UK Anti-Piracy Campaign [Aug 20, 2008, 07:43 am ET] – Share – Viewing Comments
Times Online has news that five developers, Atari, Topware Interactive,
Reality Pump, Techland, and Codemasters, are serving notice to 25,000 UK
families demanding they pay a settlement, or risk being taken to court over
software piracy (thanks
Edge Online). Here's a portion:
The computer games industry has launched an unprecedented assault on illegal downloads, demanding payment from thousands of families who obtained the latest releases over the internet without paying.
Five of the world’s top games developers will serve notice on 25,000 people across the UK, requiring each one to pay £300 immediately to settle out of court. Those who refuse risk being taken to court. The companies will target their initial legal actions on 500 people who ignore the letters.
The companies involved – Atari, Topware Interactive, Reality Pump, Techland and Codemasters – make some of the popular games, including The Lord of the Rings, the Colin McRae Rally series and Operation Flashpoint. It is estimated that as many as six million people in Britain share games illegally over the internet. The aggressive action marks a dramatic change in the approach to copyright on the internet. The British music industry, hit hard by illegal file-sharing, has taken action against just 150 people in ten years.
The game makers have appointed the law firm Davenport Lyons. This week Isabela Barwinska, an unemployed mother of two, became the first person in the UK to be ordered to pay damages to a manufacturer. She must pay more than £16,000 to Topware after downloading Dream Pinball through a file-sharing site.
16,000 pound fine undoubtedly represents the retail price of the game * number of users that downloaded the game from her. She in essence, became a retail outlet with a lot of customers because she offered the best prices in town (free). Now it's time for her to pay up.
In fairness if she was reselling your game you would not be entitled to the full retail price because that is a marked up number after the store makes it's profit. So it should reflect the cost based on units sold as if a retailer had purchased them from you...no?
50% of retail? 75%?
And if someone resells their copy of your game on Ebay or craiglist and gets $20 for it, isn't that even worse? There must be hundreds of thousands of copies being resold that are technically causing you to lose money because you company is not getting the benefit of a sale or a share of the resell to a new client.
So aren't the people on ebay offering your product for a lesser cost, legally, a bigger threat than pirates? You can go online and buy the game for cheap and it's not paying any money to you... So if that wasn't an option the customers would have to buy from you and you'd make money...right?
So why aren't you going after Ebay? Or craiglist. Those guys are actually charging for your software!
This comment was edited on Aug 20, 16:02.
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