware with the express intent to make other software not work as intended. It leads to more refunds, angry customer service tickets, and lost repeat sales than it offsets in terms of denying pirates access for a year at the most.
The vast majority of pirates are also in places with low GDP where the game at retail price can be a whole days worth or more of salary. I don't understand why publishers don't remove the DRM and replace it with a system instead that serializes all of the games and figures out which installs are unauthorized. It reports the unauthorized install to the publisher and the publisher writes that copy off as a charitable contribution.Dragon Age Origins and Hitman come to mind. If you lose internet access and those games decide to phone home, too bad, so sad, you're done playing the game until ET's finger works again. Even in Hitman, you're dragging a body or something when it decides to phone home, you'll drop the body so you have to grab it again.
DRM sucks man. It punishes everyone. HDCP is just another flavor of DRM invented to make the film and TV industry happy (to the detriment of everyone not them).
You even managed to somehow put the blame for software piracy on the software vendors themselves! Bravo! That little gem of yours above REALLY proves my point, thank you. :)
If you want to read about software piracy, read the following exhaustive, unbiased, and incredible analysis on the effects of software piracy I ever had the pleasure to read. It also debunks all the arguments software pirates use to justify their wrong-doing while still managing to remain unbiased (EDIT: the article, not the pirates lol) - not an easy feat:
www.tweakguides.com/Piracy_1.html
SAME f#$%g thing!!
As to Hellblade, Ninja Theory is far from an unknown company.
@JcRabbit Just stop. You're embarrassing yourself. Your narrow-minded moral platitudes echo the game publisher's who use DRM, which do not concern us. We gamers care about the broad effective moralities such as user rights(the right to play games we've paid for when we choose without limitation). You are preaching an ethic proven to be useless, a waste of time and resources.
I predict the fallout from this very foolish move is that the hacking/cracking communities are going to go dark web then declare all out war on Denuvo and the DRM industry as a whole. Publishers had better pucker their back-sides, because it's only big sand-paper shafted nastiness from here.
How you guys fail to understand how twisted that reasoning is, is totally beyond me.So crackers are 'freedom fighters' now? lol. Proves without a doubt that one man's freedom fighter is another man's terrorist.
Look, all your talk about defending software piracy would STOP ABRUPTLY the very SECOND something YOU spent a long time sweating blood and tears to create got cracked and pirated.
I can already picture it: 'But, but... I am one of the GOOD guys! Why are they doing this to me?! THIEVES! <SHOCK>'.
It's very easy to defend software piracy when you only have to gain from it and nothing to lose. But the very nanosecond it affects YOUR income (instead of someone else's) then it is, of course, a VERY different story. Unfortunately it's the kind of thing most people won't really understand until it affects them personally.
Pirates and crackers are not the 'good guys', and they don't really care who the good and the bad guys in the industry are either, they go after EVERYTHING.Sure I am. You're the one saying we should reward criminals for their criminal activity and I am the one embarrassing myself? Go read the article I linked to above, if you don't suffer from ADD.
Anyway, you're on. :)True. Your point being?
Not all pick lockers are thieves, some actually do it for an honest living - a skill necessary and useful when someone forgets their keys. But this is because CONSENT is given by the property owner. If you crack an application (i.e.; by pass the locks) without the consent of the legit owner, then you are a criminal and a thief.Again you keep conveniently forgetting that DRM came AFTER software piracy, not the other way around.
What you seem to be implying is that an home owner has no legit right to defend his own house from burglars. In other words, software developers should just quietly take it up the *ss and do nothing about it.
Look, I dislike DRM as much as you do (although to tell you the truth, it hasn't interfered with any of the games I like to play in a VERY long time and that is fine with me) but I understand why it is necessary. In an ideal world Just closing the door to a bank safe should be enough - but this is not an ideal world and so it isn't - your lock must be secure enough to prevent most if not all thieves from robbing it.
In the case of games, even if it deters thieves from breaking the lock for only a few days or weeks, that will already help - because a lot of people who cannot pirate the game on day 0 will actually buy it instead. And that blows another theory out of the water too, that nothing is taken because people would not buy it anyway. That's BS. Some would not, true, but many would! So the loss is real, it is just hard to quantify.Yes, a little cheese would be nice, thank you. :)
I am saying that those games sell very well DESPITE software piracy, not BECAUSE of it. That is not the point, what you are saying is a fallacy anyway. How many MORE units would that game sell if it couldn't be pirated?
