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CD Projekt RED drops their harsh anti-piracy stance

Written by Andre Yoskowitz @ 13 Jan 2012 6:45 User comments (7)

CD Projekt RED drops their harsh anti-piracy stance

CD Projekt RED, the developers behind the popular "Witcher" series, have ended their controversial methods of using law firms and torrent-watching private companies to find pirates of their games and sue them.
The devs, which are anti-DRM, lost most respect with gamers after deciding to go the route of the RIAA and other groups in their actions against pirates. The company, through the law firms, was sending letters demanding 900 euros to alleged pirates found via their IP addresses.

Regardless, the company has now flipped, and will no longer be suing alleged downloaders:

CD Projekt's CEO Marcin Iwinski says:
In early December, [a TorrentFreak] article was published about a law firm acting on behalf of CD Projekt RED, contacting individuals who had downloaded The Witcher 2 illegally and seeking financial compensation for copyright infringement. The news about our decision to combat piracy directly, instead of with DRM, spread quickly and with it came a number of concerns from the community.



Repeatedly, gamers just like you have said that our methods might wrongly accuse people who have never violated our copyright and expressed serious concern about our actions.

Being part of a community is a give-and-take process. We only succeed because you have faith in us, and we have worked hard over the years to build up that trust. We were sorry to see that many gamers felt that our actions didn't respect the faith that they have put into CD Projekt RED.

Our fans always have been and remain our greatest concern, and we pride ourselves on the fact that you all know that we listen to you and take your opinions to heart. While we are confident that no one who legally owns one of our games has been required to compensate us for copyright infringement, we value our fans, our supporters, and our community too highly to take the chance that we might ever falsely accuse even one individual.

So we've decided that we will immediately cease identifying and contacting pirates.

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7 user comments

113.1.2012 19:34

I hope SOPA reads this

214.1.2012 00:00

Wasn't the game a flop anyway? Sounds like the pirated numbers were even laughable. I mean, you can't go to your next roundtable of backers with those numbers either.

314.1.2012 00:43

Originally posted by LordRuss:
Wasn't the game a flop anyway? Sounds like the pirated numbers were even laughable. I mean, you can't go to your next roundtable of backers with those numbers either.
1.2 million sales is nothing to sneeze at.

414.1.2012 12:00

So did they even actually sue anyone? Or did they flip before actually doing any damage.
Time to chalk up another company to actually buy stuff from.

514.1.2012 13:38

Originally posted by DVDBack23:
1.2 million sales is nothing to sneeze at.
OK... So, I'll politely fold that into a nice package & cram into my ass accordingly...

I'm still apprehensive as to what their motivation is for suddenly dropping all the cases against these individuals. Other than the impossibility to make blind IPs stick to individual people.

614.1.2012 14:22

This game was really fun so it totally sucks that it was pirated so many times but the way they were going about catching the pirates just isn't realistic. There could be another way, however. I remember reading something about the DRM of Serious Sam 3 BFE which stated that pirated copies of the game had a super fast enemy with infinite health. I'm sure there is a way around it now but I thought it was really funny XD. Here I just found a video of it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e91q5BtlxK0


714.1.2012 14:33

Originally posted by dab0ne:
I remember reading something about the DRM of Serious Sam 3 BFE which stated that pirated copies of the game had a super fast enemy with infinite health.
OMG! That was hilarious!

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