Wonder what's going on these days on the piracy front? Here's a quick glimpse:
Blu-Ray and HD-DVD formats have both had their inherent copyright technology cracked.
Despite Piracy being "higher than ever" especially in China, India and the U.S, box office takes have gone through the roof, especially in China, India and the U.S... further showing that the slump in movie sales in the last few years were because of crappy movies, not because of piracy.
And here's an interesting tidbit... if you're going to be downloading movies (legally) from places like Netflix, BitTorrent, Movielink or Instant Media, you'll be happy to know the movie you own** will have backup-choking Macrovision ACP copy protection embedded in it. Well, I guess it isn't DRM software, at least... but that's like getting shot in the hand and being told at least you weren't shot in the nuts.
**- haven't you heard? You don't own anything you buy anymore, you only license the right to use it, and that right can be revoked at any time for damn near any reason.
2 comments:
Speaking of piracy, this is disheartening:
http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/46079
sigh...
They kind of hit it on the head though. Those that buy bad-ass parts are probably smart enough to use bittorrent and such.
Probably the most unfortunate aspect of piracy is those games that are good enough to pay for are most likely the most pirated. A sort of reverse-inverse-square law of PC games. The better a game is, the more money you will "lose". What is there to motivate a developer to make a bad-ass game?
Although, if developers were to ditch PCs completely the focus of piracy would shift completely toward consoles and unfortunately once you crack hardware(a la XBOX) it is cracked for good. Sure MS can detect a poorly cracked XBOX and keep them from playing online, but what is to stop people from figuring out how to get around that in several different ways? Not much if it saves themselves some cash.
I admit to a "try before you buy" mentality, and I might be part of the problem. But I do buy games that I feel are totally worth their cost. In fact, I have bought most epic games twice. Some may say I am trying to clear my conscience but in this age of poorly tested, poorly written and just plain bad games I feel like I need to protect my wallet as much as possible and I will continue to do so in the future whether I am on a PC or a console.
Please dont tell me that in this day of always-on broadband that PC developers cant come up with a better way of protecting their assets. It may be difficult and inconvenient for everyone but it will save the future. Please someone start coming up with ideas.
But please nothing like BF2 unlocks. That IMO is lame.
Heh, well check this out:
http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/82273
Microsoft: "If you're going to pirate something, pirate us."
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