Guns Disabled in iOS Deus Ex On Jailbroken Devices

damicatz said:
Nope.

Look up "fraudulent non-disclosure".

1.Making a "first-person shooter" implies that you can shoot. Edios does not need to directly state this claim; merely using the term first person shooter, or FPS, or showing videos or screenshots of guns being shot is enough.

2.Edios failed to disclose those facts to the buyer.

3.The facts were material. This means that a reasonable person in the circumstances of the buyer (e.g. using a jailbroken device) would have altered their buying decision had they known about the limitation.

4.A reasonable person in Edios place would know that, absent Edios telling potential buyers, that potential buyers would have no way of easily discovering this fact on their own prior to it being publicly revealed.

5.By failing to disclose this fact, Edios induced buyers to commit to a purchase of the product that they otherwise wouldn't have because of the limitations.

6.A reasonable person would have an expectation that any limitations such as this would be disclosed. As such, they relied on Edios non-disclosure.

7.Because the person has spent their money and are now out the cost of the game, they have been harmed.
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damicatz said:
You could make that argument if it was a simple unintentional incompatibility.

You cannot however, use that argument when it is an intentional act.
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damicatz is totally correct, and it would be really nice if he became a lawyer to start raising legal hell over this and practically everything else going on in this country. ;)
 
I'm one of the "sheeple" who is willing to go along with most forms of DRM but this one is over the line. For example, if they required a check-in every 24 hours (yeah, that's right, I'm cool with requiring Internet check-ins) to verify the validity of the license I'd consider that reasonable. But this restriction disables functionality without even attempting to verify whether the copy is valid and that's a pretty bullshit move.
 
Mini-Me said:
damicatz is totally correct, and it would be really nice if he became a lawyer to start raising legal hell over this and practically everything else going on in this country. ;)
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Oh I expect by Monday morning someone, somewhere will have filed a lawsuit over this, even if just for their own $7 and whatever the lawyers can gouge out of the suit as well in fees.

This isn't going to end well for them PR-wise... it has epic shitstorm written all over it.

Nothing like taking money for something then blind-siding the customer. Yep, that's gonna end well..... not.
 
Ashbringer said:
Are there Android games that do the same thing with Root?
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AFAIK an app cannot even tell if rooted unless it requests root privileges.

This is just anti piracy crap. The only way i know of to pirate on iOS is with a jailbroken device. I would be worried too with that insane price they want for it...
 
Disposed said:
AFAIK an app cannot even tell if rooted unless it requests root privileges.
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Yeah, I've seen one or two Android apps unexpectedly pop up a SU prompt on my Nexus 7. If you grant the app root, it gives you an error message. If you click "no," it runs as normal. The Blizzard Authenticator app does this for example.
 
Babbster said:
I'm one of the "sheeple" who is willing to go along with most forms of DRM but this one is over the line.
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Worrying about DRM at all on a $6.99 game on a platform where a very small percentage of users even have the option to pirate software is completely silly. What Square Enix did is just nonsensically and unjustifiably stupid, and they're paying the price for it.
 
Isn't it possible to play through the whole game as a passivist? I seem to remember hearing about someone beating the game without firing a shot.
 
damicatz said:
You could make that argument if it was a simple unintentional incompatibility.

You cannot however, use that argument when it is an intentional act.
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They should have just made the game crash intermittently on Jail broken phones.
Then they would at least have plausible deniability
 
Mini-Me said:
No, jailbreaking didn't break the Deus Ex game for any technical reason. Eidos CHECKED for jailbreaking and broke it on purpose. There's a difference.
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To elaborate: Eidos's decision to check for jailbreaking and break your game if they found it is just as arbitrary from the consumer's standpoint as if they checked for kitten apps, or if they checked whether your name is longer than five letters, and then broke the game on purpose for either of those reasons (or any other reason). Jailbreaking didn't break anything any more than kitten apps or five-letter names would have broken anything in those examples. Eidos broke it...deliberately.
 
Piracy is definitely a problem, but in the not too distant future it won't be. With everyone giving up liberties in the name of security (knowingly and unknowingly these days) can you imagine the Microsoft bathroom? Toilet won't open unless it checks in every 24 hours to make sure it hasn't been pirated.
 
