Lawsuit Against Ubisoft for Starforce 106
Cyber Akuma writes "Due to Ubisoft's intentional use of the highly controversial copy protection scheme Starforce, despite user protests and purposeful deletion of any forum discussions about the protection, Christopher Spence has filed a 5 Million Dollar lawsuit against the company for use of the crippling DRM in their games. Starforce has been reported to cause system instability, slowdowns, and possible damage to optical drives. As well as questionable business practices when dealing with customers and other companies, which has been reported on Slashdot before."
Out of control lawsuits! (Score:2, Interesting)
It is often a shame IMO when legal action is the only way to take care of issues such as the wonderful rootkits, spyware and drm on music and video game disks.
Lawsuits vs. Accidental or Intentional wrongdoing (Score:2, Insightful)
The only time a lawsuit is stupid is when someone sues over something that is, at worst, an accident. Malpractice, McDonald's hot coffee, etc.
Re:Lawsuits vs. Accidental or Intentional wrongdoi (Score:3, Interesting)
What most people don't know want to admit is that the hot coffe suite wasn't about someoen spilling coffe, it was about a company serving coffe that was too hot for the cups they served it in. Yes, the coffee was so hot it melted the cups and caused the lids to come off. After recieving many complaints about it at that particular (yes it was only one store serving it this hot too) store, a customer suffered third degree burns on thier crotch and leg areas.
MCdonal
Re:Lawsuits vs. Accidental or Intentional wrongdoi (Score:2)
Then again, the whole post above sounds a bit like a trial lawyer soundbite, so not sure how much good my statement will do.
Re:Lawsuits vs. Accidental or Intentional wrongdoi (Score:2)
All I know is this: People don't read. (Score:1, Interesting)
It says on the outside of the box, before you buy it that you may have problems with some hardware and why. Ubisoft can't be responsable for people not reading what's in front of them.
Re:All I know is this: People don't read. (Score:1)
Re:All I know is this: People don't read. (Score:1)
Now isn't that something... quick someone do a study on losses due to DRM vs losses due to piracy.
Re:All I know is this: People don't read. (Score:1)
a lost sale to a company (regardless of the true reason) get's packed together under piracy so they can go "SEE! our products are PERFECT! everyone is just pirating them!" even though it could be only like %10 of the total number is piracy.
Re:All I know is this: People don't read. (Score:1)
In most jurisdictions they can be, at least with consumer contracts (e.g. the Unfair Consumer Contracts Regulations 1994 which apply throughout the whole of the EU, which supplement numerous national protections such as the Unfair Contract Terms Act in the UK). It always strikes me as amazing that software companies somehow believe (god knows where they take their legal advice) these laws don't apply to them and that disclaimers
Warning: Use of this product may cause death!! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:All I know is this: (Score:2, Insightful)
For one, most of the time EULAs are not legal contracts, and even if they met the legal 'requirements' you cannot have a contract for something that is illegal.
http://www.okratas.com/modules.php?op=modload&name =News&file=article&sid=45&mode=thread&order=0&thol d=0 [okratas.com]
Who reads EULAs? (Score:1)
I guess that this would be called the Homer Simpson defence?
W
Is this an Internet Lawsuit? (Score:1, Flamebait)
Re:Is this an Internet Lawsuit? (Score:1)
Hello EFF? (Score:2)
Anecdotal Evidence (Score:3, Interesting)
Proof? Out-of-specs equipment? (remember the problem one of the linux distros had).
Re:Anecdotal Evidence (Score:4, Informative)
Installed UbiSoft's 'Silent Hunter III' and my Artec BKM-52x16 Combo drive almost immediately refused to recognize blank media directly after that. Within days of installing the program, my brand-new DVD/CD-RW Combo drive refused to even recognize a CD. Forums suggest flashing firmware, I do so, regain burning functionality, only to have the drive completely stop working the very next day. It didn't take a week for StarForce to completely kill my optical drive, force me to wipe out my hard drive, reinstall anew, and microwave the Silent Hunter CD. I paid 30 bucks for the game, and that game cost me ~$45 just to get my system back in working order due to the damage it caused.
