Space Empires V Pirated!

[DeadMilkman]

Tim_Ward, unfortunately that wont really help, because torrents are not only usually posted to multiple sites, but there are torrent sites which index other sites torrents as well.... basically they spread.

What I do is put up torrents of each patch as they come out. And when there is a good stable version of the demo I intend to put up multiple torrents of that. A slightly different form of marketing you might say

As to the suggestion of seeding bad torrents, yes it will work, but the word usually gets spread pretty quickly if a torrent is bad. So it would be necessary to seed a new torrent occasionally, make sure it is the EXACT same size as a real SEV upload would be. And the file name would have to be something like spaceempires5.iso,or as a rar file. If you are just seeding a bunch of random files, it wont work. Because the bittorrent clients report the names of the files they are downloading.

And yes, if it is not obvious I am frequent torrent user. I download lots of porn, old movies, and tv shows. So I guess I'm a pirate, arrrrr.

[Tim_Ward]

DeadMilkman said:
Tim_Ward, unfortunately that wont really help, because torrents are not only usually posted to multiple sites, but there are torrent sites which index other sites torrents as well.... basically they spread.

Obviously you'd have to to target more than just mininova.

You'd never get rid of it entirely, but the more sites you can get it taken down from the less people will find the torrent and the less people therefore will pirate the game. If you really think that'll help sales.

[Azselendor]

actually, you target the original uploaders.

See, any copy of SEV that is copied from the CD, I believe, uses a key, correct? If so, that key can be traced to the original person who pirated it via strategy first's shipping logs. If it's sold online, we have a credit card and a shipping address. If its sold in a store, then we can trace the cd key to the batch shipment sent to a store, then check with that store's purchase logs to find out who bought it and even get a picture (and if we got time, maybe play a rousing game of one-sided chair beatings).

Once we find the SOB, we then look at his torrent uploading stats and the number of down loaders for that torrent and pull a page from the RIAA, We take that information and times the number of down loaders times the number of days available times the full retail price to determine how much he owes aaron.

And if he's outside the country or unwilling to pay, I'm sure more than one of us will be more than happy to play the aforementioned chair beating game with him.

[Baron Grazic]

I like your thoughts Azselendor.
Only thing against it is if they have made a key generator. I'm not sure how hard that would be to create, but if only a simple algorithm was used...

[Atrocities]

I had to order a new XP Pro disk from MS because the key that came with my new copy ($400.00 program) had already been used to register a pirated copy of XP. This took many weeks to recover from and HP was no F**king help!

[DeadMilkman]

Yes, there is a key generator already out there, I dont know if it works or not. And the same site I just found the keygen on has full downloadable copies as well... this is without using torrents etc... just a direct web download.

And I dont see much to gain by taking down the torrents now. Since they seem to be mostly unpopulated at this point. I think this is best a lesson learned for the next round really. There are several means to go about making a new release harder to pirate, but once the pirated copies are out there, it is pretty much going to stay.


Sorry to be the bearer of bad news.

[Atrocities]

Well there is one saving grace about this, one or more versions of the BT file for both games seems to also have within it spy/malware. I guess they will be getting more than they bargined for with these downloads. LOL.