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Lawsuit Against Ubisoft for Starforce

Posted by Zonk on Mon Apr 03, 2006 08:26 AM
from the punishing-the-enablers dept.
Security Government The Courts Entertainment Games News
Cyber Akuma writes "Due to Ubisoft's intentional use of the highly controversial copy protection scheme Starforce, despite user protests and purposeful deletion of any forum discussions about the protection, Christopher Spence has filed a 5 Million Dollar lawsuit against the company for use of the crippling DRM in their games. Starforce has been reported to cause system instability, slowdowns, and possible damage to optical drives. As well as questionable business practices when dealing with customers and other companies, which has been reported on Slashdot before."
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Lawsuit Against Ubisoft for Starforce 50 Comments More /

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  • Wait... we don't like Starforce... go get em Chris!!!

    It is often a shame IMO when legal action is the only way to take care of issues such as the wonderful rootkits, spyware and drm on music and video game disks.
    • Lawsuits such as this are totally justified. It's intentional asshattery. There is nothing frivolous about this.

      The only time a lawsuit is stupid is when someone sues over something that is, at worst, an accident. Malpractice, McDonald's hot coffee, etc.
      • But McDonald's hot coffee was a real problem.

        What most people don't know want to admit is that the hot coffe suite wasn't about someoen spilling coffe, it was about a company serving coffe that was too hot for the cups they served it in. Yes, the coffee was so hot it melted the cups and caused the lids to come off. After recieving many complaints about it at that particular (yes it was only one store serving it this hot too) store, a customer suffered third degree burns on thier crotch and leg areas.

        MCdonal
        • For an alternate view see overlawyered.com's rebuttal of this "it's an urban legend" position. Don't have the URL handy, but search "mcdonald coffee" on overlawyered. (Turns out McD's coffee then was 10-20 degrees cooler than Starbuck's is served right now. And was well within the norm for coffee temperatures at the time.)
          Then again, the whole post above sounds a bit like a trial lawyer soundbite, so not sure how much good my statement will do.
  • Isn't this just the sort of thing the EFF likes to get involved in? I would think any suit like this would get a lot more traction with their backing (even if it's just adding some whitepapers/briefs in the mix).

  • Anecdotal Evidence (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 03 2006, @08:39AM (#15049485)
    "For example, here's one of the common problems brought by Starforce: under Windows XP, if packets are lost during the reading or writing of a disk, XP interprets this as an error and steps the IDE speed down. Eventually it will revert to 16bit compatibility mode rendering a CD/DVD writer virtually unusable. In some circumstances certain drives cannot cope with this mode and it results in physical hardware failure (Most commonly in multiformat CD/DVD writer drives). A sure sign of this step down occurring is that the burn speeds will get slower and slower (no matter what speed you select to burn at). Starforce, on a regular basis, triggers this silent step down. Until it reaches the latter stages most people do not even realise it is happening."

    Proof? Out-of-specs equipment? (remember the problem one of the linux distros had).

    • Re:Anecdotal Evidence (Score:4, Informative)

      by Khyber (864651) <khyberkitsune@gmail.com> on Monday April 03 2006, @10:40AM (#15050517) Journal
      Proof.

      Installed UbiSoft's 'Silent Hunter III' and my Artec BKM-52x16 Combo drive almost immediately refused to recognize blank media directly after that. Within days of installing the program, my brand-new DVD/CD-RW Combo drive refused to even recognize a CD. Forums suggest flashing firmware, I do so, regain burning functionality, only to have the drive completely stop working the very next day. It didn't take a week for StarForce to completely kill my optical drive, force me to wipe out my hard drive, reinstall anew, and microwave the Silent Hunter CD. I paid 30 bucks for the game, and that game cost me ~$45 just to get my system back in working order due to the damage it caused.

      Personally I'd like to see a massive petition sent to Congress to totally ban Ubisoft in the USA. Add on to that a nice hint that suggests unless this happens these Congressmen won't be sitting in their seats come re-election time, and there's a slim but better than nothing chance that they'll listen.
    • Shit!! This happened to my system about a year ago. Everything slowed WAAYY down. It was driving me mad, and after about 4 hours googling and messing about I finally worked out my IDE drive wasn't using DMA anymore (or something along those lines, it was a while ago now). Had to delete the IDE drivers for XP to 'automatically' reinstate them. That was a sweaty-palmed few seconds after that reboot, I can tell you!