Personally I'd like to see a massive petition sent to Congress to totally ban Ubisoft in the USA. Add on to that a nice hint that suggests unless this happens these Congressmen won't be sitting in their seats come re-election time, and there's a slim but better than nothing chance that they'll listen.
Re:Anecdotal Evidence (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Anecdotal Evidence (Score:1)
Re:Anecdotal Evidence (Score:2)
Huh... You know, this sounds almost exactly like what happened to my drive about a year, maybe two, ago. At the time, though, I never actually checked to see if StarForce was infecting my system. I make it habit of always cracking any game I buy, but of course SF will be installed along with the game initially.
One day, my CDRW/DVD combo drive just stopped accepting blank discs. At first it was only RW discs, but quickly it spread to all discs. It never got to the point of refusing to read regular CDs,
Re:Anecdotal Evidence (Score:3, Interesting)
I was baffled to how this happened (just blamed Windows
Re:Anecdotal Evidence (Score:2, Informative)
The registry branch where the info is stored seems to be constant, so this registry file might work too:
Re:Anecdotal Evidence (Score:1)
Also, in reply to myself - from looking online, it seems that particular Splinter Cell game doesn't have Starforce, so maybe it wasn't the culprit after all.
Re:Anecdotal Evidence (Score:2)
Re-enable DMA using the Registry Editor
Run REGEDIT. Go to the following key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Contr o l\Class\{4D36E96A-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}
It has subkeys like 0000, 0001, 0002, etc. Normally 0001 is the primary IDE channel, 0002 the secondary, but other numbers can occur under certain circumstances. Check the DriverDesc value to see which one it is.
Delete MasterIdDataChecksum or SlaveI
Re:Anecdotal Evidence (Score:3, Interesting)
Had no clue why until the first article on
Dude..... (Score:3, Funny)
Just get a crack for it like the rest of us!
Re:Dude..... (Score:5, Insightful)
There's a probability of scratching each time. It also drains battery on laptops.
When games first started coming out on CD, they all required you to have the game disk in the drive. Yet people didn't complain.
And you couldn't blow 640 MB * num cds in drive space on a whim then either.
The requirement to change disks hasn't stopped people from playing console games.Hell, some games require you to change disks while the game is still playing! Yet, no one minds.
Consoles are not general purpose machines. Why shouldn't someone be able to play a CD while playing a game?
The whole "steal the game to avoid having to use the disk" has got to be one of the lamest excuses for theft ever.
If you've bought the game, how is it stealing to use the crack?
Re:Dude..... (Score:2)
If you've bought the game, you already have a way to use it legitimately. Refusing to use that way and supporting pirates by using the cracked version of the game is still illegal. No matter how you try to spin it, it's still ille
Re:Dude..... (Score:2)
Supporting the pirates? What is this, some kind of international cartel that profits from your downloading and installing a 34kb file to play the game you purchased without the CD? I bet they all wear pirate hats too, and peddle crack to one-legged children. It's the downfall of society!
Re:Dude..... (Score:2)
Using an inaccurate term with with strong connotations of illegality and wrong-doing is not a matter of "using a simpler term." If you can't be bothered to describe the issue accurately, perhaps you shouldn't be discussing it?
If yo
Re:Dude..... (Score:3, Insightful)
Now, a crack is a patch. And a patch is basically the errata section that may be applied to any book that doesn't contain what it should (you can find errata pages for scientific textbooks now and then).
Now, by your logic, it'd be illegal to insert errata pages into legally bought books if those pages were produced by a third party. In actuality, it's completely legal.
