Rockstar is selling cracked game copies on Steam
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The original game from Steam won't run on Linux but if I change the .exe for one that is cracked, it works.
I've been keeping that .exe for years.
The crack for The Colonel's Bequest worked by hardcoding the RNG in the interpreter to always return the same number. This broke every random element of the game, which is undetectable on a single playthrough.
It would be ironic if Rockstar was in violation of Razor1911's copyright.
At best it would be a wash, there is a decent chance the damages for the countersuit would lead to a net loss.
This is basically how Rockstar used it - to make the game work on computers without CDs. So the actual rights holder has recognised that this tool or one like it is legitimately required for interoperability, between the game as a piece of technology and a modern computer. They won't work together otherwise.
Maybe I am being too tricky but that's how I see it. And if that makes it a legitimate work then it's funny to think about the consequences.
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2021/10/28/2021-23...
Geeks often think that the law is some sort of blockchain-esque thing that is absolute, context-free and machine-interpretable.
In reality, many laws require 'guilty intent' (mens rea). This is why we have 'judges', who perform 'judgement'.
So the same tool called 'no-cd', marketed as a backup tool may be judged 'OK', where 'WaR3z HaCk.exe' published by a group of known software pirates will be judged 'anti circumvention'
A Harry Potter spin-off about Hermione (I don't know anything about HP, sorry in advanced) is a derivative of the original Harry Potter work. As I'm sure you are well aware, you cannot sell copies of your Hermione spin-off, because that'd be copyright infringement, because it is a derivative work.
Very true.
> You can't make a derivative work without a license. T
You can, but it is a copyright violation to do so unless an exception (like Fair Use) applies.
A derivative work is also a work eligible for copyright in its own right, and as such is copyright by the creator by operation of law when fixed in a tangible form, whether or not it also violates someone else’s copyright.
> It derivates
“derives”
> from the copyrighted work and is therefore within the domain of the copyright and under the control of the copyright's owner.
No, producing it is within the legally exclusive rights of the copyright holder subject to the limitations on those rights, but once created the copyright in the derivative is not under the control of the copyright holder of the original (though transferring or licensing back may be part of the resolution of copyright violation lawsuit over its creation.)
See 17 U.S.C. §103(a), which says that derivative works can be copyrighted, but that does not extend to any part of the work in which such material has been used unlawfully.
(not a lawyer but I did audit this class at a law school)
This is actually an unanswered/unproven question that comes up quite a bit in automotive tuning, where individuals and tuning companies modify OEM calibrations and create application software patches which, while they are unique and perform stand-alone functions, run on top of OEM ECU software.
GCC made an enhancement board for Missile Command and later for Pac Man ("Crazy Otto", which became "Ms. Pac Man"). Rather than employing simple "ROM hacks" as other enhancement board manufacturers did, GCC specifically built their enhancement hardware not to contain any code copied from the original game ROM. Their hardware patched the existing ROM only by overlaying their code onto the original ROMs, not by copying any of the original code[1].
There's some neat detail in the background slides here[2]. I'd love to hear that talk but I'm not immediately a recording of it.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Computer_Corporation
[1] https://web.stanford.edu/class/sts145/Notes/3_game_business/...
Yes, just as annotations are recognised as being a derivative work even without the original.
> Is the unique, creative work of writing "perform XYZ instruction at XYZ address," in lieu of the original executable, still derivative?
If you can convince a judge that, on the balance of probabilities, you were divinely inspired to write it with no connection to the original executable, then it's not derivative. But good luck with that.
But you can distribute it for free, as fanfiction.
Also, a no-CD crack does not contain any of the original work. It's akin to a program that you can use to modify, say, your legally-purchased Harry Potter ebook in order to change all instances of "wand" to "wang"
https://www.vice.com/en/article/88gqjz/anne-rice-really-hate...
Not legally.
> Also, a no-CD crack does not contain any of the original work. It's akin to a program that you can use to modify, say, your legally-purchased Harry Potter ebook in order to change all instances of "wand" to "wang"
Doesn't matter, it's still a derivative work, just as a translation or annotation that doesn't contain any of the original text is a derivative work.
A maybe more clear example is music. Songwriting is covered by copywrite. Singing is also covered by copywrite. If A writes a song and B sings the song without A:s premission it can be copyright infringment. However, A can not take a recording of B:s song and copy and sell it without B:s consent because B has the copyright to the performance (even if the performance was a copywright infringment).