Whichever way you try to distort the issue, there is one thing you cannot deny: THERE IS a loss because of software piracy. And that is money that game developers would have received otherwise, so money that belongs to THEM and not to the users. Ergo, money that was TAKEN/STOLEN from them without their consent.
Did you read the article already, by the way? You can start by responding to all the legitimate points that article makes.
By voiding ones right to make a personal copy they have taken away a person's legal rights.
The only technicality they can get the "hacker" with is if he onsold copies.
In the old days you could also photocopy books to keep a 'backup' copy, but nobody ever did because it was just too expensive. If you lost the book you were NOT entitled to a 'free' copy either - you could always just buy another one.
Anyway, this kind of is a mute point with Steam and digital game distribution becoming the norm these days - if your hard drive crashes you just download the game again.A hacker can still be sued. The only reason he isn't put in jail is because it is still considered a civil offense and not a criminal one - which is a mistake, if you ask me. Anyway, laws can and are changed all the time and they evolve over time to keep up with new technology - although very slowly sometimes.
We also often used NO-CD patches/cracks so we didn't have to stick stupid CD/DVD's into drive every time we wanted to play them. For LEGALLY PURCHASED! games.
Other option is GOG who treats us as customers and not thieves by default. Which is why I always prefer buying from them if possible.
I just can't go past endless idiocies when I bought a game and was then punished for it because I had to deal with stupid DRM where pirates who actually stole it had NO PROBLEMS because games just worked fine.
As long as there is evidence of a "clean room" reverse engineer, it's completely legal to do (Nightdive Studio does this to make ports of games). I think it was a Megaman game where they emulated the console it ran on to the letter so all of the glitches in the original exist in the port. As far as I know, Nintendo didn't give them their blessing to emulate their hardware but Capcom gave their blessing to restore the game.
"Right to repair" should extend to games broken by DRM too.
Let me clear: the act of reverse engineering DRM is very different from the "piracy groups" that go beyond that: distributing the software in its entirety (often in addition to the means to circumvent the DRM). That breaks so many copyright and intellectual property laws it isn't even funny.
DRM, however, is a CONSEQUENCE of software piracy and does not invalidate that pirating and cracking software IS wrong.
If you (or anyone else) want to pirate software, please go ahead, just man up to what you are doing and don't pretend or fool yourself that what you are doing is good or that you are doing it because you want to 'stick it to the man'. The reality is that you are doing it for your own personal gain in detriment of the gain of others, the legit owners and creators of the content you're currently enjoying to play.
Try modifying a work of software and then passing it as your own work to see how well that goes - you'll be sued for copyright infringement. So the 'intellectual property' is NOT yours to do as you please, as you seem to be implying. Only the medium in which that intellectual property is expressed is yours.Name a few.LOL. No wait, please explain it to me like I'm 5 years old, will you, daddy? :p
Cut the crap, you can be better than that. Now, getting back to the point in question:
You're trying to hang on to technicalities when you know very well that cracking software and then making that crack available to others is AT THE VERY LEAST immoral. But you are also wrong about it not being illegal (as I said, laws are slowly catching up to the new technologies):
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act makes the act of circumventing access control a crime whether or not a copyright violation has occurred. It doesn’t actually matter whether you are the one who did the actual cracking or not… installing it on your pc when the software should have access control is enough.Do you even understand how wrong it is what you are saying? By the same reasoning, we shouldn't have law enforcement or put criminals in prison because doing so has not made crime disappear.
Crime, like software piracy, will never go away. All you can do is try to make sure it stays on controlled levels.Yeah, game developers are stupid people who take a secret and sadistic pleasure from inconveniencing legit users. They even pay Denuvo and others like them thousands of dollars for technologies that don't work.
OF COURSE IT WORKS. It won't work forever, but it does work and every day without a crack is money in the bank. If DRM didn't work, nobody would be using it by now.Yes, the old ideology vs. the real world. Problem being that the real world trumps ideology every single time.
So because they will never succeed entirely they should stop trying? Despite the fact that DRM does help sales?
