Witcher 2 to have a DRM-Free version... but there's a catch

Krieger91 said:
OP just admitted he pirates games.
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No, I did not. I expressed my dislike of companies demanding money from people who are innocent, which is what always happens when they do this. When did it become unpopular to be disgusted by this kind of legal extortion?
 
The problem is that:

IP addresses != people

While you maybe responsible for who uses your connection as far as the contract between you and your ISP and face possible termination if your connection is used for illegal purposes. The same doesn't apply to the rest of the law, it's not reasonable match IP's to people since many people use the same internet connection.

This is why we get people wrongfully accused and why it can't be tolerated.
 
evilsofa said:
No, I did not. I expressed my dislike of companies demanding money from people who are innocent, which is what always happens when they do this. When did it become unpopular to be disgusted by this kind of legal extortion?
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What about demanding money from people who are guilty? How do you feel about that? What percentage of the people that will be sued for this game do you think are innocent? Do you believe if that if someone swears something, it has to be true? How about 60 year olds being incapable of using torrents?
 
Great news that it's DRM free. Now I can buy it immediately instead of waiting 1-2yrs.

I think their other approach is a little misguided at best. Maybe they're just threatening because they're trying something new and are afraid it'll backfire.

I'd rather have them sue everyone though than send out extortion letters. I'm still not really sure how it's legal for a company to extort random people by saying "Pay us $X or we'll sue you". If they're not confident enough to bring a lawsuit against someone then they shouldn't be sending out these letters either.
 
needmorecarnitine said:
What about demanding money from people who are guilty? How do you feel about that?
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I don't think two wrongs make a right, so no, I don't believe that extorting money from the guilty is the right thing to do. It's still extortion.

needmorecarnitine said:
What percentage of the people that will be sued for this game do you think are innocent?
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If they follow through with this plan, I think the number of innocent people who will get sued for this game will be more than zero. Would it be acceptable if it were only one person if that one person was you?

needmorecarnitine said:
Do you believe if that if someone swears something, it has to be true? How about 60 year olds being incapable of using torrents?
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Of course it doesn't have to be true. That's why perjury penalties are so high. I'm not entirely sure what you mean by your last sentence, but many 60-year-olds are indeed incapable of using torrents.
 
No suspected murderer should be sentenced to prison because there is a chance that a number greater than zero will be innocent.
 
I cannot agree with "fine letter" method currently employed to fight copy infringement. Governments and there judicial systems really need to examine this, as it is grossly unfairly titled at the moment in favor of the big money IP (intellectual property) owners.

The IP owners can (or through a third party) basically send at very low cost and low risk (I'll get more to this in a moment) these infringement letters to individuals carrying the threat of a fine and legal suit that places a disproportionate burden upon that individual. That individual by turn is also burned with the cost of seeking legal advice/representation should they decide to go that route. Why is it disproportionate? The thousands of dollars for these fines or the alternative cost to seek legal help places a much higher burden upon the individuals then the company sending the letters.

What makes this worse is how little risk it is for companies to use this tactic. They cannot be counter sued for any significant amount (if at all) that would make it an acceptable risk for an individual to pursue in relation to his legal costs. They also can essentially cherry pick actual law suits to pursue that are more favorable to them (either to avoid negative precedents, high chance profile/payout, and etc.) as the infringement letter does not obligate them to actually carry through and pursue legal action against any individual.

Parmenides said:
No suspected murderer should be sentenced to prison because there is a chance that a number greater than zero will be innocent.
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This point is a bit interesting in that wrongly accused individuals have the option to file law suits for very large reparations. Also the burden of proof is much higher in criminal cases then these civil law suits.
 
evilsofa said:
I don't think two wrongs make a right, so no, I don't believe that extorting money from the guilty is the right thing to do. It's still extortion.
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I see the problem now. English isn't your primary language.

This isn't extortion. In the United States, you have the right to pursue people who wronged you in civil cases. Not sure where you live but that is one of the methods used to redress a wrong in the U.S.


evilsofa said:
If they follow through with this plan, I think the number of innocent people who will get sued for this game will be more than zero. Would it be acceptable if it were only one person if that one person was you?
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If they are sued and they believe themselves to be innocent, they can claim that in court. They can also ask the judge for compensation if they believe the filing party brought the suit without merit
 
Well, let's see what happens. If a group chooses to mimic the IP of many random people and download it, the lawsuits will go to hell. Maybe they'll pick IPs from the music and movie industry for laughs.
 