So I can't write a story with HP characters, but I can't be copyright struck for writing that there is a book called Harry Potter that has these characteristics.
(The above is in the USA, other countries have different policies and rights.)
https://www.mugglenet.com/site/publications/
You can also find unofficial and unauthorized books in other settings, such as Minecraft, but you can argue that it's explicitly permitted as seen here: https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/article/commercial-use-guide... - but you can ignore those in the USA in many cases - here's one already: https://www.amazon.com/Minecraft-Monarchies-UnOfficial-Story...
>There are at least four books so far in the "unofficial" series, and if you believe that the companies involved wouldn't copyright strike it if they could, that's protected by the first amendment.
You have no idea what you are talking about. The first amendment isn't a defense to copyright infringement. transformative fair use with a de minimis copying is.
That was my scene back in the day when there was less risk of the Feds kicking in the door. At least back then most of us saw it as a learning experience.
Why did you do this? Fame? Money? Challenge?
I didn't know enough to so it myself and no one would teach me.
Fame: Non-existent, since you don't tell people.
Money: Non-existent, you don't get paid.
In retrospect, I think a major drivers for teenagers for a lot of activities is a sense of identity. You feel like one of the role models in [name your favorite hacker movie]. It's the same reason why punks wore spikes and mohawks, goths wore black, and people might pick a genre of music (even if privately). I'd guess a lot of more negative things, like vandalism, are similar too.
You become part of a community too.
And ultimately, you contribute to it. As much as it might be illegal, cracking software helps other kids who can't afford that software. Few real engineers will use a hacked copy of AutoCAD, and literally everyone I know began to pay for music once they could afford it. On the other end of the bell curve are kids who can't afford those. Providing them with access is a community service. And it's going up against The Man. It's illegal, but by the code of ethics we followed at the time, it was very ethical.
I did it because it was interesting, I wanted to prove DRM is a flawed concept and broken construct, and because the community which I built (as a result) was really great and a home to me when I didn't ever experience one.
It was never about money or fame, it was about providing something to people that had a value. People said the "thing" I provided was better than the "real thing", and that gave me a sense of pride: I'd never get hired by the company that made "real thing" to make their "thing" better because I didn't have the credentials on paper.
But at least my "thing" was better.
At least in the 90s there were lots of tutorials to learn how to crack/reverse engineer, from +orc’s documentation to fravia ´s fortress of reverse engineering - I’d expect similar tutorials to still be around.
Reverse engineering also happens to be a very useful skill as a regular software engineer ( debugging compiler bugs, figuring out why software X is behaving strangely and what it is doing etc ).
All that reverse engineering experience gave me a particularly useful talent as a developer: an uncanny ability to sit down and grok other people’s code almost like magic.
Solid experience with reverse engineering really is a good skill to have.
On the other hand, probably 15-20 years after I had last used a crack for a game I had to implement some basic protection like this into a piece of software (more like: make sure the customer will not run this demo version forever) and it was fun to discuss in the team what we all remembered from back then and which measures were adequate to implement.
Then in 20 years you boot up the image and find you can't log in because your cloud Windows account was deleted 10 years ago for inactivity, your build toolchain is too outdated to download artefacts, the vendor of your text-padding library deleted it in a fit of pique, your code-signing certificates have expired, the guy whose cell phone is on the corporate account 2FA left the company 15 years ago, the OS vendor won't allow new releases to use those obsolete, deprecated APIs.....
I wonder if they did assign someone all that and they took a shortcut.
I want to know in what world a company like Disney goes anywhere and then send Microsoft and Amazon there.
And I can't find any non-crack iso to load into the VM. (Can't rip it myself, due to not having a cd drive anymore)
Anti what features? Piracy?
Like parent says, cracking and piracy pair well, but I've had to do it many times just for compatibility reasons, on software I had purchased.
All perfectly understandable to me. But from the perspective of the people designing the anti-something system, wouldn't they call it piracy?
We can argue if piracy is a charitable enough name for bypassing copyright protections but that's irrelevant in terms of whether or not that is the thing the software provider is trying to do.
Cracking is a method of removing undesired features or inclusions from software, often licensing controls, or other anti-consumer features.
Many many many people "cracked" their software who where not eganged in the act of copyright infringement, they legally owned the software but for a number of reasons has no desire to run the invasive software bundled with the game or content they purchased.
I've heard stories of them getting disconnected because they were bumped, and the whole unit goes dead five minutes later. At least it's not immediate.
'software fraud', 'software theft', 'forgery'... hmm well there's a reason I don't work in marketing obviously.