What are these idiots thinking? This is not how you sell games. This is how you piss off and alienate your target audience. Really getting fed up with the "you don't own anything you buy" corporate attitude. If someone finds child porn on your computer you can be damn sure they'll say it was yours. If they find a pirated song they'll say it was yours. Why the hell doesn't the same standard apply for software you legitimately pay for? Do you own what's on your drive or don't you? If so, then they can @!#$ off and let people use it how they want. If not, then nobody should have to go to court for piracy or forbidden content ever again, and a lot of people are owed a lot of money by the RIAA and MPAA. The double standards need to go.
 
Apple won't update (iOS 6) for the first gen ipads so I won't take a chance on paying for a game.
 
ktk_ace said:
I SMELL A LAWSUIT
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Please NO ... that is the problem with the US that the first response to anything is "I'll Sue" ... there are some valid situations where severe harm is caused and financial reparations or damages are appropriate (Medical malpractice, willful physical or mental harm, grossly defective merchandise, breach of contract, etc) ... however, some of the hardware and software problems people are suing over are laughable ... let's just leave the scum sucking lawyers out of this one, shall we ;)
 
collegeboy69us said:
My steam library is proof I'm willing to pay reasonable prices for good software, treat me like a criminal and see how much I spend on your software, LOL
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This kind of reminds me of the quote from Shawshank Redemption: "I had to come to prison to become a criminal." :)
 
Wait a minute...

Isn't half the damned draw of Deus Ex the hacking?

This news story has a better plot line than half of the games that broke probably. :eek:
 
kbrickley said:
Please NO ... that is the problem with the US that the first response to anything is "I'll Sue" ... there are some valid situations where severe harm is caused and financial reparations or damages are appropriate (Medical malpractice, willful physical or mental harm, grossly defective merchandise, breach of contract, etc) ... however, some of the hardware and software problems people are suing over are laughable ... let's just leave the scum sucking lawyers out of this one, shall we ;)
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Lawyers are indeed scum-sucking, and all class action lawsuits ever seem to do is feed them...but in the general sense, how do you seriously propose to hold corporations accountable for defrauding for example thousands of people in this case, or millions in other cases? This particular case involves petty damage done to each customer, and it's such a PR bust that they're probably going to have to give refunds or reverse their policy, but the general problem still applies:

Corporations get away with doing things on a MASSIVE scale that no one else could ever get away with, and there's never any real accountability or restitution. The market can put them out of business after consumers have gotten outraged enough, but by itself it can't hold people accountable to specifically repay damages done. Even when corporations do something flagrantly criminal, it's all, "Oops, it was a mistake. My bad," and they just keep on going with business as usual like nothing ever happened. The courts can railroad some "hacker" into hard time if he put a hidden address into his browser's URL field and told a journalist about the private information that came up, but they don't send corporations to a federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison for daily abuses, and almost nothing ever happens to the executives or leading shareholders either. All of the culpability just disappears into a black hole, every time, and it adds up.
 
Mini-Me said:
Lawyers are indeed scum-sucking, and all class action lawsuits ever seem to do is feed them...but in the general sense, how do you seriously propose to hold corporations accountable for defrauding for example thousands of people in this case, or millions in other cases? This particular case involves petty damage done to each customer, and it's such a PR bust that they're probably going to have to give refunds or reverse their policy, but the general problem still applies:

Corporations get away with doing things on a MASSIVE scale that no one else could ever get away with, and there's never any real accountability or restitution. The market can put them out of business after consumers have gotten outraged enough, but by itself it can't hold people accountable to specifically repay damages done. Even when corporations do something flagrantly criminal, it's all, "Oops, it was a mistake. My bad," and they just keep on going with business as usual like nothing ever happened. The courts can railroad some "hacker" into hard time if he put a hidden address into his browser's URL field and told a journalist about the private information that came up, but they don't send corporations to a federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison for daily abuses, and almost nothing ever happens to the executives or leading shareholders either. All of the culpability just disappears into a black hole, every time, and it adds up.
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In this particular case the bad publicity seems to have gotten them to back down ... they are already going to back down and remove the feature with a patch ... what they did would have been legal if they had been upfront about it and listed non-jailbroken phones as a requirement in the system configuration purchase page ... when corporations actually do harm then I am all for suing them but people are suing corporations for some pretty trivial things lately ... it diminishes the value of a lawsuit when everything becomes a lawsuit ;)
 