Applying a crack to a legally
Cracking paid-for games (Score:1)
Unfortunately, if you live in the USA, this logical argument is actually incorrect. Thanks to a nice piece of legislation entitled the Digital Millenium Copyright Act [wikipedia.org], it is a federal crime to circumvent a copy-prevention scheme. That's right, when you forked over $50 for a copy of Morrowind, and after a few days of near-constant crashes, found out that much stability could be regained by installing a simple no-CD patch (and did so)... yep, you t
Re:Dude..... (Score:3, Informative)
If you look at the various forums, you will see that is sometimes is needed to use a crack to be able to play a copy protected game you bought.
It happens too often that 'compatibility issues'
Re:Dude..... (Score:2)
And you do other things besides games on the console how? A computer is general purpose. Things that limit that do not get installed.
you could always try a portable CD player. Or just slap another CD-ROM drive in
Buy more because of "features" of the software that gives me no benefit? Yeah, right.
Re:Dude..... (Score:1, Insightful)
Console users don't have a choice. They do what the games require of them. Computer users DO have the choice of playing the CD shuffle or getting the crack. Many of us do the latter.
Well, let's see, you're getting an illegally modified copy of the game without compensating the owner. I'd call that th
Re:Dude..... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not like it's a new thing, either. When games first started coming out on CD, they all required you to have the game disk in the drive. Yet people didn't complain.
The requirement to change disks hasn't stopped people from playing console games. Hell, some games require you to change disks while the game is still playing! Yet, no one minds.
The whole "steal the game to avoid having to use the disk" has got to be one of the lamest excuses for theft ever. "See, judge, I wanna make my life slightly more convenient, at the cost of Ubisoft's business."
This "case" is going to be laughed out of court.
It has nothing to do with switching CD's. I'll gladly play a game that needs the CD to start up, like Oblivion. What I don't want is Starforce on my machine. At all.
Why? Again, it has nothing to do with piracy or switching disks or any of that. Starforce screwed up my machine. I bought "Silent Hunter III", a sub simulation, and installed it on my computer. But I noticed that after a while, the entire computer started acting sluggish in normal activities....even though it's a Dual-core 4200+ with 2 gigs of RAM and it wasn't sluggish before. Rebooting seemed to make it worse, yet I couldn't see any activity or stolen CPU cycles or any of that. And I run a very clean system.
Anyway, it was acting sluggish. But that wasn't even the half of it, when I went to make a CD this past Christmas to take to my in-laws of Christmas music (mainly of Tiny Tim singing carols....drives my mother-in-law crazy...but that's another story). I found nothing would burn on my burner. Then my son told me that he couldn't play his older game he liked anymore because it would launch, then just shut down. It was an older game from a few years ago, and it was working fine just a week earlier.
To make a long story longer...I finally tracked down that all of this started happening AFTER I installed "Silent Hunter III" on my computer. I did some research online and found out all about Starforce and it's drivers. I found the Starforce removal tool and WHAM, like magic, everything started working again. But I hear that I was lucky because some people's CD drives are sometimes permanently screwed, though I don't know how.
THAT is why I'm all for this lawsuit. I don't care about any money, just want Starforce to go away.
More info on Starforce in case you needed it. (Score:3, Informative)
StarForce has received criticism for installing its own device driver onto computers. Some users claim that the StarForce drivers can cause optical drives to fail, which has been investigated by the popular American magazine Computer Gaming World. CGW states that under certain circumstances StarForce will cause Windows to access optical drives in Programmed input/output mode which causes the drive to be accessed far more slowly, potentially causing problems. StarForce deve
Re:More info on Starforce in case you needed it. (Score:2)
" StarForce's developers claim that their EULA absolves them from any responsibility for problems that their software may cause [3]."
