The can sue them for anti-circumvention statutes in the DMCA. But not for infringement, since the developers did not do the infringement, they only enabled it.
How did the cracked game enter circulation, if the crackers didn't redistribute it?
In this very specific case, it's a no-cd patch, you can be a legitimate owner of the copy but for some very valid reasons that do not want load the CD every time you play the game. (Like disk and/drive wearing, or just don't like the hassle)
Disney lawyers, meanwhile, are looking to extend copyright to 50 years beyond the life of the author's 3rd generation descendant or the heat death of the universe, whichever comes last.
The way things are going, the death of Disney may come quicker.
Lolwat? Have you been to Disney? They take all your money. Have you watched a movie? Chances are Disney made it happen.
I want to know in what world a company like Disney goes anywhere and then send Microsoft and Amazon there.
could the NoCD crack author do a DMCA takedown on these games now? Would it even need to be the author issuing such a request?
You need to either be or represent the copyright holder. I'm 99% sure most warez groups have no interest in exposing themselves to any legal systems when it comes to what they do.
In Russia, developers of a Minecraft crack called TLauncher have targeted other developers of other Russian Minecraft cracking projects with takedowns and trademark complaints. How did they do it? They registered a company in the Seychelles islands to protect their identity. And of course, they're relying on the fact that the Russian government is uninterested in protecting the intellectual property of Mojang.
The copy protection wars were a blast back in the day. A decent number of games had methods of copy protection that were more interesting than the games themselves. I still remember the Wizardy IV copy protection (Mordor Charge Card). The game came with a book of thousands and thousands numbers printed on very dark brown pages that were difficult, if not impossible, to legibly photocopy on the machines of the day. I still have the book, and it takes a very bright light and (in my old age) a magnifying glass to make out the numbers for the copy protection challenges (which only come after completing a somewhat challenging first level).
Former cracker for rzr here :) did not do this game unfortunately.
Question for you from the 17 year old me. Why did you do this? Fame? Money? Challenge? I didn't know enough to so it myself and no one would teach me.
It’s a great way to learn - so challenge. There’s neither fame nor money here I think.
At least in the 90s there were lots of tutorials to learn how to crack/reverse engineer, from +orc’s documentation to fravia ´s fortress of reverse engineering - I’d expect similar tutorials to still be around.
Reverse engineering also happens to be a very useful skill as a regular software engineer ( debugging compiler bugs, figuring out why software X is behaving strangely and what it is doing etc ).
It would be kind of sad/funny if one of the games had a bad crack and the game itself was broken and not caught by QA. For example, Earthbound has one final check that would cause the game to freeze and delete your save at the final boss.
To me it happened the other way around. The original game from Steam won't run on Linux but if I change the .exe for one that is cracked, it works. I've been keeping that .exe for years.
Rockstar owns the copyright, they can do whatever they want with their games. It is rather odd however, and paints Rockstar in a very negative light as a trustworthy purveyor of binary distributed software. Do you want to receive l33t warez when paying for software? I expect reproducible binaries produced by a controlled toolchain from a responsible developer. Linux distributions have higher standards for binaries th…
Ironically the leet warez often are more well behaved pieces of software than the average crap app on the store of popular mobile OS manufacturers.
People had standards at the time, which wasn't that long ago either.
Reproducible builds and controlled toolchains are not really things you are going to realistically have, shipping games for Windows - even in 2023. That does not necessarily mean the final build is coming out of Mikes office PC, however.
You're taking what I said to mean a very pedantic definition of "reproducible builds" that even Linux distros largely only aspire to achieve. By reproducible I meant they can recreate their binaries from source code, not necessarily bit-for-bit. There's zero reason to ship a Warez group's cracked version of a game when you're the copyright holder in possession of the source and ability to simply build an executable w…
The game is old and recreating the tool chain required to rebuild the game might be a massive work investment.
It probably is even less save, because the builds differ and perhaps behave differently and you might even need a full QA cycle. The likelyhood of an old crack working more flawlessly is higher.
Related story, I remember years ago as a kid I bought a Prince of Persia PC game at a yardsale (on a CD), but early on in the game there was a riddle where you needed a password to get through this door, it was some cryptic message of a few numbers. I don't remember the exact format but it turned out the riddle was instructing me to go to page X, line Y and character Z of the manual for the game! I remember being so…
GTA IV has something similar, if you play a cracked copy eventually the camera starts to wobble and it makes it impossible to play, and it makes it look like a bug. I remember thousands of players asking in the forums why their camera was shaking without knowing they're telling everyone they had a pirated game. Hilarious move from Rockstar. For those wondering, yes it happened to me, it was absolutely infuriating lik…
The original Settlers 1 game, released in 1993, had ingenious copy protection built in. It had multiple levels of copy protection, that would activate, if the copy protection was attempted circumvented, i.e. cracked. It would not let you complete levels due to some characters missing/never appearing and the likes, if you used a cracked version of the game. Much like you describe with GTA IV, users thought this was a buggy game, while in reality it was a buggy crack.