ssintercept's Journal: ubisoft uses crack...then ships it to customers

story stolen from techdirt - Ubisoft, one of the larger video gaming companies out there, has a somewhat troubled history of overburdening its games with awful DRM<http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20060331/1549225.shtml>. And, as with most DRM systems, the people it tends to hurt most are the legitimate purchasers who somehow run afoul of whatever DRM rules are in place. In this case, the Ubisoft game Rainbow Six: Vegas2 (R6V2) had some DRM that would check to see if the physical media (CD-ROM) was in the drive before it would let you play. Unfortunately, Ubisoft also offered the game as a download via IGN's Direct2Drive store. They had set it up so this would work even without the actual CD, but a recent patch didn't take that into account, and broke the game for anyone who had purchased it via D2D.

So, what does Ubisoft do? It releases a patch that isn't actually a "patch" but a well known crack that it downloaded off the internet. As TorrentFreak points out at the link <http://torrentfreak.com/ubisofts-no-cd-answer-to-drm-080718/> , according to the way companies like Ubisoft look at things, it "stole" someone else's code and passed it off as its own. And, of course, there's the somewhat delicious irony that it didn't just "steal" any code for its own use, but the very code that companies like Ubisoft insist is evil, immoral and illegal. Except, of course, when Ubisoft is in desperate need of it, apparently. from techdirt- <http://techdirt.com/articles/20080718/1117121722.shtml>