Now that was a bit lazy of you rockstar

[SocksFoHands]

LOL Epic.

This is why I love Rockstar. You glorious Scottish bastards.

This had me rolling. Literally. I laid on the floor and rolled.

[Luckz]

Originally Posted by Jito463

Whether you choose to abide by the agreement, or violate it, is up to you. There are many aspects of EULA's that I find deplorable (first and foremost, being that you cannot read most EULA's, until you've actually purchased the product), so I'm not saying that I like them, but they do exist, and have to be taken into consideration.

In the civilised world, they do not 'have to be taken into consideration' as they only gain some amount of validity if you can reasonably see them before you buy your game. And I've not seen any company print them on the box.

Of course Steam does to some degree do that - they show you their own EULA, not the one for the game, at least before you do your first purchase.

[0xEEr]

This is so fckin funny. Hilarious. LOL.
Hope their Red Dead Redemption is going to be awesome, because now Rockstar´s reputation went so down.

[MADDOGGE]

Originally Posted by Elbart

That's just a workaround, not a fix.

Or do I have a wrong perspective in this, especially with Valve advertising Steam to keep the games always "up-to-date" instead of outdated, let alone doing it silently without notification.

Woah there parter, Steam never promised that for 3rd party games. That is entirely the publishers/developers responsibility not Valve or Steam. Don't know where you got that idea. Steam is just a digital store to 3rd parties publishers. Just another way to sell their product. You the customer are required to have the correct equipment and OS to run them. Research before buying.

I said "advertised", not "promised". Where you are seeing a distinction between Valve-games and third-party-games in "On Steam, your games stay up-to-date by themselves." is beyond me. But yes, advertisement and the SSA apparently are two different things, mea culpa.

And it still doesn't change the fact that MP2 is now outdated on Steam, after being up-to-date on Steam for almost two years now, and Valve and Rockstar are apparently perfectly fine with that.

You decide.

[Liamaj]

And Thus ends the most amazing thread I ever started. Once scandal, a patch, countless news stories, and two screenshots later, what did we learn?

Well, mainly we learnt that gamers can't agree on the legality of NoCD cracks, as well as the legality of making them. Also we learnt that games can't agree on DRM in general.

All in all, it's been a crazy week, but it worked out pretty well for my rep score

I learned quite a lot, especially regarding Valve and how they do business.
So yes, thanks for this thread.

[Anamon]

I learned through this repeat incident (GOG etc.) that not only was I right all along, but now even the publishers indirectly admit it: the cleanest, safest version of a game is the one from the crackers. Of course everyone with a bit of PC gaming experience knows that, which apparently excludes game publishing house shareholders.

This will just become more and more apparent. Look around the scene of Apple II game programmers from back in the day, and ask them if they still have copies of the games they wrote. If they do, chances are they only own floppy images from the warez scene anymore. They're simply the only versions that have been preserved for posteriority. This incident just proved that once again, history is repeating itself.

The message is not "pirates aren't bad". The message to the publishers is "stop making us paying customers turn to the pirates because your legit copy of the game is of lesser quality than theirs".

Originally Posted by Krid

Well, I suppose that would be true if you wanted to ignore the definition of a derivative work.
Myth owns the rights to the differences between the official and cracked binaries. No more, no less.

Krid, please stop trying to be an internet armchair lawyer, you're not doing very well at it. Read Pickett v. Prince. It clearly states (emphasis mine):

"The Copyright Act grants the owner of a copyright the exclusive right to prepare derivative works based upon the copyrighted work. 17 U.S.C. §106(2)."
-- Pickett v. Prince

If I take a photo of someone, you can't draw a mustache on it and validly claim partial copyright in the new image. I can see what you've done, put the same mustache on the original image and have full copyright.

Obviously this is relevant specifically to the US, and you'll have to refer to TRIPS/WIPO and individual country statutes for information on other markets.

[Rimo]

I read through a lot of the topic and I think a lot is irrelevant. I think this is NOT about piracy but just common decency.

I want to talk about another thing that happened here, about something that happened in my perspective.

So Rockstar applied code of which the functionality is not entirely known (and therefor not to be trusted). However, people expect that products they paid for work and that the seller knows what he is doing so he can provide support to his costumers.

Apparently Rockstar does not think this should be the case.

Yet they feel embarrassed and therefore want to remove the logo of the unsupported code. The solution obviously should be degrading the product to a previous versions and therefor reintroducing bugs into the game. I can not see how this "solution" gives the value back to your hard earned money.

[Anamon]

Originally Posted by Rimo

[...]

You are making some interesting points. Apart from the interesting insight it gives us that apparently even Rockstar themselves trust the crackers, there are also some liability issues.

From what source did Rockstar get the crack they applied from? It is not unheard of for secondary sources to "repack" scene cracks with malware such as trojans. Potentially, if they got the crack from a bad site and it injected malicious code directly into the game executable, they would be redistributing ie even though they release only the patched file. Not to mention the remaining risk of unintentional bugs in the patched file - there is always a risk of undefined behaviour when reverse engineering and modifying compiled code. Given all that could go wrong, I'm not sure whether recompilation wouldn't have been the better choice for Rockstar, even if it is a bit more expensive. That is, if they still have the original source.

[Joshmansss]

The pictures look like russian to me...

Originally Posted by Rimo

I read through a lot of the topic and I think a lot is irrelevant. I think this is NOT about piracy but just common decency.

I want to talk about another thing that happened here, about something that happened in my perspective.

So Rockstar applied code of which the functionality is not entirely known (and therefor not to be trusted). However, people expect that products they paid for work and that the seller knows what he is doing so he can provide support to his costumers.

A simple byte comparison of the modified file and the original would show exactly what was changed and safety is likely trivial to determine. Try again.

[Keldorn]

Like someone else said its probably one of the programmers there that did it. I dont think Rockstar would condone this either. Programmers can get away doing stuff in code since the other management has no idea to understand the code. As long it works there happy and you keep your job.