      I was baffled to how this happened (just blamed Windows ;-), but after reading this I am wonderi
      • Here's an article about resetting the the drives to DMA mode [aiscl.co.uk].

        The registry branch where the info is stored seems to be constant, so this registry file might work too:

        Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

        [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlS et\Control\Class\{4D36E96A-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE1 0318}\0001]
        "MasterIdDataCheckSum"=-
        "SlaveIdDat aCheckSum"=-

        [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\Current ControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E96A-E325-11CE-BFC1- 08002BE10318}\0002]
        "MasterIdDataCheckSum"=-
        "Sl aveIdDataCheckS

      • You don't have to delete the driver. Next time, just follow this procedure:

        Re-enable DMA using the Registry Editor

        Run REGEDIT. Go to the following key:

        HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Contr o l\Class\{4D36E96A-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}

        It has subkeys like 0000, 0001, 0002, etc. Normally 0001 is the primary IDE channel, 0002 the secondary, but other numbers can occur under certain circumstances. Check the DriverDesc value to see which one it is.

        Delete MasterIdDataChecksum or SlaveI
    • Happened to me. Completely toasted my Dual-Layer DVD/CD combo burner/rewrite drive.

      Had no clue why until the first article on /. about Starforce appeared. Checked on my computer and sure enough, there it was. Had to go out and buy a whole new goddamn drive.

  • Dude..... (Score:3, Funny)

    by WickedClean (230550) on Monday April 03 2006, @08:45AM (#15049529) Homepage
    Such a fuss...all because he wants to play without the disk.

    Just get a crack for it like the rest of us!
    • You DID read the legal brief and/or the many, MANY posts on just about every major gaming blog concerning StarForce, right? Even if it doesn't permanently damage your optical drives, cause extreme system slowdown, or make it impossible to burn a CD/DVD (all of which have been reported to happen), it grants system-level access to user-level applications - introducing yet another security hole into Windows, one within a payload much more likely to be used by many users. Also, the company itself acts far sup

      • Re:Dude..... (Score:5, Insightful)

        by sqlrob (173498) on Monday April 03 2006, @09:18AM (#15049744)
        It's not like it's that hard to change disks. You hit the little Eject button, take out the disk already there, and put in the new one. Easy

        There's a probability of scratching each time. It also drains battery on laptops.

        When games first started coming out on CD, they all required you to have the game disk in the drive. Yet people didn't complain.

        And you couldn't blow 640 MB * num cds in drive space on a whim then either.

        The requirement to change disks hasn't stopped people from playing console games.Hell, some games require you to change disks while the game is still playing! Yet, no one minds.

        Consoles are not general purpose machines. Why shouldn't someone be able to play a CD while playing a game?

        The whole "steal the game to avoid having to use the disk" has got to be one of the lamest excuses for theft ever.

        If you've bought the game, how is it stealing to use the crack?
          • "Well, let's see, you're getting an illegally modified copy of the game without compensating the owner. I'd call that theft. But, if you'd rather, you can always call it "copyright violation". I find that to be a little too unweildy, and would rather use the simpler term: stealing.

            If you've bought the game, you already have a way to use it legitimately. Refusing to use that way and supporting pirates by using the cracked version of the game is still illegal. No matter how you try to spin it, it's still ille
            • If you've bought the game, you already have a way to use it legitimately. Refusing to use that way and supporting pirates by using the cracked version of the game is still illegal.

              Supporting the pirates? What is this, some kind of international cartel that profits from your downloading and installing a 34kb file to play the game you purchased without the CD? I bet they all wear pirate hats too, and peddle crack to one-legged children. It's the downfall of society!
          • Well, let's see, you're getting an illegally modified copy of the game without compensating the owner. I'd call that theft. But, if you'd rather, you can always call it "copyright violation". I find that to be a little too unweildy, and would rather use the simpler term: stealing.
            Using an inaccurate term with with strong connotations of illegality and wrong-doing is not a matter of "using a simpler term." If you can't be bothered to describe the issue accurately, perhaps you shouldn't be discussing it?

