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Lawsuit Against Ubisoft for Starforce

Posted by Zonk on Mon Apr 03, 2006 09:26 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 25 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.
      • 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
  • 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, @09:39AM (#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, @11:40AM (#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
    • 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, @09:45AM (#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, @10:18AM (#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
          • 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'

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

        by sgant (178166) <ksgant@gm a i l . com> on Monday April 03 2006, @10:54AM (#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
  • 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, @10:02AM (#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.

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

      by FictionPimp (712802) on Monday April 03 2006, @11:24AM (#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.

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

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 03 2006, @10:06AM (#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*.

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

      by Slashcrap (869349) on Monday April 03 2006, @11:44AM (#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.

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