Fighting piracy by sueing

News & General Discussion
1

[edit, 2010/02/05]
Dead topic, trolling overload.
What was initially a simple information question turned into a judgement fest, for a reason I don’t want to know.
So please, let this topic return to oblivions of november '09, thank you.
[/edit]

Hello,

First of all, if some people still believe piracy isn’t a serious thing, just have a look at this article.
Indies are slowly fleeing from the appstore, utterly disgusted by piracy statistics.

As everybody here, I’m in the making of a game.
Started since january 2009, will end in may 2010, made a truckload of sacrifices, including apparition of health side effects.
So I really don’t want to witness my “baby” being raped by thousands of people, and then left on the floor like nearly all the other apps.

I want to blow piracy apart … Well, at my scale :wink:

I think I found a way to legally prove that an app has been hacked.

Which would let regular sueing possible.

So, here is the question :

Has anybody ever experienced sueing piracy ?
And if yes, could you share some details about this experience ?

I feel this experience sharing could be very useful to many of us.

(Would be great if Unity themselves have some feedback about anything similar)

Thank you for your attention :wink:

2

Not “piracy” specifically, but I have retained an attorney to handle issues regarding a copyright violation. I imagine that the situation is different from country to country, but here in the US it usually isn’t economically worthwhile to legally pursue a violator unless:

  1. The violator has deep pockets (a big company steals from you).

  2. You have deep pockets and just want to make an example of the violator.

  3. The value of your loss is so great that attorney’s fees seem worthwhile.

At the time (10 years ago) it cost on the order of $4000USD to retain the attorney who made a few calls, sent a few letters and negotiated a settlement (I received nothing, but the violator stopped their illegal activity and forfeited their license).

I was also told that if it went to court I could expect to pay in the neighborhood of $32000USD.

The best way to handle piracy IMO is to prevent it in the first place. The worst way is to wait until you’ve been ripped and then contact an attorney. I speak from experience…

3

Thanks for sharing your experience :wink:
That’s interesting to see real costs.

Yes, the best way is to fight piracy, but the more you fight it, the more you will attract talented hackers. So in the end, we have to expect piracy anyway (as told in the article).

4

I would suspect that the act of filing a lawsuit on every person that pirated a single app would be way too costly. Here is my breakdown, it would represent about 400 hours of work by a junior attorney. Less experienced, and thus less costly attorney.

$10,000 for each suit just to file
$8,500 for discovery
$75,000 to litigate
$10,000 to collect on the judgement

That adds up to a minimum of over $100K for each instance of pirating and you will maybe get a judgement of $25,000 max plus attorney fees. You have to pay the attorney fees in advance (I have never met an attorney that would do this kind of work for a percentage of your judgement) and the odds of the person who pirated your software having $125,000 to pay you is nil. They would most likely file bankruptcy and you would be on the hook for all of the costs.

You are probably wanting to do what the MPAA and RIAA have been trying to do by making it seem too costly to pirate your product. You have to look at this a little differently. The MPAA and RIAA have very deep pockets, they have top attorneys already on their payroll and PR groups ready to publicize their actions. They are not looking for one payday here and there, they want to make examples of individuals who pirate. They also understand that they will most likely never see a dime of a judgement in their favor. It is all about putting the fear into people that if they pirate they will lose millions of dollars, even though that is not really the truth. In the end, pirating is still on the rise, despite their best efforts. Google it if you don’t believe me, they need to find a different business model to shut down pirates.

DRM will continue to be cracked and people will continue to pirate. The object is to price your product at a reasonable price and make it easy and worthwhile for people to buy your product vs. stealing it. This will keep the percentage of pirated versions of your product to a much lower number, but you will still have pirates. It is inevitable and suing is not the answer. Look at any software ever produced and realize those companies have much deeper pockets than you and have not succeeded in court. Just be thoughtful on how you take care of your paying customers and you will make plenty of money.

5

Good clarification.

Just in my opinion :

“Reasonable price” :
actually the 60-80% piracy rate statistics are for 0.99$ apps …

How more reasonable could it be ?

“make it easy and worthwhile for people to buy your product vs. stealing it.” :
Real Racing gamestudio has invested hundreds of thousands dollars in development.
How more easy and worthwile could it be ?

Result : first week, 90% of piracy.

