- Piracy

[Blackdog_kt]

Well, you do bring up some valid points, but the end result would have been a lot different had the mods been sanctioned by the developing team of the original game.

Of course, 1c couldn't blindly sanction something that included a hack of the game engine and that's why the next sim has to make provisions for mods. If the historically minded enthusiasts can add mods without the need to hack things, then it will not only satisfy the modding community but lessen the incentive to hack critical parts of the engine, like FM and DM. What the modders need will be open to use, the rest will be locked, so anyone who tampers with it can be safely called a cheater from that point on.

[mondo]

Mods and pirates are two different things. You can get round piracy with ease if the developer really wants too and not use DRM.

Allot of games now with online elements require the customer to register with either a unique key and authentication servers (like MMO's or steam) or a unique MD5 hash associated with a Cd Key. Both won't always stop offline piracy but but they are 100% secure for online play. Even older games like BF1942 require a unique MD5 hash from a CD key to play online. Once that hash is banned from say PB or from BFSM and shared in the community the player is forced to go buy another copy of the game because they can't play online.

The answers to piracy is staring publishers in the face.

[nearmiss]

It is not possible to stop all piracy.

If the powers that be (government) made it a point to shut down the P2P and torrent sites they would stop the largest percentage of piracy.

It would not be hard to do. As long as the P2P software, sites and torrents are going full steam nothing will change.

Face it, there are a zillion links to these sites loaded with pirated software, music, movies and other valuable content. Google, Yahoo, Alta Vista, and other search engines could cause major difficulty for finding those sites. The sites could be stopped or prohibited. The majority of people would not make extraordinary efforts to find the piracy purveyors.

Google, Yahoo and others could definitely be forced to do something about referrals to the piracy sites. All the major players with piracy problems could cease to advertise with those search engines. It wouldn't take long to see the end of most of the piracy sites, especially the big ones.


98% of the piracy could be stopped poste-haste, and would probably satisify most complaintants. Microsoft has known for years about piracy and pretty well ignored it. MSFT does have better licensing for their products, because they haven't been able to pursuade anyone with authority in any country to do anything about piracy.

Actually, I think you could stop about 50% of piracy right now, by shutting down about 10 sites.

The problem is "stinking thinking". Shutting down piracy, is discussed as a 100% shutdown. It is just stupid to think it can be prevented altogether.

However, if nothing is done it will continue. We'll continue to get the Starforce kinda junk or worse still the stuff used on Alienware.

I don't look at MODS as piracy. If the MODS included the game or complete software, YES.

MODS maybe contrary to Copyright laws to some respect, but they are definitely not piracy as I view it.