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February 1999
Two things this month have reminded me that we're not free of the idiocy of piracy in such a small market, neither are directly related to copying software, but rather the unease at which they put developers and users. The first is the interview with clickBOOM's Alexander Petrovic on the PPC Quake question, and his troubling response that because of the antics of the people who used stolen Quake source code to create illicit PPC versions of the game that he felt that sales of the 68k version that they paid a lot of money to license hadn't done very well at all, and that piracy of that title was easy enough to do. The second was the trojan datatypes.library that stole your Miami username and account and password details and sent it to the group that produced the Trojan - Digital Corruption because they weren't happy with Miami author Holger Kruse's anti-piracy stance. Check your own machine. If your datatypes.library is version 45.4 or 45.5 and it is exactly 32748 bytes in size - it's the trojan. You'll also have a file in your ENVARC: dir called mcc.prefs you should delete that too, and finally make sure you change the password on your internet account and so on. At the Köln show, I was amazed to find that piracy is still a huge problem, even now the Amiga market is almost small enough for you to know the companies involved at every level in it. Titan Computers told me that the reason that there wasn't going to be a follow-up to Shadow of the Third Moon - despite all the glowing reviews it got - was because of the fact that it had been pirated so heavily that it had only sold about 2000 copies WORLDWIDE. Epic told me that Sixth Sense Investigations was pirated by someone close to the team! I know of at least one Amiga Format reader who has a collection of gold CDs containing lots of different programs - all pirated. This really must stop now. It's not funny any more. If you people still want to pirate software - go to a platform that it isn't going to hurt as quickly, like the PC or PlayStation, but it will still hurt them, you can bet on it, and it'll keep software prices high compared to hardware prices. | ||
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If you have a thought you want to tell others about, why not send it to me (ben.vost@futurenet.co.uk) with the subject "Thought for the month". | ||