14 DAY TRIAL // Piracy is a big thing nowadays – it's present in a lot of industries and despite the efforts of the producers, it will keep going for a long time. Most commonly it targets the music industry, with users downloading songs from various Internet websites or using different types of applications.
But the gaming industry also has its fair share of pirates. Sure, lots of claims have been issued, pirated CDs or DVDs have been destroyed by the police in various countries, but it is still a big thing. In their defense, pirates claim that the DRM (Digital Rights Management) systems implemented in games are too restrictive and treat every player like a villain, taking away rights such as multiple installations or multiple accounts for a single copy of the game.
Some cases have even gone to court, with companies like Activision, suing players who made illegal copies of their games. Recently, they filed a lawsuit against James R. Strickland, a New Yorker who had distributed pirated versions of Call of Duty 3 for the Xbox 360. In return for the copyright enfringement, Activision claims from 30,000 to 150,000 dollars for every copy of the game.
Such actions, most of them tackling CoD 3 copying, have been carried in the past, according to the guys at GamePolitics, who did some research and came up with other people who had been sued by the gaming giant. Most of them ended with the defendants paying big sums of money to Activision and signing non-disclosure deals, assuring that the story would not go public. GamePolitics also tried to contact several of the defendants or lawyers involved in those trials but to no avail, neither of their calls being answered or returned.
Although game piracy should be restricted, suing people is not the way to go in this regard. The big amounts of money asked by Activision aren't something a regular person can pay up and through such actions the gaming giant definitely won't increase its popularity with its customers.