Do you not remember the ads? The "you wouldn't steal a car"?
Piracy is just what they were able to get. Should have hired the bank's PR managers, who turned "failing to do due diligence on a customer's identity" into the customer's problem.
Which ended up being quite funny, because I very much would download a car
Yes, many people. But not “many many many” people. You try to make it sound like cracking to pirate was minority use case.
It was a valid use case, sure, but as big as using torrents to download Linux ISOs.
Cracks helped to fix some serious usability issues (as DRM removal nowadays also helps with), but let's not rewrite history to pretend that was what majority of people used them for.
> A bookseller that seizes the copies or writings of other men without permission.
> PI'RATE, verb transitive To take by theft or without right or permission, as books or writings.
EDIT: I just got out my OED, and sure enough:
> 1668 J. Hancock Brooks String of Pearls (Notice at end), Some dishonest Booksellers, called Land-Pirats, who make it their practice to steal Impressions of other mens Copies... [0] https://www.etymonline.com/word/pirate#etymonline_v_16375
The way the comment was phrased read as though they didn't understand what had happened, not that they didn't understand why. Especially since no one has an answer to that, so no one can offer an explanation.
Linking twitter has become worse than your average paywalled site, which you can look up on archive.something if it seems interesting.
The Windows port of Marc Ecko's Getting Up: Contents under Pressure being sold on Steam is the DEViANCE crack.
Open the game's exe in a hex editor and you can plainly see "DEViANCE".
https://www.techrepublic.com/forums/discussions/windows-uses...
> Apart from where mentioned above, filenames seem to match GoodSMS names (commonly found on the internet) with almost all non-alphabetical character removed. This suggests that all of the ROM images were obtained from the internet rather than from Sega's internal archives.
https://www.smspower.org/Development/NintendoWiiVirtualConso...
GoodSMS is a community/pirate naming scheme for identifying the different ROM dumps.
Myth? Innocent? That game was totally unplayable when it first came out (for 98/ME?) so I doubt Razor made anything worse. I'd get most of the way through any race before the game randomly crashed.
It would be funnier if it weren't so absurd, since I'd have to go through finding the opponent in the world, chasing them to the starting line and doing the race itself each time.
[1] https://boingboing.net/2006/07/19/windows-xp-sounds-cr.html [2] https://torrentfreak.com/turner-classic-movies-airs-a-film-w...
> This gets better - Razor's crack is fine, the reason both Midnight Club 2 and Manhunt crashed when these cracks were in use was the fact that Steam DRM included a .bind section that was code not marked as code - thus tripping Data Execution Prevention
I don't remember the exact format but it turned out the riddle was instructing me to go to page X, line Y and character Z of the manual for the game!
I remember being so sad that I couldn't play anymore because I didn't have the manual but in retrospect I wonder if this was an anti-piracy strategy
There's a big list on mobygames here: https://www.mobygames.com/group/9360/games-with-manual-looku...
Oh dang, these are fun, I remember the classic Monkey Island "Dial-A-Pirate" wheel [3]
FYI you can use these without downloading the whole collection:
- Under Download Options, click "SHOW ALL" to see the list of files [1]
- Find the zip file for the game you want and click "View Contents" [2]
- Click the "HTM" file listed [3]
Kudos to the kind soul who took the extra effort to package them as single-file self-contained html docs!
1: https://archive.org/download/code-wheels
2: https://ia904503.us.archive.org/view_archive.php?archive=/22...
3: https://ia904503.us.archive.org/view_archive.php?archive=/22...
For those wondering, yes it happened to me, it was absolutely infuriating like "man this fucking game is full of bugs", lol.
Totally, and exceptionally common. It was popular in the '80 and the early '90.
Who could have thought what a company with billions of revenue would use the cracks from RAZOR1911 for IP they are selling to the end users?
Shocking!
They were successful because they actually stopped when it became illegal and started calling game publishers offering localization and distribution services.
I'm betting even at the time of the game's release, it was so fragile that someone breathing wrong on the build machine would cause the build to fail. Any time the Windows machine displayed the numeral 1 in the systray, it would be unbuildable. And on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Fridays it would just fail to compile. That there were only 3 employees who could get it to work at all the last 3 months of development... and they all quit years ago.
Now? Now it won't build on Windows 11, or even on the old XP machine they dug up. It's so riddled with Denuvo or whatever, that they'd have to spin up a team of 12 for two months just to delete that, and only for them to discover it won't build afterwards.