I thought that selling our soul to the Game Devil to make a wonderful game would be some sufficient taking care of paying customers …

Honestly, there are limits to efforts. If one work very hard to make an awesome game, he deserves to be paid. Period.
Starting to add additional efforts just to thank people not to have stolen our product leads to an endless loop, as nothing is better than free pricing.

Let’s be honest : Nowadays, quality, low pricing and accessibility/demo version don’t protect from piracy anymore.
Making a great game doesn’t work.
Giving an app for practically free doesn’t work.
Making post-buy offers doesn’t work.

People don’t care.

As said before, there’s nothing more powerful than a free pricing, so as long as there will be cracked version, people will steal.

With the appstore, I think we reached a point of no return, so let’s have some relief, let’s stop prostituting ourselves to beg for the grace of not stealing our products. Let’s fight.
Don’t we deserve it ?

6

@coreyb - Thanks for the updated attorney fees. At the time (10 years ago) we worked with one of the best in the business, and even then the rate he quoted was considered a “deal”. For it to go up 3x or more over 10 years isn’t particularly surprising (but you gotta wonder if maybe we’re in the wrong line of work?). :wink:

@n0mad - I honestly can’t see how anyone can make a reasonable living selling their games for as cheap as is found at the appstore. I know people have, I just know that I probably couldn’t, thus the main reason why I haven’t bothered with the iPhone (yet).

7

Actually, if there was no piracy, even a 0.99$ good app could make a living :

  • more than 16 billions of iDevices over the world (and I feel wrong with this number, I guess it’s much more)
  • let’s say an average good app find 10% of total users, that would make 1 billion and 600000 units sold.
  • Even if spilled over a year, that just makes a few more than one billion dollars. You take away the taxes, I think we’re good for a living if the dev products one quality game per year.

In order to reach the strict minimum to live per year, let’s say 20.000 $ net income, one have to sell
30.000 units, or 82 units a day.
When googling some dev results, you will find some of them telling that the average for a less than moderate success is 100 per day.

I’m not making the promotion of 1$ apps here as I’m against that price (too low for professionalism), but even with that, you can live with it.

And I’m not talking about greediness either of course, because that revenue is purely linked to the dev’s efforts to provide a great game.
If one is lazy, doesn’t care about quality and customers, he will fail to make a living, even without piracy, like in any other profession.

But here, when you see 60 to 90% of piracy rates, for sure you really can’t make a living of it, even with an AAA game.

8

No…there are 6.8 billion people on the planet, so I don’t think there are 16 billion iDevices. :slight_smile: In reality, there are something over 50 million.

That’s way higher than average for paid apps. A good app that does very well is on average reaching more like 1-2% of total users. Free apps can do much better, of course.

Those piracy rates are misleading. They are not talking about the total percentage of people using iDevices who pirate, because it’s impossible. Non-jailbroken devices can’t run pirated software.

Anyway, I’m making a living of it, even with only one game on the app store so far that got up to #56 at the best it ever did (and it was $.99 at the time, later I raised it to $1.99). Of course, I’m working alone, so I don’t have to pay anyone else…otherwise I wouldn’t be making a living at it.

–Eric

9

You have to think about how many pirated copies you can turn in to paid copies. Otherwise you’re just on a crusade with no purpose.

Pirates who would never have bought your game, are not ruining your living. It might be wrong and annoying but it isn’t hitting your pocket.

It might be different with big budget movies and even games but with most/all iPhone games I’d say there are far more economical ways to increase exposure and distribution 2.5 times than trying to sue that pirating 60%.

10

Sorry, I mismatched billion and million.

Well, there should be a sticky on every forum that would enumerate all the denied myths.

In short, piracy conversion is a total myth.
Google for Tap Fu, or search in the long thread about piracy that I made in Touch Arcade.

Now for that other “pirates wouldn’t have bought it anyway”, pardon me, but I say a massive No.
Unless pirates are downloading games that they don’t like, they would have bought it.
And money lacking is not receivable for a 1 to 5 bucks game.

Please anyone, cease those 2 everlasting arguments. They have been counter proven in tons of reports, discussions, facts.

Piracy severly hurts revenues. Period.
Piracy severly hurts moral. Period.

Fighting piracy, or even trying to fight, is not a lost crusade, or else everybody here just has to stop developping and find another profession.

Aw… I was afraid that such a thread would quickly turn into another debate about how good/bad is piracy…

11

Here are the real piracy numbers. And if you aren’t using Pinch or another analytic system, you are doing yourself a disservice.

