DailyTech - Activision Sues Game Pirates

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Software Activision Sues Game Pirates
Stephen Kamizuru (Blog) - September 23, 2008 8:27 AM

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120 comment(s) - last by XtremeM3.. on Sep 29 at 6:56 AM

P2P File Sharers currently not targeted

Activision is suing accused software pirates for up to $150,000 per offense according to game industry news site Edge. James R. Strickland of New York is being sued for copyright infringement, an act which includes illegally copying and distributing games.

The case focuses specifically on the Xbox 360 version of Call of Duty 3 released in 2006, but Activision also accuses Strickland of "copying and/or distributing" other unnamed copyrighted videogames and plan to add these accusations to the lawsuit.

According to Activision, the alleged infringement was "willful and intentional, in disregard of and indifference to the rights of Plaintiff." Activision is seeking statutory damages ranging from $30,000 to $150,000 for each infringement of each copyrighted videogame. They are also seeking reimbursement of legal fees.

In addition to the Strickland suit GamePolitics has uncovered Activision has been quietly suing other individuals who are apparently not represented by counsel and who, as part of their settlements, agree not to discuss the case.

Activision's lead attorney on the cases is Karin Pagnanelli, who has worked on numerous copyright cases on behalf of clients in the music business. To alleviate concerns that Activision may be suing file-sharers as well, Pagnanelli sent GamePolitics an email stating, “While we don’t comment on litigation involving clients, we can advise you that we have never filed any litigation against a file-sharer on behalf of Activision.”

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Useless

By zac206 on 9/23/2008 8:33:30 AM , Rating: 2

Instead of spending huge amounts of money to find the pirates, pay the lawyers and everything they could simply sell the games a little bit cheaper and then, less poeple would copy games...!

RE: Useless

By Brandon Hill

(blog) on 9/23/08, Rating: 0

RE: Useless

By omnicronx on 9/23/2008 9:07:37 AM , Rating: 2

I'm with you Brandon. I've heard it all, 'if games were cheaper', 'if there was no drm', 'I want to try before I buy, (which is fine, but lets face, most people just try)'. All a bunch of excuses, games cost money to develop, they are not going to get any cheaper. Games are becoming more complex take longer to release, and are much more expensive to make than 5 years ago.

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RE: Useless

By FITCamaro on 9/23/2008 9:18:48 AM , Rating: 2

And costs are only going to go up.

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RE: Useless

By Mitch101 on 9/23/08, Rating: 0

By Mitch101 on 9/23/2008 9:38:33 AM , Rating: 0

Sure but not If you have patience or do gamefly.

For consoles Gamefly has an $8.95 plan. I'm done with most games in under a month or two. If its good the buy it price isn't bad and usually drops very fast. Much cheaper to buy a game from gamefly than most stores in the first month or two of its release.

For the PC I buy most of my games on GoGamer.com when they have one of their 48 hour madness's. Like UT3 was $9.99 this past week. I have about a dozen games now still in the plastic I plan on getting to.

Its like movies there are realistically only about 6-10 a year that are worth buying that have replay value. Unfortunately on the PC front there is no try before you buy like with gamefly on the consoles. Most people just need to refrain from impulse buying.

Lack of people purchasing $60.00 new releases will cause them to release the games at lower prices. But that's the problem people are buying them.

I canceled my sub on Wow in protest of the $40.00 pop for a the Lich King. What am I paying a monthly fee for to get hit with a full price sticker tag for? Isn't the 10 million subs enough that they could charge at most $15-$20.00 for the content enough?

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RE: Useless

By inighthawki on 9/23/2008 9:47:24 AM , Rating: 2

Although a lot of the monthly subscriptions do go into maintenance and support, I do agree that they should have far more than enough money to distribute it at a lower cost, if not completely free. The whole concept can go both ways
On one hand, they have the majority of the die-hard WoW fans who are willing to buy the game because they love the game and want to keep up with all of their friends, and on the other hand, releasing the game very cheap or free for the matter, in my opinion, would attract more customers that weren't playing before by advertising a bunch of free new stuff, as well as keep the customers like yourself who do not want to pay for it. Both ways I see as a win-win situation, but i think the latter would be better, but I'm not a college educated marketing team, so perhaps they have more statistics to run off of.