I guess what I'm trying to say is that if your bar for getting the courts involved is waiting for severe harm to be done to a single party, it lets corporations get away scot-free with committing smaller abuses to a lot of customers on a regular basis. Multiply each abuse worth a few cents or a few dollars by a few thousand or a few million customers hurt or inconvenienced each time, and it really adds up...always in favor of corporations. That simply wouldn't fly if some individual "inconvenienced" several thousand or several million people at once; they'd likely be sent to prison for a decade, ESPECIALLY if they inconvenienced a corporation or institution specifically.

We're stuck in a lopsided situation where we're walked over day in and day out, but the minor harm or inconvenience done to each of us individually isn't worth the expense, hassle, and drama of making a court case out of each incident. Corporations know this, so they go as far as they can get away with, and we're expected to just lie down and take it, every time. Class action lawsuits don't directly help anyone but the scum-sucking lawyers themselves, and they generally lead to higher prices overall...but they also disadvantage more abusive companies relative to their competitors, and that's a good thing at least. There's something to say for making it more of a pain in the ass for corporations to just "do as they please" without regard for the law or their contractual obligations (which includes not defrauding customers in petty ways or skirting the terms of their contracts because it's not worth the expense of holding them accountable).
 
Mini-Me said:
I guess what I'm trying to say is that if your bar for getting the courts involved is waiting for severe harm to be done to a single party, it lets corporations get away scot-free with committing smaller abuses to a lot of customers on a regular basis. Multiply each abuse worth a few cents or a few dollars by a few thousand or a few million customers hurt or inconvenienced each time, and it really adds up...always in favor of corporations. That simply wouldn't fly if some individual "inconvenienced" several thousand or several million people at once; they'd likely be sent to prison for a decade, ESPECIALLY if they inconvenienced a corporation or institution specifically.

We're stuck in a lopsided situation where we're walked over day in and day out, but the minor harm or inconvenience done to each of us individually isn't worth the expense, hassle, and drama of making a court case out of each incident. Corporations know this, so they go as far as they can get away with, and we're expected to just lie down and take it, every time. Class action lawsuits don't directly help anyone but the scum-sucking lawyers themselves, and they generally lead to higher prices overall...but they also disadvantage more abusive companies relative to their competitors, and that's a good thing at least. There's something to say for making it more of a pain in the ass for corporations to just "do as they please" without regard for the law or their contractual obligations (which includes not defrauding customers in petty ways or skirting the terms of their contracts because it's not worth the expense of holding them accountable).
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Again, I think it is where we set the bar ... people sued Apple when they lowered the price a few months after they bought their phone ... this problem was one game that had a negative feature that only affected a small group of people (and that they are removing) ... sometimes you get a bad purchase, that is life, you suck it up and move on ... if you feel the corporation was negligent then perhaps you give them tons of negative publicity (how many people crapped all over Blizzard publicly for the online feature they disliked, even when they refused to buy the game because of it)

I think people are getting very up in arms over $5 and $10 problems (or less) ... if we were talking about software that bricked your phone or caused hundreds or thousands of dollars of damages then I think that is a relevant lawsuit ... I think people's skins have become too thin when every bad purchase justifies a lawsuit ;)
 
kbrickley said:
Again, I think it is where we set the bar ... people sued Apple when they lowered the price a few months after they bought their phone ... this problem was one game that had a negative feature that only affected a small group of people (and that they are removing) ... sometimes you get a bad purchase, that is life, you suck it up and move on ... if you feel the corporation was negligent then perhaps you give them tons of negative publicity (how many people crapped all over Blizzard publicly for the online feature they disliked, even when they refused to buy the game because of it)

I think people are getting very up in arms over $5 and $10 problems (or less) ... if we were talking about software that bricked your phone or caused hundreds or thousands of dollars of damages then I think that is a relevant lawsuit ... I think people's skins have become too thin when every bad purchase justifies a lawsuit ;)
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To summarize: "Yes, it's okay for corporations to screw people for $5 or $10 at a time."
 