Pinch Media Piracy Survey

12

Hmm…even fewer jailbroken devices than I thought. Only 5% in the U.S., where normally the majority of app sales come from. Therefore, stressing out over a maximum possible piracy rate of 5% (assuming that 100% of jailbreakers pirate) seems like a huge waste of time.

According to the chart there, the less money people have, the more likely they are to pirate apps. So, if you decide to sue, you’re generally suing people with no money. Brilliant…

–Eric

13

How well does the DRM system work? AFAIK unity can detect when the DRM has been cracked. I guess you could always just make the app not work when this is detected.

14

Interesting as all those statistics are, beyond the fact that lots of apps get pirated, how you interpret them is open to considerable question.

Regardless, I’m not arguing that piracy is morally just or that it doesn’t cost money. What I’m arguing is that as a small developer, you can very probably improve your sales much better by putting the effort in other places than trying to make pirates buy your app.

Eradicating piracy won’t make you a penny. As others have mentioned, suing pirates will lose you a fortune. So you can put time, money and effort into getting pirates to buy, or put more time, money and effort into getting honest people to buy.

15

Knowing one can be sued has always been diisuasive.
Furthermore, lack of money never granted the right to steal. :roll:

Also, piracy is not confined to poor people, I know a lot of engineers that claims shamelessly that they only download hacked games.
I even was told from a friend about his CEO said he would never pay for an app.

Now, if you carefully read the article in my first post, this was the same PinchMedia that told piracy was growing even bigger now, becoming out of control.

Finally, here are some other points of view about being “piraped” :

NGmoco : http://www.mobile-ent.biz/news/34675/Ngmoco-laments-iPhone-game-piracy

Little tank that could : http://www.geek.com/articles/mobile/the-little-tank-that-could-for-iphone-was-pirated-96-percent-of-the-time-20090729/

Rally Master Pro : iPhone racing game Rally Master Pro suffers 95 per cent piracy on first day | Pocket Gamer

Tap Fu : http://fingergaming.com/2009/10/26/tap-fu-developer-details-90-iphone-piracy-rate/

So here we are, if there’s only 8% of JB devices + 60-90% of pirated apps, and those big titles have such huge piracy reports, we can deduce that there’s really not that much gamers on iPhone.

16

On the other hand, take games like Demigod with little-to-no copy protection. It is still selling very well (according to the last Stardock report I read).

I think the biggest risk you run when you start going hardcore on copy protection is pissing off customers that would otherwise happily pay. There are many examples were the pirates have it better than the paying customers - take DVD’s, pirates don’t have to wait for 2 minutes before getting to the actual movie. Pirates don’t have to deal with region lockout nonsense. Sometimes this is even worse with games - I remember find cracks for a few games that I paid good money for, because the copy protection was slowing down the game start up, or causing hiccups. I mean at that point, I’m inches for pirating myself - I wouldn’t do it as it is immoral - but take frustated customer #1234, all his friend just rip stuff, they don’t have the problems, so why even buy the product?

It’s impossible to protect against them anyways, look at Modern Warfare 2 - already cracked and already has dedicated servers.

Pirates are leeches, and all around dickheads dont get me wrong, but I think it’s more useful to spend resources on improving the experience with your paying customers than fighting a losing battle against the pirates.

17

If I may, there could be another solution.

Sure, pirating the software is an effective way of getting around buying our software. However, I think the way FaceBook games work could prove to be helpful. You give the player the core game, but have highly inexpensive buyable content.

An example is a Free-To-Play MMO called Gates of Andaron. I wasn’t impressed with the overall game (poorly executed WoW clone…), but I liked how to get a mount you had to lay down real cash ($20 got you a double-speed ground mount). You can get to most if not all places you need to on foot or via teleporter, but to get more out of the game, you pay your money.

This is just an idea.

18

For games on the iDevices, the only thing that would cause any real concern about piracy, is if I had a substantial on-line component that required me to pay bandwidth costs. In this case, I would not want freeloaders leeching off my bandwidth. Other than that, there’s no point spending much energy worrying about the 8% of total users who are potential pirates. Aside from spending a few minutes disabling the automated piracy tools from working, anything more is obviously going to be counter-productive considering the stats. Focus more on making a cool game so you can get in the top 100.

–Eric

19

Yep, I understand it will be better to focus on content :wink:

Was just sharing some ideas to potentially give them a hell of a fight.

20

Seems like you should be able to report people just like you would for shoplifting, and the legal system would take over from there.