            If yo
          • What a weird use of logic. If you've bought the game, you've already compensated the owner of the copyright.
            Now, a crack is a patch. And a patch is basically the errata section that may be applied to any book that doesn't contain what it should (you can find errata pages for scientific textbooks now and then).
            Now, by your logic, it'd be illegal to insert errata pages into legally bought books if those pages were produced by a third party. In actuality, it's completely legal.
            Applying a crack to a legally

          • If you've bought the game, you already have a way to use it legitimately. Refusing to use that way and supporting pirates by using the cracked version of the game is still illegal. No matter how you try to spin it, it's still illegal. And, if you really did legally buy the game, it's also extremely pointless and stupid.

            If you look at the various forums, you will see that is sometimes is needed to use a crack to be able to play a copy protected game you bought.
            It happens too often that 'compatibility issues'

          • Consoles are machines designed to play games. If "not having to use a disk" was really an important requirement for playing games, consoles wouldn't require you to swap disks to play games. It's not, so they do.

            And you do other things besides games on the console how? A computer is general purpose. Things that limit that do not get installed.

            you could always try a portable CD player. Or just slap another CD-ROM drive in

            Buy more because of "features" of the software that gives me no benefit? Yeah, right.

      • Re:Dude..... (Score:5, Insightful)

        by sgant (178166) <`moc.liamg' `ta' `tnagsk'> on Monday April 03 2006, @09:54AM (#15050040) Homepage Journal
        I'll never understand the "I steal so I can play without the disk!" mentality that some people have. It's not like it's that hard to change disks. You hit the little Eject button, take out the disk already there, and put in the new one. Easy. If you have time to play an hour or two in a video game, you have time to take the five seconds to change disks.

        It's not like it's a new thing, either. When games first started coming out on CD, they all required you to have the game disk in the drive. Yet people didn't complain.

        The requirement to change disks hasn't stopped people from playing console games. Hell, some games require you to change disks while the game is still playing! Yet, no one minds.

        The whole "steal the game to avoid having to use the disk" has got to be one of the lamest excuses for theft ever. "See, judge, I wanna make my life slightly more convenient, at the cost of Ubisoft's business."

        This "case" is going to be laughed out of court.

        It has nothing to do with switching CD's. I'll gladly play a game that needs the CD to start up, like Oblivion. What I don't want is Starforce on my machine. At all.

        Why? Again, it has nothing to do with piracy or switching disks or any of that. Starforce screwed up my machine. I bought "Silent Hunter III", a sub simulation, and installed it on my computer. But I noticed that after a while, the entire computer started acting sluggish in normal activities....even though it's a Dual-core 4200+ with 2 gigs of RAM and it wasn't sluggish before. Rebooting seemed to make it worse, yet I couldn't see any activity or stolen CPU cycles or any of that. And I run a very clean system.

        Anyway, it was acting sluggish. But that wasn't even the half of it, when I went to make a CD this past Christmas to take to my in-laws of Christmas music (mainly of Tiny Tim singing carols....drives my mother-in-law crazy...but that's another story). I found nothing would burn on my burner. Then my son told me that he couldn't play his older game he liked anymore because it would launch, then just shut down. It was an older game from a few years ago, and it was working fine just a week earlier.

        To make a long story longer...I finally tracked down that all of this started happening AFTER I installed "Silent Hunter III" on my computer. I did some research online and found out all about Starforce and it's drivers. I found the Starforce removal tool and WHAM, like magic, everything started working again. But I hear that I was lucky because some people's CD drives are sometimes permanently screwed, though I don't know how.

        THAT is why I'm all for this lawsuit. I don't care about any money, just want Starforce to go away.
        • This is taken right from Wikipedia:

          StarForce has received criticism for installing its own device driver onto computers. Some users claim that the StarForce drivers can cause optical drives to fail, which has been investigated by the popular American magazine Computer Gaming World. CGW states that under certain circumstances StarForce will cause Windows to access optical drives in Programmed input/output mode which causes the drive to be accessed far more slowly, potentially causing problems. StarForce deve
          • Go get em

            " StarForce's developers claim that their EULA absolves them from any responsibility for problems that their software may cause [3]."