Ok, i'll bite with Midway's Arcade treasures. I never Ok'd this app on my computer. No notice on box. No notice during install. Only a reboot when done-that is in a starforce window, didnt even know what it was at the time, i dont do many games anymore. Only EULA for game is AFTER install is done anyway WTF install 2 GB then ask if i want it?!? Course the registration
optical drive damage (Score:1)
Re:Dude..... (Score:1)
Back when CDs were introduced most of the game ran from the CD, these days the entire data is copied to the harddrive
Re:Dude..... (Score:1)
Re:Dude..... (Score:2)
Right, and that's not what it's about. Read on...
When games first started coming out on CD, they all required you to have the game disk in the drive.
Correct, but something important has changed since then. Read on...
"See, judge, I wanna make my life slightly more convienent, at the cost of Ubisoft's business."
Convenient, yes. At the cost of someone else? No. This
Re:Dude..... (Score:2, Interesting)
Not enough damage... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Hope he wins (Score:1, Insightful)
do some research (Score:4, Informative)
I don't think you fully understand what StarForce is. Only a couple StarForce games have ever been cracked - and it isn't just swapping out a couple
You need to physically unhook *all* of your optical drives and run an emulator that seriously hits system performance. UBI has released this with their Splinter Cell series - and for the most part it worked. Troubleshooting costs are way higher than normal but I know a ton of people who don't ever buy games that bought these.
Re:do some research (Score:2, Interesting)
I may be wrong about this, but it's what I've seen so far. I haven't downloaded any StarForce protected games so I
Re:do some research (Score:3, Informative)
>just like most people doing free software do.
>Let those imbeciles waste time cracking protections like
>Starforce while the rest of us spend our time doing
>something that is actually useful.
Something useful? What, like encouraging people to pirate non-DRM'd games [boingboing.net] like GalCiv2?
Re:do some research (Score:1)
Which has nothing to do with why StarForce and its maker are nasty.
I sure didn't enjoy emailing the creators of Space Rangers 2 to tell them they'd lost a sale because of the included StarForce protection. That sucks: I don't get to play a great game, small company loses money.
Re:do some research (Score:3, Informative)
Or just use a SCSI drive.
Re:do some research (Score:2)
Re:do some research (Score:2)
Re:do some research (Score:2)
>and run an emulator that seriously hits system performance.
Or wire in a switch. Or if you are really lazy, put them in USB/SCSI enclosures.
Re:do some research (Score:5, Informative)
I dont like having a giant CD rack in my office to play games. I buy the game, rip it to my network and put the cd in my library room. If I can't do that, I dont buy the game. If they want to do copy protection, they should go with value added copy protection (such as unique keys to play online). Epic, bioware, and blizard seem to understand this. Hell epic even removes the no-cd crack with their first patch for Ut2004. Bioware did the same with nwn.
Re:do some research (Score:2)
Bethesda listened to their fans on their forums, and promised not to use Starforce. In the end, the only thing protecting Oblivion is a CD check. You can use any old ordinary imaging program to make an ISO of the DVD and then use that ISO to play the game.
Try it!
Re:do some research (Score:1)
Really? Sweet, I may be able to get Oblivion after all. Now if only they remove the CD check in some patch, it'll definitely be in my list of games to purchase.
Sometime after I upgrade my PC to be able to actually play Oblivion...
Re:do some research (Score:1)
Yes, I paid for my copy. I even pre-ordered it, something I "never" do.
Re:do some research (Score:1)
Re:do some research (Score:2)
One thing I'd lie to see (Score:4, Insightful)
It would certainly not be a trivial effort to organize something like this. But it would be better proof to the publishers that we don't necessarily need what they have to offer us. They provide us with services and products (luxuries, at that) that we can choose to buy. Don't tattle to mommy government so she can slap the publishers on the wrist and leave them looking for different means to screw you. Just starve them straight. If gamers can't do this, that's just proof that publishers can do whatever they want to you.
After all, we are not talking about (sigh) Windows, which someone might actually need for some reason. These are *games*.
Re:One thing I'd lie to see (Score:1)
So, it's rFactor and not GTR for me. I'm sure ISI doesn't mind the business.