Oops, correction:
...something to be said* for making it more of a pain in the ass...

Anyway, I think one of my biggest concerns is that there are different rules for "us" and "them." You alluded to this when you said: "[W]hat they did would have been legal if they had been upfront about it." Yes, but they weren't, and it wasn't legal...and if some early 20's-something had gone and similarly defrauded a corporation in such a petty way, there would have been hell to pay, wouldn't there? ;)

I generally agree with you that our society is overly litigious, but I mainly apply that to contexts like the following:
a.) corporations suing corporations, especially over patents,
b.) career plaintiffs suing for a payday, on the off-chance that someone will buy one of their overblown claims
c.) individuals suing other individuals at every turn when the defendant did nothing wrong, including when people fail to take accountability for their own mistakes or mishaps (e.g. slipping and falling in some small business, through no fault of the business owner)

People suing Apple for lowering the price of a phone after they bought it boils down to c: They agreed to the price they paid at the time they paid it. Their high time preference had a cost. Lowering the price afterwards might have been inconsiderate, but Apple had no contractual obligation I'm aware of to maintain prices levels for the sake of early adopters.

However, in the case of corporations committing petty contract violations or criminal abuses on a broad scale, I tend to disagree with you about the "value of a lawsuit," for the reasons in post 64. We have precious few tools to promote accountability and balance in our dealings with corporations, and in most industries the market is too sluggish to let abusive companies fail (thanks largely to regulations that make market entry costs skyrocket and impede competition).

I think the mentality that some abuses are "too minor" for lawsuits has some harmful effects: Since most people have decided to just "grin and bear it," corporations have developed an unbelievable sense of entitlement and invincibility: They think they can get away with walking over people and constantly nickel-and-diming everyone with $0.01-$10 abuses. Sure, they're minor violations, and usually much less than the $5/$10 you indicated. You talk about thin skin, but how many times does the average person get bitten by this kind of crap every year with no real recourse? Thanks to this enormous sense of corporate entitlement, we're always the ones expected to suffer each trivial offense and indignity like good little serfs, and we both know that the legal system doesn't tolerate individuals doing the same to corporations or institutions.

Not only does the sum total of each incident add up for each individual, but each individual incident adds up for each corporation: After all, these aren't actually penny violations or even $5/$10 violations from the corporation's perspective. Multiply them by the number of customers and you're talking about a violation in the tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions, or more...and they happen constantly, over and over, because nobody is stepping up to do anything about it. I mean, sure, you get the occasional highly publicized class action lawsuit, and we all do our share of griping over the lawyers getting fat and rich over them...but could you imagine how much more humbly corporations might start behaving if they were hit with a class action lawsuit EVERY single time they violated their contract? Could you imagine how much more humbly they'd behave if high-level executives were hit with criminal charges for EVERY violation of the law, just like so many individuals are? If the legal system punished these abuses repeatedly and reliably EVERY time something like this happened, that might finally make corporations start to think twice about skirting their obligations and violating the law in "too minor to bother with" ways at everyone else's expense on a daily basis.
 
Oops. c.) should apply to individuals and corporations equally, i.e.:
c.) people suing at every turn when the defendant did nothing wrong...
 
Babbster said:
To summarize: "Yes, it's okay for corporations to screw people for $5 or $10 at a time."
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People used to make bad purchases all the time before the internet and ready access to lawyers made it de rigueur to sue for everything ... if a corporation willfully releases a product that destroys something I am all for suing ... but people sue for things that aren't always a corporations fault (features they don't like, missing features, bugs, etc) ... I am not saying we shouldn't hold corporations accountable but why does every insignificant problem require lawyers ;)
 
Babbster said:
To summarize: "Yes, it's okay for corporations to screw people for $5 or $10 at a time."
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Peter Gibbons: [Explaining the plan] Alright so when the sub routine compounds the interest is uses all these extra decimal places that just get rounded off. So we simplified the whole thing, we rounded them all down, drop the remainder into an account we opened.

Joanna: [Confused] So you're stealing?

Peter Gibbons: Ah no, you don't understand. It's very complicated. It's uh it's aggregate, so I'm talking about fractions of a penny here. And over time they add up to a lot.

