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Comment by eps | Hacker News Reader

At some point Denuvo was basically a repack of VMProtect [0] (made by a small Russian software company) as the core of their protection "technology". This would've not been not a big deal if they weren't using a SINGLE retail license of that software, a license explicitly prohibiting this sort of white-labelling. And prior to that they were in negotiations with the VMPSoft to develop a custom solution for them. The negotiations didn't go anywhere due to the quoted project cost, so Denuvo bought a license and went ahead anyway [1].

Talk about irony. Ethics, piracy and all.

They got sued for that and eventually settled.

[0] https://vmpsoft.com/

[1] http://rsdn.org/forum/shareware/6733058 (in Russian)

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Oh man, I hit this with the PACE/iLok DRM company in the early 2000s. I was working on a contract with a company that wanted to add support for it to their products. It wasn't working properly for me during development, so I ended up contacting PACE and the following things happened:

1) They sent me a bash script to run on my system (this was on macOS). The script basically went to the root of my hard drive and listed every single file on the system. I told them I could not send them the output because I had data from other companies in there that was under NDA. They were kind of shocked that I read the script and looked at the output.

2) They wanted me to use GPG to cryptographically sign something. When I pointed out that this was for commercial work and we hadn't paid the licensing for using it in a commercial product, they basically hemmed and hawed and said, "Oh that doesn't matter. There's nothing they can do about it."

So yeah, I don't really have a lot of respect for DRM companies, as they all seem to do the very things they're trying to stop others from doing.

Any chance you could point me to (preferably English) sources for this? "Major DRM company caught pirating software" should make for hilarious evidence in piracy/DRM/copyright debates.

Here's an article on it. https://torrentfreak.com/denuvo-accused-of-using-unlicensed-...

The official word from the company is that the post is wrong and that DENUVO had the right and always will have the right to use their software: https://vmpsoft.com/20170606/vmprotect-and-denuvo-gmbh/

That's a post-settlement statement made 3 months after the original post, which wasn't retracted. Also the company and the original poster are one and the same. It sure looks like they "came to an understanding" that was then sealed with an NDA.

The post on RSDN is the source. Its author is the VMP developer.

The thing about these anticheat/anticrack companies is that they all are founded by previous crackers.

they hire crackers currently too, see mrexodia

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