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Comment by benjoffe | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how many people visiting their site are going to take this opportunity to get the game at a discount... hopefully not many.

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I'd imagine that a good portion of the people who would buy the counterfeit copy after reading this article already have their iPod jailbroken and would just pirate the app.

Apple's response when they decide to take it down will be the interesting part. We'll find out if there is a kill switch or blacklist in the mac app store.

not really. stuff gets taken down off the App Store all the time due to legal issues and obvious copyright infringement.

the apps get removed (you can't download them anymore), but anyone who has downloaded it can still use their copy.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-10013322-37.html

Supposedly there is some sort of kill switch functionality in the iOS app store, and I haven't heard about copyright infringement to the level of taking someone else's game and redistributing it before. In my mind, the best case scenario is to refund everyone's money and take the game off the market, uninstalling from computers. The only backlash you receive is the press about the kill switch functionality and the whole "dude, where's my game" moments that people will have.

Oh, there's certainly a kill switch. Jobs admitted to it during an interview, but it hasn't been used. The closest App Store comparison is probably Abuse (source code released into public domain, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abuse_(video_game) ):

http://appshopper.com/games/alien-abuse (pulled from app store)

http://appshopper.com/games/abuse-classic (official version)

reason: http://forums.toucharcade.com/showpost.php?p=426791&post...

Long story short, Eurocenter did not have the right to use the sound effects, registered levels (levels 5 and up), or the Abuse trademark in their game "Alien Abuse".

So very similar circumstances. And the original app was never killswitched.

I grabbed VLC before they got it removed, and it still runs for me. It has survived several iTunes syncs, too, and even a restore.

The bad news is when you lose or break your computer. You can't re-download or transfer the app files from one iTunes repository to the other.

Or, at least, I couldn't find a way.

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