{"id":3024,"date":"2010-03-09T07:06:41","date_gmt":"2010-03-09T12:06:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=3024"},"modified":"2018-01-23T18:12:32","modified_gmt":"2018-01-23T23:12:32","slug":"another-anti-piracy-scheme-that-hurts-legitimate-users","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2010\/03\/09\/another-anti-piracy-scheme-that-hurts-legitimate-users\/","title":{"rendered":"Another anti-piracy scheme that hurts legitimate users"},"content":{"rendered":"

French games developer Ubisoft was the target of a DDoS attack over the weekend, which took out their license verification servers. This left thousands of gamers unable to play their games . . . but not all gamers. Only the ones who bought the game legitimately, because the “real” version requires online validation every time you play . . . the cracked versions do not<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

PC users started reporting problems accessing some of the French company’s most popular games, including best-seller Assassin’s Creed 2<\/em>, on Sunday afternoon. It later emerged that attackers had targeted the company’s controversial anti-piracy system, causing it to break down — which in turn left thousands of people unable to play.<\/p>\n

The chaos was so widespread because of the way that Ubisoft’s copy protection system — which requires players who have bought the game to log in online and verify that they are not playing a pirated version — is designed. By flooding the anti-piracy servers with web traffic, the unknown attackers forced it to collapse and therefore locked out those players who tried to sign in.<\/p>\n

This angered many gamers, who felt that they had been punished for buying legal copies of the company’s games — which cost as much as \u00a350.<\/p>\n

“We’ve had to agree to their draconian rules in order to play their game, however Ubisoft haven’t given a single thought to what happens when their servers screw up,” said one disgruntled user on the company’s web forums. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This is far from the only example of companies trying to protect their intellectual property by imposing DRM “solutions” which punish their customers. In the long term, no matter how nice the product may be, it can’t be a good practice to place barriers in the way of the people who’ve paid to use the product.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

French games developer Ubisoft was the target of a DDoS attack over the weekend, which took out their license verification servers. This left thousands of gamers unable to play their games . . . but not all gamers. Only the ones who bought the game legitimately, because the “real” version requires online validation every time […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,14,15],"tags":[109,135,156,192],"class_list":["post-3024","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-gaming","category-technology","tag-computers","tag-copyright","tag-fail","tag-mmorpg"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-MM","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3024","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3024"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3024\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3025,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3024\/revisions\/3025"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3024"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3024"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3024"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}