Re: legal issues for PC games

On Fri, 12 Aug 2005 22:25:00 +0800, Bateau <Gamera@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

>"Sketch" <nah@xxxxxx> wrote:
>>I'm considering writing a research paper on the subject of legal issues for
>>PC games. Here are a few topics I'd like to get your opinions on to see if
>>it's a worthy topic:
>>
>>When EULA's expressly state that owners cannot "reverse engineer" a
>>publisher's software, do you, as a consumer -- and specifically a gamer --
>>consider no-CD cracks and the like as a form of software pirating? How about
>
>It is not a form of pirating and I also do not see what it has to do
>with reverse engineering.

It requires a certain amount of reverse engineering to figure out how
to modify the files to bypass the protection and perhaps how the game
itself actually handles disc accesses if the author went with some
sort of oddball file system. It's not reverse engineering from the
standpoint of an end user just downloading a crack and swapping out
the executable or applying a patch, but someone would have had to do
the legwork to create the crack.

Where the piracy issue comes in is that many of these no-cd cracks are
modified versions of the main executable or the launcher from the
original game. I really doubt the authors gave these guys permission
to distribute those files. If the crack was simply a patch, that
contained none of the original author's code, then it wouldn't be an
issue of piracy, but the DCMA style legislations do put it all under
the same umbrella by looking at it as facilitation (ie. a sort of
accomplice to the crime sort of relationship).

---------------------------------------------

MCheu
.

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