Activision Targeting Individual Pirates
If it wasn’t enough that the RIAA and MPAA started hunting down individuals for piracy – we now have Activision following suit acting with aggressive action on a case-by-case basis.
According to public reports, Activision has sued a new resident for allegedly copying Call of Duty 3 for the Xbox 360 console and other, unnamed games. Activision is seeking between $30,000 to $150,000 in damages “for each infringement of each copyrighted videogame.”
GamePolitics managed to dig up six other instances of piracy-related Activision lawsuits. Settlements in those cases ranged from $1,000 to $100,000. They also noted that five out of the six defendants lacked any type of representation.
Why haven’t more people been talking about these cases ? Apparently, clauses in the settlements are forbidding the defendants from making any public statements that are inconsistent with any term of the Stipulation to Judgment and Permanent Injunction. Enough to make almost anyone remain quiet about the matter.
Unless James R. Strickland of New York is mass pirating video games – hitting him up for $30,000 to $150,000 clearly shows that Activision is at this point making examples out of people – much like RIAA and MPAA did. Notice how the RIAA and MPAA ordeal has significantly tapered off ? It is a no-brainer that piracy does indeed cost these companies a lot of money – but when they jump on individual consumers for large sums of money, then slow step back into the woodwork it is obvious they are just using the legal system to recover lost money. It is definitely an unfortunate situation for both sides of the story – a lose-lose situation for the win.
In the end, it is no real big surprise to see the gaming industry big-wigs doing this sort of thing. Over the past year or so several large industry players such as Epic Games, id Software, Crytek and Infinity Ward have all expressed great concerns about game piracy on the PC. Sound sounded off more than others, such as Crytek. Can we blame them ? No.
Strangely though, all the aforementioned lawsuits seems to be about console game piracy.
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"and distributed the Copyrighted Video Game to the public."
That statement appears to indicate that he made a number of physical copies of the game and either gave them away or sold them, so while he's an individual pirate the article appears to be incorrect to assume that Activision is targeting individual file sharers on the Internet.
The article doesn't make mention of any "making available" issues with the typical file-sharing argument, only that the person was distributing, so I don't see how you could draw that conclusion without more knowledge than they provided.
There's no reason to assume that they're targeting customers as it doesn't say that -_-