Live data from Hacker News

Rockstar is selling cracked game copies on Steam

twitter.com

251–259 of 259 posts

Re: Rockstar is selling cracked game copies on Steam

#251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, it's not "skirting incredibly close" to write those reference books, because they are in no way a substitute for the underlying fiction, which is why they would probably be considered a fair use. >There are at least four books so far in the "unofficial" series, and if you believe that the companies involved wouldn't copyright strike it if they could, that's protected by the first amendment. You have no idea wha…

I was saying that if you believed that the companies involved wouldn't strike these if they could, that belief is covered by the first amendment freedom of religion.

You said they were strikingly close to the line, they aren't. The implicit suggestion being one can just write harry potter fiction by referring to harry potter facts, you can't!

Re: Rockstar is selling cracked game copies on Steam

#252
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been waiting for ~23 years for the copyright system to grapple with the implications of 1. having a copyrighted work A 2. taking someone else's "patch" (mod/crack/whatever, I call it "patch" as a general term) B and 3. combining them on your local computer to produce a final work C. We techies have been arguing about who has what rights, who can block who from doing what, who's responsible for what, etc. in that…

The general principle of copyright law is that copying/distributing work that combines multiple copyrightable parts requires the permission of every author/copyright holder. Copyright law does not attempt to establish a single owner for any given work, it's perfectly fine with multiple parties having copyright protections over a single work, in which case any of them has a practical veto to doing anything with the jo…

Yes, as I said, many people have many opinions. I think you'd find you're in the minority on HN (and the Internet armchair lawyer's favorite cry of "Fair use! Fair use!" which means next to nothing the way it is typically used) but probably with the majority of copyright laywers.

However, it hasn't actually been settled. I've been watching. The question of whether you can bypass the matter of distribution by distributing a patch you definitely 100% solely own, but then the end-user is the one doing the combining, is not established.

Re: Rockstar is selling cracked game copies on Steam

#253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

pirating software (movies, and music) is a term from the 90's by the MPAA, Riaa, and Games industry in attempting to link the act of simple copyright infringement, a civil non-criminal violation of the law to violent robbery on the high seas... Cracking is a method of removing undesired features or inclusions from software, often licensing controls, or other anti-consumer features. Many many many people "cracked" the…

Another alternative to cracking was to use something like DAEMON Tools to emulate the CD in the drive with an .iso so you could legitimately play multiplayer games without having to deal with stupid CD checks.

Daemon tools was the bomb

Re: Rockstar is selling cracked game copies on Steam

#254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: Rockstar is selling cracked game copies on Steam

#255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I did it for unlimited access to t3 zero day ftp sites

Re: Rockstar is selling cracked game copies on Steam

#256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way things are going, the death of Disney may come quicker.

based on what? their stock is taking a hit but they're still a big, scary corp, and will probably win the fights with FL's a-hole governor.

Walt Disney share price declined 3.9% on Thursday to close at $82.47, its lowest level in nearly nine years, or since October 16, 2014. Investors expect more weakness in Disney shares in the next few months. https://www.livemint.com/market/stock-market-news/disney-sha...

Re: Rockstar is selling cracked game copies on Steam

#257
30 years ago, when I worked at a computer shop, the manager had an original Atari ST game with a bad disk. He didn't want to throw it away, so I reformatted the disk and copied a cracked version of the game onto it using XCopy on Amiga. The cracked version didn't have any intro btw... lolz

Re: Rockstar is selling cracked game copies on Steam

#259
post #183

Many years ago, I worked on a product that provided a bunch of old emulated games. We properly licensed them, but many of the license holders no longer had the original ROMs, ripping the game data off of some of the really old consoles was quite difficult, and the only ROMs available publicly were cracked copies with demo's added. That was the birth of the demoscene, which was awesome, but bad for us trying to legiti…

Was it Gametap?

It was!
Post reply on HN