            Ok, i'll bite with Midway's Arcade treasures. I never Ok'd this app on my computer. No notice on box. No notice during install. Only a reboot when done-that is in a starforce window, didnt even know what it was at the time, i dont do many games anymore. Only EULA for game is AFTER install is done anyway WTF install 2 GB then ask if i want it?!? Course the registration
  • 5M? Ubisoft sold a lot more kit than that. What is the damage going to be - 5$ off Splinter Cell Double Agent for us, 4M to the lawyers? Would be nice to see some of these machine horking protection schemes get held to the same 'criminal' behavior like deleting files or defacing websites...

  • do some research (Score:4, Informative)

    by the computer guy nex (916959) on Monday April 03 2006, @09:02AM (#15049627)
    "Such a fuss...all because he wants to play without the disk. Just get a crack for it like the rest of us!"

    I don't think you fully understand what StarForce is. Only a couple StarForce games have ever been cracked - and it isn't just swapping out a couple .EXE files.

    You need to physically unhook *all* of your optical drives and run an emulator that seriously hits system performance. UBI has released this with their Splinter Cell series - and for the most part it worked. Troubleshooting costs are way higher than normal but I know a ton of people who don't ever buy games that bought these.
    • Actually, quite a few StarForce game have been cracked. Try looking each game up on TorrentSpy, you'll see that a lot of them are avaliable there. And yes, it is an EXE patch as far as I'm aware. Once one game protected by a certain scheme is cracked, the rest are pretty simple to crack since you just have to look for the same patterns, provided it's the same version of the protection scheme.

      I may be wrong about this, but it's what I've seen so far. I haven't downloaded any StarForce protected games so I
        • >Starforce coders laugh at the idiots in the warez scene,
          >just like most people doing free software do.
          >Let those imbeciles waste time cracking protections like
          >Starforce while the rest of us spend our time doing
          >something that is actually useful.

          Something useful? What, like encouraging people to pirate non-DRM'd games [boingboing.net] like GalCiv2?
    • "You need to physically unhook *all* of your optical drives and run an emulator that seriously hits system performance."

      Or just use a SCSI drive.
    • >You need to physically unhook *all* of your optical drives
      >and run an emulator that seriously hits system performance.

      Or wire in a switch. Or if you are really lazy, put them in USB/SCSI enclosures.

    • Re:do some research (Score:5, Informative)

      by FictionPimp (712802) on Monday April 03 2006, @10:24AM (#15050344)
      I have a no cd or a fixed iso (small iso that meets the cd check requirements) for every single starforce game I own (which is a lot of games). Starforce can't stop piracy. Most pirates have no problem waiting a month or two to play a new game. I personally dont buy games until there is a no CD crack. I even waited to buy Oblivion (Note that oblivion does not use starforce) until there was a fixed iso. I perfer fixed iso's to no cd cracks as I can use daemon tools and the iso without patching my game. Plus those isos are usually less then 20 meg.

      I dont like having a giant CD rack in my office to play games. I buy the game, rip it to my network and put the cd in my library room. If I can't do that, I dont buy the game. If they want to do copy protection, they should go with value added copy protection (such as unique keys to play online). Epic, bioware, and blizard seem to understand this. Hell epic even removes the no-cd crack with their first patch for Ut2004. Bioware did the same with nwn.
      • Oblivion wouldn't -have- a fixed ISO, because Oblivion was released without copy protection.

        Bethesda listened to their fans on their forums, and promised not to use Starforce. In the end, the only thing protecting Oblivion is a CD check. You can use any old ordinary imaging program to make an ISO of the DVD and then use that ISO to play the game.

        Try it! :) Worked just fine for me. In addition to that, I am extremely thankful to Bethesda for not punishing me for buying the actual game.
      • I have a similar philosophy. I don't usually buy games until the price drops to $30 or so. By then, all the cracks and patches I'll want/need have been released and I avoid most bugs from the original release. It saves me money, too. :)

  • One thing I'd lie to see (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 03 2006, @09:06AM (#15049657)
    Less lawsuits, more *EFFECTIVE* boycotts. And no, I'm not talking about half-hearted "boycotts," where idiot gamers with no self-control warez the hell out of a title that's supposed to be boycotted, only to serve as proof that publishers need to use copy protection. I'm talking about shutting out all purchases, downloads, and even positive discussion about a boycotted title.