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RE: Useless

By stonemetal on 9/23/2008 2:32:56 PM , Rating: 2

Then you missed the recent report that WOW spends $5/per player /per year on maintenance. They are raking it in hand over fist there should be no charge for the litch king if it keeps people on the feeding tube one more month.

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RE: Useless

By inighthawki on 9/23/2008 3:17:30 PM , Rating: 2

What about server upkeep, the staff required to manage all of the networking, paying developers to patch and fix exploits, as WELL as player upkeep, this all accounts for more thna that, BUTTTTTT, i TOTALLY agree, in no way am i saying that blizzard is in any way shape or form running low on cash. $15/month per player is FAR more than enough to keep everything in line as well as line the pockets of the CEO pretty thick with cash.

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RE: Useless

By FITCamaro on 9/23/2008 9:57:30 AM , Rating: 5

WTF? The Lich King is gonna be $40? Glad I don't play WoW but thats ridiculous. I mean they pull in tens of millions a month in subscription fees. Expansions are supposed to be $20-30.

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RE: Useless

By quiksilvr on 9/23/2008 4:22:59 PM , Rating: 2

And companies wonder why piracy ensues? 10 bucks to watch a movie in a theater? 20 bucks to watch it on DVD? 30 in HD? A dollar for a 128 kbps mp3 song?

The $60 for a new game is understandable IF it is a great game. But I can never EVER in my life willingly pay to play online. I already spent 60 bucks for the game, 300-400 bucks for the console, 30 bucks a month for the internet and 700 bucks for the HDTV. I'm NOT going to pay just to PLAY the game just because you aren't willing to cut down on profits.

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RE: Useless

By tential on 9/23/2008 7:32:53 PM , Rating: 2

If you want to play a game like WoW you should pay to play. One payment of 60 dollars for the game isn't enough. 60 dollars doesn't cover 2 years worth of play at all. However they shouldn't make you be paying for each expansion pack. They make over 100 dollars off you a year I think that's enough.

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RE: Useless

By Gatt on 9/24/08, Rating: 0

By Gatt on 9/24/2008 2:49:19 AM , Rating: 0

Hmmm.

10 bucks to watch a movie, today's minimum wage is what? 7? For the very lowest paid person, it's still less than 2 hours or work for anywhere from equal to greater number of hours in entertainment.

A DVD is not 20$, more like $14. 2 hours of work for the very lowest paid for unlimited viewing.

An HD disc, that's a tough one. Some are $30, some are more, some are less. Still, it's roughly 4 hours of work at the very lower pay level.

$1 for a song, that potentially can never decay. So at the very lowest pay level it's less than 10 minutes of work. Sounds like a fair deal to me.

To put things in perspective, 25 years ago, it wasn't uncommon for an Atari game to run $60-$100. Today we make significantly more money, and the price has gone down. I'm really not seeing the problem here. Adjust for inflation and I wouldn't be surprised if the pricing shouldn't be more like $100-$140 for games today, but I don't know the equation to adjust for inflation.

Further, why should anyone cut down on profits? They're priced in line with the competition, they aren't gouging, so why should they make things cheaper? I mean, I don't expect the gas station with the highest traffic to cut it's prices because more people go there.

If they were out of line with the market, then sure. If they were more expensive than historical peers, then sure(TEN charged $20 a month, AOL charged something like $5 an hour for NwN).

I'm not seeing a problem here.

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RE: Useless

By quiksilvr on 9/24/08, Rating: 0

By quiksilvr on 9/24/2008 3:29:19 AM , Rating: 0

You don't see a problem with having to pay extra just so that you can play online with others? Isn't paying for the game and the internet access enough? And no, $1 a song is not a fair deal. I'm not going to pay 1000 bucks for a 1000 crappy 128 kbps quality songs.

As for WoW, I agree that it is a very fun and lasting appealing game. But the reason why I don't play it is because of the continuous fees. It just doesn't seem worth it to me to spend that much.

