Massive lawsuits planned against game pirates

Posted by Dan on August 21, 2008

GamesIndustry.biz is reporting from Leipzig that five gaming companies, Atari, Codemasters, Reality Pump, Techland and Topware Interactive, have appointed UK law firm Davenport Lyons to make a demand of 300 GBP to approximately 25,000 users suspected of pirating game software. We’ll have more on that firm’s recent success in another post, by the way.

This litigation is seemingly RIAA-esque in its nature: making a monetary demand on that scale of users, with as little actual evidence as the firm likely has, is rather frowned upon in the U.S. It’s the kind of action that perhaps a huge industry association such as the RIAA and MPAA with vast lobbying powers could get away with, but it seems to be a bit beyond five publishers (and not even five of the largest).

It’s interesting to note that at the same time, the head of EA Sports, Peter Moore, announced that he does not support suing game pirates, as he believes that route has historically failed. Lets put something in perspective here: Codemasters is claiming that Operation Flashpoint was downloaded over 691,000 times in one week. Pretending for a second that’s not an excessively high number, OFP had a much hyped FADE copy protection that theoretically (I don’t think it was ever confirmed if it worked or not) degraded a copy that was illegitimate over time. When I was with 3dActionPlanet, and got my press copy of OFP, (one of the very earliest press builds), it had the strictest copy protection I’ve ever come across to date: I had to start the game, eject the disc, insert the copy protection removal disc, run that program, eject, reinsert the game disc, and hope it didn’t crash, which anyone who played an unpatched version of OFP will tell you is like wishing the tooth fairy drops hundred dollar bills. And OFP wasn’t even that popular of a game, it’s a cult classic.

I think these numbers are unreasonably high, and the concept of demanding a settlement before commencement of an action, en masse, carries in the U.S. a reek of extortion. I question whether this is something that will succeed, especially at the price tag of 300 pounds (They certainly can’t argue that their GAME costs that much, the argument must be contributory infringement by uploading, but how likely is it they have data to support that?)

The whole thing sounds shady to us. It’s something we’ll keep updated on. (Can someone think of a good name for this we can categorize it as? Something like “Five Publishers vs. The UK”?)

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