Difference between "legal" crack and illegal crack?
 

Hi,

This forum guidelines say not to poste information about "illegal" cracks. But as far as I know, all cracks are illegal. so what is the difference between illegal crack and legal? Is downloading a crack from gamecopyworld.com legal and downloading it from P2P illegal?, What is the reasoning behind it?

It is about games, not cracks. Downloading games from the internet is illegal.

The forum rules state what is illegal on this forum; it may have little correlation to actual laws in some countries. Note that, in some countries, none of creating, hosting or using cracks is illegal; in others, only some of these activities is illegal; and in the most capitalistic ones (~= überparanoid police states) all of them is (or soon will become) illegal.

You see, what's the point of downloading and using a crack when you don't have the game? However, it's another story where you got the game from; if from an illegal source, we don't care, good luck with it, just DON'T DISCUSS IT ON THIS FORUM! I hope this clears things up...

Depends on what country you live in and what copyright law says you can do with the stuff you buy.

If the law in your country states you can't circumvent copy protection mechanisms then using a 'crack' is illegal, if another country allows copy protected discs to be backed up then a 'crack' will be legal.

Bugger, you beat me to it Joe :)

eula can contradict those laws though too.. so it gets very messy

TippeX, ehehe, that's what we quarrelled about with DABhand a few years ago: if a contract between two persons/companies contradicts the laws in a given country, the contradicting parts are automatically void. So the EULA cannot have priority over laws.

All EULAs should operate within the laws of the country the software is sold in, hence some EULA agreements have exceptions for when a particular state/country does not recognise warranty or limitions written into the EULA and this won't affect your statutory rights in case of disputes.

none

Oh no not this again, and I said that no LAW can take precedence over someones legal property, which includes software.

The software is owned by the developer/publisher and its their right to let you make a backup or not, not by the say of whatever country's law.

Also if a countries law was paramount and you had the 100% right to make a backup then every protected game out there is breaking the law as you cant simply back it up.

Im sorry Joe, as I said back then you misread your own countries copyright law.

Afterall posession is 9/10ths of the Law.

While moderating the BioShock threads, I start to understand what the original poster meant... :)

The no-CD patches that GCW hosts are meant to allow you to play the game without needing the original physical media (CD, DVD... floppy disk? ;)) because the media can be broken or the copy protection can cause the game to not work (properly) on your PC. That is considered "legal" to discuss on this forum, too. However, the following patches are "illegal" to discuss and, if uploaded to GCW, are removed soon:

- Turning a freely downloadable or leaked alpha/beta/demo/trial game into the full version, by whatever means: key/serial generator, missing files, EXE from full release etc. This applies to "digital download" games, too: if you bought the game without a CD/DVD then there's nothing to get broken so why would you need a no-CD patch?! If the "digital download" game doesn't work because of the copy protection then 1) complain at the publisher and 2) next time read our forum FAQ about why such purchases are not a good idea.

- Allowing to install the game without the original physical media, by whatever means: removing online activation or other copy protection. There's no need for that as you DO have the original CD/DVD and it only needs to be used once when installing it, right? If you manage to break it during this short session, well, you're so clumsy you should've asked the neighbor to do it for you anyway... ;)

- Whatever else that I cannot remember right now.

In short, GCW is supposed to give you CD/DVD-free gaming experience - which, in our opinion, is the legal gamer's right - but - trying to save the forum and GCW from getting closed by gaming companies - NOTHING MORE!

Perhaps, some explanations should be added to the forum rules? Discuss!

(Thread moved to the GCW Support forum; hopefully, it's the least off-topic here.)

@DABhand: Yes, if a country's law explicitly states that you may make one backup of your legally purchased software (such as in Hungary) then you CAN make one, no matter what the publisher said. If they try to kick your ass for it, Hungarian laws will protect you: they shouldn't have sold the software with such a license in the first place anyway.

Why was mp3search.ru - a site that carried millions of MP3's first for limited but free download and later for download at extremely low prices - such a pain in the RIAA's and MPAA's and whomever's ass? Because it was legal in Russia! Those American idiots probably blackmailed the Russian government (an embargo here, a veto there) and this is how they managed to get that site closed. (Of course, it's working again, with a different name and a slightly different policy so never mind... ;))

There's something about the GNU Public License that came to my mind but I don't remember it well for a quote...