10 bucks to watch at a theater is utterly ridiculous, especially with the quality of most theaters today. Even new theaters still use film with the lines and the artifacts on the screen with crappy seats and overpriced food. Either give me my money's worth or screw it I'm not going unless the movie is awesome (Dark Knight, Iron Man, etc.).

$60 for a game is fine if the game is good. If its crap, obviously people don't buy it and the price of the game goes down (wish this happens as efficiently as it does for DVDs and BDs).

Considering things such as Netflix exist today, newly released DVDs should NOT cost 20 bucks. I think it has reached a point when 10-15 is a better price range.

As for HD, new releases should max out at 20-25. Their sales are down it only makes sense to cut the prices.

And the main reason to cut down on profits are so that you can get more people to get which in turn will up your profits and boost the PR with the company (we let you play this awesome game online for free! we're so cool! yay!).

It's the "I don't see a problem" mentality that lets company do things like this and because of the group of people that don't mind paying just to play online it will probably never end. Unless there is a significant boycott of such practices I doubt it'll ever go away.

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RE: Useless

By rcc on 9/24/2008 4:22:28 PM , Rating: 3

Whatever trips your trigger.

Personally, if an online game is good I have no problem with a subscription fee. You get changes to content and fixes in the dynamics of the game, and you actually (oh, shock and horror) get to interact with other people. WoW is what, $15 / month now? For how many hours a month of entertainment? It's still one of the cheapest forms of entertainment you can get. You'd spend more for a short night at the bar.

$40 for an expansion is a bit high, but it brings major changes. And, it includes a free month of game time, so it's really a $25 expansion pack.

I probably shouldn't admit this around here, but I'm a capitalist. They are offering a fair value for the price. I'm really sorry that you diagree, but 10 million people plus or minus a few, are ok with it.

The market will adjust itself, or will end. Pirates, copy infringement technicians and other thieves crimp the process, they don't help, make a statement, force companies to lower prices, etc. They just steal for their own profit or gratification.

When I go to the dojo I pay a monthly charge. There was also an startup fee, so there should be no monthly charge, right? Uh, no. How about your electric bill, unless you have outstanding credit and/or history with them you will pay a deposit and start up fee. So how dare they charge a monthly fee?

So, vote with your wallet. You don't like it, then as you have mentioned, don't give them money. But, don't steal.

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RE: Useless

By Veerappan on 9/26/2008 11:44:22 AM , Rating: 2

quote:
You don't see a problem with having to pay extra just so that you can play online with others? Isn't paying for the game and the internet access enough?

I actually don't see a problem with paying $12-15/month for an MMO for one simple reason: It saves me money.

Before I started WoW, I was buying a new game every month and a half. At $50/each, that's $400/year. While I was playing WoW, my new game purchases happened once every 4 months or so. I was spending enough time playing WoW that I didn't get through the other games nearly as fast.

Using these purchase rates, and an average of $50/game, I was spending $400/year on games without WoW, and $330 with it (3 games/year @ $50 + $12/month for WoW). Spread the purchase price of WoW ($60) and its expansion ($30 when I got it) over the 3.5 years since I purchased WoW, and the pricing is still in favor of paying for the MMO.

Also, even though there is an expansion that has been released and there is another one coming soon, there have also been multiple releases of new dungeons in the past via patches for free. Not all new content is explicitly charged for, and part of that is financed by the subscription fees.

Summary: There is a case to be made for paying for a monthly subscription to a game, depending on your game purchasing habits.

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RE: Useless

By inighthawki on 9/23/08, Rating: -1

RE: Useless

By Mitch101 on 9/23/2008 9:41:37 AM , Rating: 5

We need to stop supporting review mags who base their reviews a lot of time on the revenue income of their advertisers which are the game companies. Bad review and they pull their advertising. Bag game good review and they pay for advertising which is just a payout.

Its a broken business model and review mags need to change the model or go the way of the dinosaurs.

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RE: Useless

By MrWho on 9/23/2008 12:09:32 PM , Rating: 2

That's why I stopped buying gaming mags a long time ago, and read all my reviews online - and even that I take with a grain of salt, like the GameSpot ones since the Kane & Lynch review drama.