Yeah, does anybody here actually believe that CD Projekt would even succeed in taking somebody to court?

How would this even happen? Are they going to sue the person - the case would get thrown out. Have the person brought up on criminal charges - yeah, in what country? You can't arrest a Canadian if you're a Polish police officer.

The letter thing is quite frankly laughable. CD Projekt can't even spell properly to begin with. They're the laughing stock of the gaming community.
 
I'm inclined to believe that this is just a publicity stunt to scare off most pirates. Something like this would be a pretty big waste of resources, and CD Projekt is already giving us so much when they could have easily charged more for The Witcher 2.
 
Fail said:
they should just do what they did with the first Witcher

simply make it so that when you want to download extra content, you sign up on their site, and then use your account there to get it

it's one way to validate your copy that isn't intrusive, and it's perfectly acceptable too, a few moments of your time to validate your copy in return for some extra content.
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The first Witcher also required the CD to be in the drive.
 
needmorecarnitine said:
I see the problem now. English isn't your primary language.

This isn't extortion. In the United States, you have the right to pursue people who wronged you in civil cases. Not sure where you live but that is one of the methods used to redress a wrong in the U.S.




If they are sued and they believe themselves to be innocent, they can claim that in court. They can also ask the judge for compensation if they believe the filing party brought the suit without merit
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The issue here is what should happen in theory is not practical in practice due to the current system, which I mentioned in a previous post.

It costs these companies, relatively speaking, pennies to send infringement letters and pocket change to actually carry through legal actions. However the relative costs for an individual when faced with this is magnitudes higher.

What are are the options should an individual receive an infringement letter under the current situation? The cost to seek legal advice or hire legal representation (especially for a lawyer that specializes in this area, and/or comparable to the legal representation of a company) is much higher then the cost to actually pay any fine. Also the the individual (as far as I know) has no grounds to counter sue for damages (and surely not for any amount making the pursuit of such course practical). The individual also still risks losing in a civil case (perhaps not the full judgment), even if not guilty, as the burden of proof is different versus criminal. In summary contesting such a letter presents a case of zero to little gain with high risk. While for the plaintiff (the IP owner) it is low cost/low risk with potential for high gain. Does this seem like a fair situation? It isn't, which why companies are utilizing this method. Imagine if companies were liable for 100k USD counter suits for each infringement letter sent, do you think they would still blanket send tens of thousands of these?
 
needmorecarnitine said:
I see the problem now. English isn't your primary language.
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Do you think that because I haven't felt the need to be unnecessarily insulting?

needmorecarnitine said:
This isn't extortion. In the United States, you have the right to pursue people who wronged you in civil cases. Not sure where you live but that is one of the methods used to redress a wrong in the U.S.
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The RIAA, the makers of The Hurt Locker and now the makers of The Witcher 2 are not suing thousands of people. They are only suing the people who do not submit to their extortion. "You have pirated this software so you will be sued in court" is not what is happening here, because the legal system would not be amused by 50,000 lawsuits for every movie, game and song released in the US. "Cough up $1000 and we won't file a lengthy lawsuit that will cost you many times as much just to defend yourself" is what's happening here, and that feels like extortion to me.

needmorecarnitine said:
If they are sued and they believe themselves to be innocent, they can claim that in court. They can also ask the judge for compensation if they believe the filing party brought the suit without merit
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Yes, the innocent can spend thousands of dollars and many months in court defending themselves and then spend years in a countersuit trying to get the money back and compensation for whatever wages or even jobs they lost during the lawsuit, or cough up $1000 to keep the lawsuit from ever being filed. Maybe you are one of the handful out of 50,000 who are rich and/or brave enough to go for the lawsuit, but honestly speaking, even if I were innocent, I'd pay the $1000 because I wouldn't be able to afford to do the lawsuit. Intimidation has made innocence irrelevant.
 
While I don't agree with pirating, I think the John Doe suits and settlements are a bad way to treat the general populous. A business should not alienate customers or potential customers.

From my experience, most of the pirating I have seen is from high school and college students. These people typically graduate, get jobs and families, and become paying customers. I know this isn't going to cover the entire pirating community, but that has been my observation of the people I know.

The people they sue more than likely wouldn't buy the game, so they aren't really losing on that much revenue. Unfortunately, they have to do something if we want to see good single player games. It seems that multi-player games are really what started to bring bigger sales numbers back to the the PC.
 