Look, just go read that article already, it also discusses arguments such as yours:
"Many people will blurt out what they believe is the ultimate argument against copy protection and DRM: "It doesn't work!". This claim is borne out of the misconception that the games industry is using copy protection or DRM measures to completely eliminate piracy, which is absurd. It's common knowledge both within the gaming industry and outside it that piracy cannot be stopped completely. If properly motivated, and given enough time, pirates can and will break through virtually any software or hardware-based defence mechanism. The rationale behind the use of copy protection and DRM is much the same as the rationale behind the use of physical locks: to increase the complexity, time, effort and risk involved in attempting to overcome the protection, in the hopes of discouraging 'casual' pirates and thieves. In other words whether a physical lock or a digital lock, the aim is essentially to keep honest people honest, not to present an impenetrable barrier. "
www.tweakguides.com/Piracy_8.htmlWait, you rephrase exactly what I wrote and admit that SOME WOULD and then you say that my argument is without logic?! lol
It is EXACTLY as I said: some would, the problem is quantifying how many.
It does not matter, what matters is that *some* would (even by your own admission) so money is effectively being stolen from the legit content creators.Look, just go read that article I already mentioned here several times, it is unbiased, very well written, covers all these arguments and it analyses the issue with facts, figures and examples:
"Economic Loss
The argument is straightforward and both intuitively and logically sound: for every pirated copy of a product, there is some potential loss of income to the producer of that product. This is not the same as saying that every pirated copy is a lost sale. What it actually means is that firstly some proportion of the people who are pirating a game would have bought it in the absence of piracy. Equally as important however is the fact that even those who would never have paid the full purchase price for one reason or another may still have paid some lower amount to purchase and play the game which they pirated. This is because by the very act of obtaining and playing a game, they've clearly demonstrated that they place some value on that game. After all, if something is truly 'worthless', consumers won't bother to obtain or use it in the first place, regardless of whether it's free or not. Even if a game only gives the pirate a few hours of enjoyment, that's still worth something. In the absence of piracy they may have purchased the game at a discount several months after its release, or bought it second-hand for example. So the existence of piracy results in some loss of income to PC game developers, publishers, retailers and even other consumers.
Pure economic loss is actually very difficult to calculate in precise terms because it's largely hypothetical - there's no way of knowing exactly how many more units of a particular product would have sold if piracy did not exist, or how much money various people would have paid over time to buy discounted or second-hand copies in the absence of piracy for example. However examination of piracy figures combined with sales figures for similar products which are less affected by piracy does provide some indication of the scale of loss."
....
"Piracy & Marketing
One of the economic arguments in support of piracy is that it imparts benefits to the producers because the mass distribution of pirated copies of a product effectively provides valuable free publicity and marketing via word of mouth. This can be particularly useful for low budget releases which don't have large marketing budgets. For example if a hesitant purchaser obtains a pirated copy of a little-known game and then loves it, there's no doubt they're much more likely to encourage their friends to get that game. This argument is logically sound, in that there is indeed a great deal of power in the way in which widespread positive word of mouth can influence the perceptions and decisions of the general public, and propel an otherwise unknown or underrated game to greater popularity.
However the argument deliberately ignores one fundamental problem: there's no evidence to suggest that positive word of mouth from pirates results in anything other than more people pirating a particularly popular game. After all, if a person can tell others about a pirated game he likes, he can just as easily tell them how and where to obtain it illegally, or give them a copy for example. So it's unclear as to how much this additional positive word of mouth due to piracy actually results in increased sales rather than simply increased piracy. Looking at the data in the next two sections, we can see that the more popular a game, the significantly higher the number of people pirating it, though sales may also benefit as well. So the net effect of this claim is unclear."
www.tweakguides.com/Piracy_3.html
There is no evidence that pirated copy encourages purchase just as pirated copy doesn't mean loss of revenue/income.
Piracy was one of only means of even obtaining games years ago for me and kids mostly do it because they have no purchasing power. I mean, how many parents would pay 60€ for endless supplies of games to kids? Not many. But pirated copies could be obtained no questions asked from parents and no whining for wallet/credit card.
Fast forward 2+ decades and I've basically purchased almost all games I've had pirated in the past. A lot of them I still haven't played yet, but I've bought them because I have my own income now, I don't have to justify it to anyone (parents) and it just felt like a right thing to do. I also haven't pirated a single game for ages thanks to my own income and global availability of games via Steam/GOG and the likes. And because I value honesty despite pirating circumstances from the past, I insist buying from GOG whenever possible. They respect me with zero DRM policy and I respect their trust by never sharing any of installers with anyone, even though you can easily just copy them with USB drive or upload them somewhere.
GOG is well aware people pirate their games still, but they keep on building with zero DRM trust policy and huge number of people greatly appreciate and respect that. Me included. For me, knowing games will work for unforeseeable future without having to botch therm with cracks is what is most important. I mean, I still play NFS3 from 1998 here and there which we had to hack on our own to play today...