And, whatever else, they sure as hell don't have anyone who's good enough at assembly and IDA Pro to crack themselves. Probably too cheap to even get the single seat license for IDA Pro.
To whom would I have to prove or disprove my standing to take Rockstar games down, I wonder? Does Steam have any right to refuse such a request just because it's patently absurd?
If you say you represent them, all the scary letter heads will go to _you_.
Of course, you'd probably get counter-sued for a number of civil torts for being a fuckhead.
This is only true of Youtube, where their "DMCA" process is entirely extralegal, which is why there is no penalty for an incorrect takedown request.
If you file a DMCA, and Valve ignores it, you have to take it to court, where a judge will decide whether you prove you are the rightful copyright holder. As in the case with google, a company is free to take down content for any reason, including for bogus DMCA claims.
No requirement such as that is part of the DMCA, and there is no penalty in statute for making illegitimate notices.
Apparently they’ve been active again since 2010, but in my ( much older ) mind, steam has made piracy mostly obsolete.
That seems to be the real point for these groups. Reputation from reverse engineering. I certainly enjoyed my time writing them. I don't know of any group that does this and doesn't support the developers of the IP in question. You still end up buying the software.
I prefer Steam over other platforms because multiplayer is effortless, with a friend or at a LAN party that means means more time actually playing the game. But if it’s not on Steam or not everyone can afford it, we’re probably playing a cracked, portable copy.
I mean, the scene is not a reliable way to pay the bills. You need to find a "real job" at some point, and the skills you get by cracking software and making demos could find good use in the video game industry.
A crack does not compile anything, but even if you go that road, it will be argued anyway that the patch which is applied is copyrighted.
Now, of course, it's another thing to prove that the patch may indeed be copyrighted...
I guess the economics just haven't worked out to produce a true showdown. Game mods are in my opinion the clear favorite for where this would finally rise to a court-level problem, and clearly there's been a lot of conflict in this space, but nobody yet has been foolhardy enough to build a large enough business on selling some mod that when the owner tries to shut them down they actually go to a full-on, precedent-setting legal battle. (After all, economically, when you get to that level of capability, why not make your own game that you clearly own? That path has been trod many times.)
So, my best answer to your question is, honestly nobody really knows what kind of rights Razor may or may not have to the final product of their crack, especially since it is not the crack itself being distributed.
For a very common example, let's look at a translated book. Copying and distributing such a book requires separate permission from both the author of the book and the author of the translation; the translation is a derivative work, it's covered by the copyrights of the original book and the author, but the translator also holds independent copyright on the translation in addition to the author's interest.
IMHO a derivative work of a program patched with someoone else's code (no matter how small, as long as it meets the very low copyright law bar of 'the slightest touch of creative input') is quite similar.
But the specific case of Razor 1911 might be disqualified by US copyright law section 103a which says "[...] but protection for a work employing preexisting material in which copyright subsists does not extend to any part of the work in which such material has been used unlawfully."
However, it hasn't actually been settled. I've been watching. The question of whether you can bypass the matter of distribution by distributing a patch you definitely 100% solely own, but then the end-user is the one doing the combining, is not established.
I ANAL of course.
edit: per the sibling comment the crack might not be included, so this might not apply.
The "regardless" part is wrong. It is permissible for the owner of the software to include software for the express purpose of bypassing the protections they themselves placed on their software. Why would you think that the software owner isn't allowed to do that?
It's not permissible for them to make available other people's "software for the express purpose of bypassing the protections they themselves placed on their software" without the express permission of those other people.
Neither statute nor case law sets a lower limit on the size of software that is protected by copyright... but if there were a lower limit, then it is clearly down towards the hundreds (or even dozens) of bytes. The crack certainly doesn't sit underneath that lower limit.
It'd be like purloining just one source code file, including it in your commercial software and relying on the defense "hey, it was only a few hundred lines long".
That is false. They simply have to use the other software, i.e., the crack, within the terms of its license.
In this case, the crack was distributed widely with a permissive use license. My hazy memories of that era specifically mention giving them credit and nothing else. There was definitely no commercial use restriction.
Also, the patches typically had no license terms attached to their usage, or if they did it came in the format of attribution. The implications here is debatable, but we again come back to enforcement to close out the otherwise circular argument.
If you pick up a copy of Photoshop and can't find the license for it, you don't get to go down to the street corner and sell bootleg copies. That defense won't hold when you're in district court fighting to stay out of federal prison, anyway.