Joanna: Oh okay. So you're gonna be making a lot of money, right?

Peter Gibbons: Yeah.

Joanna: Right. It's not yours?

Peter Gibbons: Well it becomes ours.

Joanna: How is that not stealing?

Peter Gibbons: [pauses] I don't think I'm explaining this very well.

Joanna: Okay.

Peter Gibbons: Um... the 7-11. You take a penny from the tray, right?

Joanna: From the cripple children?

Peter Gibbons: No that's the jar. I'm talking about the tray. You know the pennies that are for everybody?

Joanna: Oh for everybody. Okay.

Peter Gibbons: Well those are whole pennies, right? I'm just talking about fractions of a penny here. But we do it from a much bigger tray and we do it a couple a million times.
 
If we really want to tie up our courts with all these lawsuits then I would recommend the following:

a) Special courts that only hear these cases
b) Mandatory jury service (to insure that juries are adequately staffed)
c) Limits on the fees that lawyers can collect
d) No cases on contingency ... lawyers can receive fees but not a percentage of damages
e) No appeals (which generally prevents the corporation from tying up the procedures for years)

Otherwise these types of lawsuits just prevent our courts from dealing with actual criminal cases. Also, if a corporation commits a crime (as some have suggested) then they should be tried in criminal court and sent to jail ... you should never resolve a criminal problem with civil damages ;)
 
kbrickley said:
you should never resolve a criminal problem with civil damages ;)
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That's something that should have been written into the US Constitution. It would have stopped the RIAA and MPAA cold. Too bad the founding fathers didn't see that one coming.
 
You talk about tying up the courts with all of these class action lawsuits, but that pretty much concedes the point that corporations screwing people has become a ubiquitous phenomenon, doesn't it? Are you saying that corporations are so out of control that it would be prohibitively expensive to rein them in without serious changes to the legal system? ;) If we were in a position to actually change the legal system, we could make room for all of these cases by summarily throwing out every case regarding software patents.

Still, if we actually held abusive corporations accountable on a regular basis, they'd pay the full costs of civil trials where they're actually liable. It would probably make it prohibitively expensive for corporations to keep behaving with such a sense of entitlement and invincibility, but if they want to keep on going, I suppose they can afford to build us some more courthouses and fulfill your condition a.). Really though, the point is to make them think twice about abusing people so often in the first place.

I'm not too big on position b.) as a libertarian (even as someone who doesn't mind jury duty personally), but all of the threats and intimidation make jury duty essentially mandatory anyway, so b.) is already covered by the status quo. c.) and d.) seem practical, although I'm not a fan of legislating them for several reasons (such as Constitutionality, etc.).

e.) sounds good on the surface, but it's too ripe for abuse. The appeals process may be too laborious as it's currently set up, but we have to guard against statistical anomalies in the system, such as when the defendant gets screwed by an unusually vicious jury in a way that wouldn't or shouldn't hold up on appeal. Moreover, eliminating appeals even for class action suits would set a bad precedent that could ripple over to cases that can ruin a person's life...something Jammie Thomas can tell us all about.

I'm not sure I agree that there should never be civil trials for criminal offenses, for two reasons:
1.) Some offenses like fraud blur the line.
2.) Our current criminal justice system pays absolutely no attention to restitution for victims, or making them whole. Money can't heal irreparable wounds, there's something to be said for "best effort" compensation...and the reparable wounds? I'd like to see living victims of violent crime get their medical bills (and more) taken care of by their assailants, and I'd like to see thieves and vandals pay for the damage plus interest, plus extra interest for the fact that the exchange wasn't voluntary, unlike other situations where people pay interest.

Phoenix333 has a point about the RIAA:
Phoenix333 said:
That's something that should have been written into the US Constitution. It would have stopped the RIAA and MPAA cold. Too bad the founding fathers didn't see that one coming.
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However, there are several problems here:
1.) There's no justification for making copyright infringement a criminal offense in the first place. At the VERY MOST, it's an offense involving torts.
2.) Eliminating civil trials for criminal offenses would only stop the RIAA's current methods; it wouldn't solve the root problem.