By the way, your misunderstanding probably comes from the fact that you only know countries where laws are quite similar to those in your country. If there was a truly communist country where there were, by the law, no patents, no copyright, and actually NO PROPERTY then it would be obvious to you, the seller of some product, that your product would be "stolen" - which word already sounds strange in a country where there's no property, right?! - at the very moment you sold it to someone living in that country: your software would be copied in infinite amounts and your "physical object" products would be disassembled and replicated as needed. (Does that sound familiar? In the cold war era, Russians copied everything from the Western countries they managed to get their hands on. Which is why the so-called "CoCom list" was made: a product export embargo from Western countries to the Soviet bloc. The same is going on in China right now... Hehe, both are/were "accidentally" the two greatest bastions of communism.) To avoid this, you (or, most probably, your government) would have to sit down with people (not the government! there's no government in communism!) living in that country and make a compromise: they have to obey YOUR laws in THEIR country. Now, doesn't that sound weird to you?!

But, as a better example, there's a very obvious cultural clash between the so-called Western and Eastern civilization. Because of the behavior of the USA - not only military but also cultural -, Iraq publically announced that they don't give a shit about the copyright of American software (or any American product? don't remember) and are going to "pirate" them without end. As a counterattack, if I'm not mistaken, Iraq is now on the USA's software export embargo list: you sell software from the USA to Iraq and the FBI/CIA will fuck you in a second. As Iraq's own laws have priority over the contract between any individuals/companies if at least one of them is Iraqi, this was admittedly the only thing the USA could do about this problem...

The game developers/publishers put the protection there, having the original does not free you up to use cracks etc.

To say you only promote cracks for legit users, or cracks that don't circumvent activation is contradictory.

A crack is a crack is a crack.......one crack cannot be more acceptable than another, because they all do something game/software developers/publishers don't want YOU to do.

As long as the protection is circumvented, pirating will flourish.

Yes, GCW is dancing on the edge of the razor blade of legality with "legal" cracks (as defined above) already. So, the best it can do is to not host/support "illegal" cracks, don't you think?

Also, consider who download cracks from GCW... People who download pirated copies of games don't need to: the crack is included in the pirated copy and the so-called "dox" groups release cracked game updates, too; these are all available at your local warez site right now, for free or for relatively low prices. ;) And, since GCW gets cracks (crack-only packages) from such warez releases, everything you find on GCW has already been available on a warez site hours/days/weeks ago! So why would pirates want/have to download anything from GCW?!

I understand that this distinction seems to be hipocrisy to you. However, from a much broader point of view, democracy and the notion of egality in a capitalistic society is also hipocrisy, and a much bigger one at that. As someone pointed out yesterday - unfortunately, I deleted the post as it was completely off-topic there -, if some people weren't as greedy, not only prices (in general) would be significantly lower but also wages significantly higher, as there would be no "middle man" (the capitalist himself) taking money away from both the buyer and the seller. If a game didn't cost as much as you earn in several days (remember: not all people have wages of several thousand dollars a year but computer games have the same price everywhere!) but only an hour or two, why would you bother to (try to) pirate it?

(Note that I refuse to use the word "steal" or "theft". It makes me furious to see those damned "you wouldn't steal a car so remember: copying a movie is crime" adverts on movie DVD's as these two are not comparable. And, if I bought the DVD then this advert is wasting MY time - every time I try to watch the damn movie! -; and if I downloaded/copied the DVD then I probably don't give a shit anyway...)

And as for what developers/publishers don't want me to do... Would you consider no-intro packs "illegal"? If they modify the game files, they may be illegal. However, am I expected to see the same "hi, it's company X, it was us who developed/published/whatever this game", "this game is best played with an X video/sound card" intro movies (or rather adverts?) and the "if you pirate this game, we'll find you and burn your house down" screens - which cannot be even skipped in some games so it may take up to half a minute or more to get through them! - every time I play the game?! I don't have much time to play games so I play only a bit every day - this means a lot of watching this shit. But even when playing a game (or watching a movie) once, I don't want my time to get wasted because I don't have much of it. Can't I have control over what's happenning on MY computer?! Yes, I want to skip intros in games (or, even better, get rid of them completely) and, yes, I want to get rid of anything other than the selection screens, the main movie and the extras on a DVD. If this means modifying the game files/EXE or rebuilding+shrinking the movie DVD with the appropriate software (to a backup DVD - without stupid intros, copy protection and user operation prohibition - that I'm gonna use for watching the movie) then so be it!

If I also remember correctly your law states you can if you are in a contract to do so. Contract being the EULA you agreed to.

But no point talking about it now, it will never come to a close.