Re:One thing I'd lie to see (Score:1)
Re:One thing I'd lie to see (Score:2)
Two problems with that (Score:2)
2) A large number of games are sold to people who have no online contact with such groups.
Re:Two problems with that (Score:1)
There are a few [similarities.org] lists [glop.org] which strive to detail all games released with Starforce so you don't have to guess.
Ubisoft actually released an official patch to remove Starforce from their older game, X2. I can't tell you how eager I am to see a trend like that spread.
Boycott Schmoycott (Score:2)
-If
Re:One thing I'd lie to see (Score:2)
A group willing to stand outside their local EBGames, GameStop and hand out the above flyer would be the next step.
An overall group organizing and willing to educate consumers is probably the way to go for an effective boycott/lobby group as well as a way to reach those who may not got on-line enough to care.
A side effect of this sort of thing might be driving more consumers to c
Always remember, kids: (Score:2, Interesting)
I hope it stops these practices, I've held off from purchasing quite a few games because I'm not sure starforce is trustworthy and I'm VERY sure that I as a legitimate customer do not tolerate being treated like a criminal. Well, actually the criminals get treated much better since the warez versions usually remove such inconveniences completely. "Here's your reward for purchasing our software instead of downloading: A worse user experience! Isn't that great?"
Damage to optical drives? (Score:1)
They offered $10,000 reward and all-expenses paid round-trip to moscow to their headquarters, if you could replicate situation where starforce actually did some damage to optical drives.
The competition is over by now, apparently no one tried to prove it right, link here [star-force.com].
Re:Damage to optical drives? (Score:2)
That said, anyone that would install system-altering DRM to play a damn game is insane. Totally nuts. I am not much of
Re:Damage to optical drives? (Score:1)
This story has not reached the kind of news value, that the Sony case generated. When this happends, maybe Ubisoft will listen. I don't think that Sony was "forced out of the market" - but you could read the story in many different newspapers/site - not just in computer related news. This, ofcause, is not something Sony can live with, so they undid theri mistake. The only place I have
Re:Damage to optical drives? (Score:4, Insightful)
No, the deal was that you flew out to Moscow at your own expense to demonstrate it. And then they decide whether to award you the prize based on their rules. Also note that the vast majority of people aren't complaining that it physically damages their CD drives. They are complaining about system instability, poor performance and the gaping fucking security hole that Starforce opens on your PC*.
I'm sure that you totally misrepresented the "competition" rules by accident. Everyone knows Starforce are above planting paid shills on forums.
* The Starforce driver can elevate user processes to Ring 0**.
** That's what we call a rootkit.
Re:Damage to optical drives? (Score:2)
The contest page was visited 48.000 times but we received 0 applications. No one showed up.
48,000 visits? Slashdot probably gets that many visits in an hour and we're supposed to be impressed? If they said 480,000 or even 4.8 million unique visits, I'd be more understanding but 48,000? Thats NOTHING by internet standards.
Re:Damage to optical drives? (Score:2)
Was that before or after the death threats [game-overdrive.com]?
Re:Damage to optical drives? (Score:2)
Why Ubisoft? (Score:2)
I do know that other game developers use StarForce though, to the same effect. Why sue UbiSoft in particul
Re:Why Ubisoft? (Score:1)
UbiSoft, instead of a different company, is likely the target due to a recent choice to equip all their games with StarForce.
Cool (Score:2)
Hmm... Russia... (Score:1)
Let's see... The company is based in Russia, produces harmful software and doesn't acknowledge it. It also posts links to torrents of pirated copies of games, that don't use their copy protection (Galactic Civilisations 2) and generally screws up the whole world, except Russia and other countries, where practically everybody infringes copyright, instead of buying the software. I say that this StarForce thingy is actually sponsored by the Russian government in an attempt to screw up the US and the rest of th