    It would certainly not be a trivial effort to organize something like this. But it would be better proof to the publishers that we don't necessarily need what they have to offer us. They provide us with services and products (luxuries, at that) that we can choose to buy. Don't tattle to mommy government so she can slap the publishers on the wrist and leave them looking for different means to screw you. Just starve them straight. If gamers can't do this, that's just proof that publishers can do whatever they want to you.

    After all, we are not talking about (sigh) Windows, which someone might actually need for some reason. These are *games*.
    • Perhaps a more attainable stepping stone is getting legislation done that requires publishers to label the box and disk with the specific name, brand, and VERSION of copy protection used.
    • 1) Finding out ahead of time which game has which copy protection is difficult.

      2) A large number of games are sold to people who have no online contact with such groups.
    • This isn't a dire enough issue for a boycott to even enter the vicinity of reality. A game company would have to be harming children or supporting international terrorism to incite an "effective boycott." Boycotting in general is just not an effective means of making change. Lawsuits, on the other hand, are highly effective... I'm all for alternatives to litigation, but let's look at new methods of protest that might work and let's avoid looking back at methods that have historically failed. Repeatedly.

      -If
    • Flyers that list the issues, games and what DRM is on them (including "none") and websites with more information would be a start.

      A group willing to stand outside their local EBGames, GameStop and hand out the above flyer would be the next step.

      An overall group organizing and willing to educate consumers is probably the way to go for an effective boycott/lobby group as well as a way to reach those who may not got on-line enough to care.

      A side effect of this sort of thing might be driving more consumers to c
  • "What you reap is what you sow".

    I hope it stops these practices, I've held off from purchasing quite a few games because I'm not sure starforce is trustworthy and I'm VERY sure that I as a legitimate customer do not tolerate being treated like a criminal. Well, actually the criminals get treated much better since the warez versions usually remove such inconveniences completely. "Here's your reward for purchasing our software instead of downloading: A worse user experience! Isn't that great?"
  • I know of Ubisoft as a game developer, but what is their relation to the creators of StarForce. It mentioned that they're being used for using it, not developing it... sound really it sounds more like they should be sueing the creators of StarForce or at least have a suit against both. On the other hand, Sony used bought DRM and they're usually the ones held as reponsible for its nasty rootkit, soooo.

    I do know that other game developers use StarForce though, to the same effect. Why sue UbiSoft in particul
  • Maybe now they will be forced to release a nocd version of Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory so I can finally put the 4GB image to some use ;)
    • I think that's interesting, though I'm not sure how many people regularly browse the Star Force website and even more, how many actually want to take a trip to Moscow and the headquarters of the company. It doesn't seem all that appealing to me. Of course, the results of their experiment are not "proof" like they claim, but what would you expect from a company trying to sell its product?

      That said, anyone that would install system-altering DRM to play a damn game is insane. Totally nuts. I am not much of

    • Re:Damage to optical drives? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Slashcrap (869349) on Monday April 03 2006, @10:44AM (#15050556)
      They offered $10,000 reward and all-expenses paid round-trip to moscow to their headquarters, if you could replicate situation where starforce actually did some damage to optical drives.

      No, the deal was that you flew out to Moscow at your own expense to demonstrate it. And then they decide whether to award you the prize based on their rules. Also note that the vast majority of people aren't complaining that it physically damages their CD drives. They are complaining about system instability, poor performance and the gaping fucking security hole that Starforce opens on your PC*.

      I'm sure that you totally misrepresented the "competition" rules by accident. Everyone knows Starforce are above planting paid shills on forums.

      * The Starforce driver can elevate user processes to Ring 0**.
      ** That's what we call a rootkit.
    • Actually, the entire competition was very hush-hush and rarely spoken of, let alone known even after it ended.

      The contest page was visited 48.000 times but we received 0 applications. No one showed up.

      48,000 visits? Slashdot probably gets that many visits in an hour and we're supposed to be impressed? If they said 480,000 or even 4.8 million unique visits, I'd be more understanding but 48,000? Thats NOTHING by internet standards.

    • The competition is over by now, apparently no one tried to prove it

      Was that before or after the death threats [game-overdrive.com]?

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