And while it's true that this will never be enforced, if there are no principles here, then there can be no guilt from illegally copying these games.
So even if there was a no commercial use license somehow, it feels kinda like jury nullification where it's not explicitly legal, but de facto legal because of structure of the rest of the judicial system.
Inversely, it's not like the crack was made just out of educational curiosity. At one point it might have hurt sales... now somehow it helps.
Not like the group would have a moral high ground to claim their copyright was violated. Though the idea is fun.
It is rather odd however, and paints Rockstar in a very negative light as a trustworthy purveyor of binary distributed software. Do you want to receive l33t warez when paying for software?
I expect reproducible binaries produced by a controlled toolchain from a responsible developer. Linux distributions have higher standards for binaries they distribute for free ffs.
I would estimate the number of videogames published for Windows PCs matching all of these critera to be roughly 0.
For Rockstar to be shipping pirated cracked binaries as their own demonstrates a profound lack of responsibility and professionalism as software developers.
But I'm sure there's a non-zero amount of windows game developers being careless/sloppy in general too.
By reproducible I meant they can recreate their binaries from source code, not necessarily bit-for-bit.
There's zero reason to ship a Warez group's cracked version of a game when you're the copyright holder in possession of the source and ability to simply build an executable without the copy protection crap the crack is bypassing.
It's pathetic on Rockstar's part.
It probably is even less save, because the builds differ and perhaps behave differently and you might even need a full QA cycle. The likelyhood of an old crack working more flawlessly is higher.
That's not a pedantic definition, that is the definition.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reproducible_builds
> simply build an executable
One does not "simply" build an executable of a ten year old game codebase on a modern system. Of course it might be worth putting the build system - by which I literally mean the hardware and software - in storage. Realistically though, with all the churn happening in the games industry, studios getting closed/moved right after the game ships, it's often just not happening, especially if the game is not a big success.
> It's pathetic on Rockstar's part
It's actually exactly the kind of "fuck the police" attitude that I expect from the studio responsible for a game like GTA. Groups like Razor1911 also have their own ethics, they're doing a good job, creating a version of the game that is better than the one that actually shipped.
Right, of the term I quoted when saying you're pedantically applying the definition of a phrase I didn't even use.
I had originally said reproducible binaries, which meant to say they have the source, and can modify + recompile the damn thing. "Reproducible builds" is an industry term with a specific meaning, and I didn't say that.
People had standards at the time, which wasn't that long ago either.
(I am talking with the context of current games using denuvo, not this specific case)
One could presumably then archive the directory and go DRM-free
Bypassing Steam DRM requires just replacing a single DLL in the game directory. There's even whole full-featured Steam Emulator DLLs that you just drop in and get to play the game for free with working online play over Valve's servers.
I was thinking that since the binary seems largely unchanged... that the presence of DLLs and such wouldn't really matter.
The cracked version wasn't aware of Steam, so I wonder if it's even checking
analogous to free work-for-hire
I'm guessing this is some subcontractor taking shortcuts rather than an official company policy approved by legal.
I suppose it's possible for that particular string to get into the binary by some other means. Maybe failed anti-circumvention that checks for known strings in its own directory or something similar?
Are you a journalist because you're frustrated that this person isn't being a journalist...? That's kind of the same logic.
Second problem: There could be many different official executables for this game. Each would have a different hash. Provenance proving applies here too.
Third problem: Two hash values doesn't communicate the actual story as well as what this person (who may or may not be a journalist, that appears to be your assumption) chose to do.
Second solution: Not really, when you do CD releases you have a "gold master" which is the final burned CD that the other CDs are copied from. That's the one you use as the official one, as that's the one most people on PC actually have.
If the game had multiple regions (something PC games usually don't), you have multiple executables. But this happens mostly for console games, but again wouldn't be difficult to acquire a specific one for one of the ~4/5 regions there is.
Re third problem, you're probably right about this. But I'd still argue that verifying information after a finding would add more credence to the story itself and cement it better, it wouldn't take anything away from the story (unless it proved that there isn't actually any story).
> Not really, when you do CD releases you have a "gold master"
This is an oversimplification. In the late 90s / early 00s when 3D APIs were more fragmented than they are today, many games had different releases built to support different GPUs. There's also versions distributed with hardware that include checks that the PC contains the specific hardware.
MC2 had separate NA and EU releases, there is at least the chance of multiple versions from internationalization.
(well, "smoking gun" in quotes, because I don't really see Rockstar doing anything wrong here. Would it have been better if they had zeroed out that string?)