Just what the forum needed, a DRM debate. I swear to god, every gaming forum ought to have a single DRM thread that just gets stickied or something.
 
WabeWalker said:
Yeah, does anybody here actually believe that CD Projekt would even succeed in taking somebody to court?

How would this even happen? Are they going to sue the person - the case would get thrown out. Have the person brought up on criminal charges - yeah, in what country? You can't arrest a Canadian if you're a Polish police officer.

The letter thing is quite frankly laughable. CD Projekt can't even spell properly to begin with. They're the laughing stock of the gaming community.
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Yes they CAN sue people. The RIAA has done a pretty good job of it so far. If the ISP gives up the name of the customer that had that IP address at the time (yes, they do track who has what IP address even if they're dynamic) then yes they can sue them. There are companies that watch torrents and catch people downloading and uploading files.

Obviously it won't be criminal charges, its not a criminal matter its a civil one. Whether or not it succeeds how many people can afford the court fees and would just pay the fine? CDP is well within their rights to do it as long as they have solid proof and aren't using insane, outragous, fees.
 
WabeWalker said:
Just what the forum needed, a DRM debate. I swear to god, every gaming forum ought to have a single DRM thread that just gets stickied or something.
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What's brain melting here is that this is a DRM debate about a game which doesn't feature DRM.
 
I don't see what the problem is. Buy your software legitimately and keep your wireless secured and you won't get sued.

If you don't want to pay full price for your game, just wait for a steam sale. Witcher is a single player game, so it's not like you're going to be missing out anything. Well... not much. If you're not willing to pay anything for the game... then fuck you. :)
 
I love all the "XTORT! XTORT! WAAAHHHH!"... bitches.

Party A has enough information that he feels he can reasonably sue the balls off of Party B.

Party A can do this, but keep in mind that this means longer more drawn out proceedings through the legal system and SOMEONE has to pay for all that crap. Party A will probably feel reasonably sure of success, so Party B could really take it in the ass here...

-OR-

Party A and Party B can settle the matter out of court, Party A is satisfied, Party B doesn't get as anally raped as it could be, and the public is not inconvenienced with this horseshit clogging up the courts. I'm not saying this is how it always goes, but it seems to me like a win/not lose as badly as you could have.

It seems to me that people get all "XTORT! XTORT! XTORT!" because they feel that copyright holders are trying to intimidate the alleged infringers into paying up the cash. Well, if the sucker did it he's going to be paying somebody something somehow... It's just a matter of how bad it has to hurt. If not, well, what reason does the alleged infringer have for being intimidated?

Let's say you have your typical airhead user (plenty of them out there. you know who you are...) with an unsecured wireless network and a backdoor open so wide that elephants casually invade your ass on an ongoing basis. It seems to me that the "reasonable person" could expect the issue between the alleged infringer (clueless end user, we hope) and the copyright holder to be resolved simply by agreeing to have someone come in and secure/clean up that rabid ass hole of a home network. See the foam? It's freaking everywhere!

I think something that people seem to miss out on here (because they just bitch for the sake of bitching) is that you rarely have the case where the FIRST notice of infringement is a settlement letter or lawsuit notice. No, the first thing you normally get is an email or phone call from your ISP because they're getting emails and letters from people saying "hey, cut this asshole off or we're going to make you dig up records so we can sue his balls off!"

Now, no ISP wants to be involved in this process any more than necessary, so chances are unless your ISP loves pissing matches... you're just going to have to find alternate interwebs. Seriously. Not. Worth. The. Time. Or. Effort. To Keep You.

Why are we still on this? DRM-FREE release, people. We should be having a drunken orgy!
 
evilsofa said:
"Cough up $1000 and we won't file a lengthy lawsuit that will cost you many times as much just to defend yourself" is what's happening here, and that feels like extortion to me.
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you should have thought about that before you did it.

If you didn't do it, nothing to worry about because they aren't even suing you to begin with... :rolleyes:
 
evilsofa said:
No, I did not. I expressed my dislike of companies demanding money from people who are innocent, which is what always happens when they do this. When did it become unpopular to be disgusted by this kind of legal extortion?
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WTF????
 
needmorecarnitine said:
you should have thought about that before you did it.

