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."
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:3, Informative)
Or just use a SCSI drive.
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 developers responded to these findings, stating "The issue on StarForce is obviously sponsored by our competitors or organized crime groups that run CD/DVD piracy operations. We are now in close cooperation with US and Russian officials investigating the matter and trying to find out who stands behind the boycott campaign". When faced with criticism on the internet, StarForce officials are known to threaten with legal action and contact with the FBI, though the extent to which these threats have been pursued remain doubtful. StarForce's developers claim that their EULA absolves them from any responsibility for problems that their software may cause [3]. Supporters of StarForce argue that the stability problems were exaggerated and have been resolved in newer versions of StarForce.
StarForce copy protection software also forces users to completely wipe and reinstall their partitions if they wish to remove the copy protection software. The protection will also write to any shared network drives that have full read / write access, causing problems for other users on the network.
A large number of gamers have advocated boycotts of games or publishers known to use StarForce. On 30th January 2006 Boing Boing, a popular weblog, labelled Starforce as malware, alleging several problems associated with the protection system, including disk drive performance degradation, weakening of operating system security and stability. A day later on January 31, 2006 Boing Boing received an email from Starforce, threatening legal action and stating that the article was "full of insults, lies, false accusations and rumors". CNET also ran a similar story, and has received similar [email]. However, Protection Technologies have never proven these claims are false.
On 5th March 2006, a StarForce employee posted a link [4] to an illegal download source of Galactic Civilizations 2, a game developed by StarDock which does not use copy protection. Starforce later issued an apology for this act [5], after it received a great deal of attention on the internet.
More info at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starforce [wikipedia.org]
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: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: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' with the protection prevent a legally bought game from functioning on vcertain hardware.
For some games, like unreal tournament 2004, the copy protection was removed in a later patch because of too much incompatibility issues.
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:2, Informative)
The registry branch where the info is stored seems to be constant, so this registry file might work too:
The change takes effect after reboot.