The root problem here is that the law has been written by corporations to justify outrageous and unequitable payments. Eliminating civil trials wouldn't solve that, and it might just cause the RIAA to lobby for capital punishment in filesharing cases, like the textile industry in France lobbied for capital punishment in patent violation cases: http://hardforum.com/showpost.php?p=1040040193&postcount=4
They got what they wanted, too. They used to break people on Catherine Wheels for it...so no, eliminating civil trials for criminal offenses wouldn't solve the RIAA problem. That's an issue of bought-and-paid-for laws and an insane culture that buys into them, along with a voir dir process that stacks the jury politically.

I'm not a fan of copyright to begin with, but it wouldn't be so bad if the RIAA could only sue individuals for realistic damages, especially if they really had to *prove* their claimed extent of that individual's distribution based on the proponderance of the evidence. Realistically speaking, the average filesharer is going to have an overall upload/download ratio below 2.0, after all: If the average filesharer shared at a greater than 2.0 ratio, the exponential growth would cause the entire world would have a copy of the song lickety-split! Therefore, the sheer improbability of it all would be extremely difficult to prove realistic damages any higher than, say, $2/song, unless they were dealing with an obvious seeder with a ratio as high as...ooooh, 8.0.

Anyway, in an ideal world I'd love to see someone try a corporation with a crime and send it to prison. ;) Sadly, corporations don't exist as jailable entities, because corporate personhood is fictitious. For the same reason, limited liability corporations couldn't even exist in a free market (especially limited liability regarding torts); they'd simply be joint stock companies where the shareholders are held accountable for everything.

Therefore, in the real world, only a corporation's agents and shareholders can be jailed for crimes committed by corporations as a whole. Since the responsibility is dispersed among multiple people, it usually just goes in a black hole...but I'd much rather see everyone involved in criminal abuses tried (reliably), and then throw in conspiracy charges while you're at it. ;)
 
ARGH, no edit.
"There are several problems here:" = "There are two problems here:"
 
More errata:
"...sheer improbability of it all would make it extremely difficult to prove..."
 
Additional errata:
"Money can't heal irreparable wounds, but there's something to be said for "best effort" compensation.

Editing ability is the air I breathe, and I'm drowning here...
 
Phoenix333 said:
That's something that should have been written into the US Constitution. It would have stopped the RIAA and MPAA cold. Too bad the founding fathers didn't see that one coming.
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Except copyright infringement is both a civil and a criminal type action (depending on how severe your offense is) ... if you would like more people to be criminally charged for copyright violations then I am sure the RIAA and MPAA would be more than happy to oblige :p
 
You talk about tying up the courts with all of these class action lawsuits, but that pretty much concedes the point that corporations screwing people has become a ubiquitous phenomenon, doesn't it? Are you saying that corporations are so out of control that it would be prohibitively expensive to rein them in without serious changes to the legal system? If we were in a position to actually change the legal system, we could make room for all of these cases by summarily throwing out every case regarding software patents.
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I am saying that if given the opportunity then people will sue for anything, including product delays and software bugs ... there is a very strong anti-corporate sentiment in people ... I am not as anti corporation as my entire working career has been for corporations (as a peon but still in the corporate environment) ... I am willing to give them the benefit of the doubt because of that ... I have also seen some ridiculous lawsuits come out which will only get worse if we make it easier ;)
 
kbrickley said:
I am saying that if given the opportunity then people will sue for anything, including product delays and software bugs ... there is a very strong anti-corporate sentiment in people ... I am not as anti corporation as my entire working career has been for corporations (as a peon but still in the corporate environment) ... I am willing to give them the benefit of the doubt because of that ... I have also seen some ridiculous lawsuits come out which will only get worse if we make it easier ;)
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Not if the plaintiff lawyers have to foot the entire bill for class action lawsuits where the jury decides the corporation has 0% culpability. ;)
 
Mini-Me said:
Not if the plaintiff lawyers have to foot the entire bill for class action lawsuits where the jury decides the corporation has 0% culpability. ;)
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If you are going to change the law to do that then you might as well make lots of other changes as well ... I just don't want lots of corporate lawsuits since a fairly large chunk of our GNP is tied up in corporate earnings ... lets not give up our number one spot to China too quickly because we want to become Europe ;)
 
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