If you didn't do it, nothing to worry about because they aren't even suing you to begin with... :rolleyes:
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If you live alone and don't have wireless internet, the situation is as black and white as this, but only in this case.
 
psychowes said:
If you live alone and don't have wireless internet, the situation is as black and white as this, but only in this case.
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it's not that hard to go to a friends house with your system, or take a USB drive to get the neccessary files.

nothing says they have to be on YOUR computer.

you can validate your copy and download the files from any computer.
 
evilsofa said:
You, like some others in this thread, are assuming that the party doing the suing is infallible.

You are wrong.
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Yeah and thats where the problem with something like this can come in. Though the RIAA's methods for getting names at the time was a "little" dubious. In this case CDP wants to get the names directly from the ISP, so unless the ISP gives them the wrong information that shouldn't (keyword) happen.
 
Yeah, we should be celebrating that this is DRM free.

I'm sure CDP will be checking out the suspected offenders before suing. I doubt they go into reckless cowboy mode suing Grandpa who keeps his wifi open. I doubt they would waste their times on dubious cases. This will discourage some piracy, and that's enough. I'm not worried that anyone I know is going to get screwed over.
 
How can people be mad that they are releasing a DRM free game, some thing we have been ASKING for, yet be mad that they are punishing pirates??
 
Just IMHO but one would be total dick to download it :

- you get 20+ (CDP promises 40) hours of mature rpg content (unlike some other I shooted few zylions aliens and fucked alien chick pseudo rpg game)
- you get real pc game pushing some serious graphics
- you can get digital version with absolutly totaly 0 drm that can be installed on every single computer in your household if that's what you want
- you can get it on steam if that's your cup of tea
- you can get nice retail package with some nice stuff thrown in there compared to some publishers giving disc and 3 page leaflet
 
One day all media will be free, you can download what you wish. Then they just take random people to court to recover their costs. :D
 
What I think is odd is people are making illogical connection between what other people who have followed the route of pursuing priates and what cdproject are doing. Precedence does not work in this case as cdproject have not done anything to show that they are of the same make as the RIAA or whatever.

There is no evidence that they will using "extortion" or that they will go after innocents. In FACT they have shown by their previous actions that they are a good sort of company, GOG is run in a way many people like, they removed the need for a diskcheck on the original witcher after it had been out for a while although I am not sure if it was them or the publisher who would actually want the DRM and they are offering the next game without any drm at all.

So anyone who is arguing against this line of action based on others who have followed it have no real ground to stand on IMO.
 
necrophile said:
What I think is odd is people are making illogical connection between what other people who have followed the route of pursuing priates and what cdproject are doing. Precedence does not work in this case as cdproject have not done anything to show that they are of the same make as the RIAA or whatever.

There is no evidence that they will using "extortion" or that they will go after innocents. In FACT they have shown by their previous actions that they are a good sort of company, GOG is run in a way many people like, they removed the need for a diskcheck on the original witcher after it had been out for a while although I am not sure if it was them or the publisher who would actually want the DRM and they are offering the next game without any drm at all.

So anyone who is arguing against this line of action based on others who have followed it have no real ground to stand on IMO.
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DRM is a publisher thing and the retail version will probably have some kind of DRM. The GOG version is being published by CDP themselves so they can do it without any DRM.
 
Steam version also say published by CDP so apart from the need to use steam I doubt there will be any install limits or things like that.
 
I have mixed views on this, sure I understand CD - P need to protect their game from stealing but using a lawfirm like Davenport Lyons to bully customers (some totally innocent) is totally wrong.

It's already been proven that it doesn't work. Davenport Lyons have only managed to successful sue a handful of people so far. Many will pay up immediately though when threatened with a letter, I guess they count this as a success.

Bullies can fuck off, I think CD - P are taking a dangerous precedence by doing this. It will fail, but it may prevent a small number of illegal downloads.
 
Michaelius said:
Just IMHO but one would be total dick to download it :

- you get 20+ (CDP promises 40) hours of mature rpg content (unlike some other I shooted few zylions aliens and fucked alien chick pseudo rpg game)
- you get real pc game pushing some serious graphics
- you can get digital version with absolutly totaly 0 drm that can be installed on every single computer in your household if that's what you want
- you can get it on steam if that's your cup of tea
- you can get nice retail package with some nice stuff thrown in there compared to some publishers giving disc and 3 page leaflet
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the mature content is gonna be highly cut from the sounds of recent pcgamer previews..
 
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