Boing Boing Threatened By Software Creator

mfh writes "StarForce has issued threats to Boing Boing's Cory Doctorow in retaliation to Cory's post about the anti-copy malware that installs itself along with many popular (and unpopular) video games." From the BoingBoing post: "Yesterday, I posted about StarForce, a harmful technology used by game companies to restrict their customers' freedom. StarForce attempts to stop game customers from copying their property, but it has the side-effects of destabilizing and crashing the computers on which it is installed. Someone identifying himself as 'Dennis Zhidkov, PR-manager, StarForce Inc.' contacted me this morning and threatened to sue me, and told me that he had contacted the FBI to complain about my 'harassment.'"

Yay, more useless litigation...

[PFI_Optix]

That's right, folks. Criticism is harassment. It's no longer voicing an opinion. The press' right to inform the consumer and raise awareness about problems no longer exists. At least, that's how these guys would like it to be. What we need is a way for judges to penalize plaintiffs if they are clearly attempting to infringe on the rights of others for their own gain, as the case would appear here.

Don't you love how every time these people...

[Avillia]

Threaten to involve or claim to involve the FBI (Cybercrime)? Really, I swore they had better things to do than investigate petty sites using legally protected free speech to label corporate interests as having malicious intent with their product. Like, I dunno. Child Porn? I hope so.

And then, of course, comes the OMG LAWSUIT brigade, claiming libel and slander when, again, opinions of a entities buisness practices are protected free speech...Hoping to tie up critics in a huge and costly (in the short term) legal battle to silence them. (PriceRitePhoto scandal, anyone?)

It just goes to show the sort of people behind this company that, instead of making logical arguments against their critics, they choose to take the 'dirty route' with the aforementioned threats...360, Claira, Jack Thompson, PriceRitePhoto..

I really, really, really hope someone gets up the gonads to take one of these foolish corporations, PARTICULARY so a adware/spyware corporation or someone with similar malicious intent to court when they issue a groundless Cease and Desist in a attempt to hold face and further their own intent.

Fin.

Re:The FBI?

[jandrese]

I think he should send a letter back to the company asking for verification that the email isn't just the ramblings of some unaffilated nut. If they own up to it, then craft your own legalish looking letter with threatining wording telling them how you're collecting the names of everybody they've done this to so you can form your own harassment lawsuit. I wonder how long it would take them to panic and try to shut you up with hush money? These guys only exist because they call up game companies, give a slick speech with terms like "50% sales loss due to piracy" and the like, and convince them to use the software. If the companies start hearing bad things about them destabalizing users machines and boycotts of their software, they'd probably think twice about buying it from them. They can't afford to have their actual practices brought out into the sunlight.

Starforce incompatabilties

[OvErRiDeX]

The Heroes of Might and Magic V public beta is protected by starforce, which is unfortunate since it worked in Wine on Linux up until they added Starforce... Ubisoft just lost me and most likely any other Heroes fans that run Linux, who would of been able to buy and run the game otherwise.

Starforce causes more harm than good, and I believe gamers have to show their dismay by simply not buying games with it. Hopefully if the sales are hurt enough, game publishers will stop using this "protection" and we can finally put a bullet in it. Unfortunately too many people who buy games don't realize the game is protected by this, and might just be blaming Windows for their computer's crashes.

Geeks embrace copy protection and DRM

[Paladin144]

At slashdot, we like to pretend that we're the Geek Mecca, and that we speak for all geeks. This is, of course, bullshit. Geeks are a huge demographic and they cannot be so easily summarized.

That may explain why some people here might be puzzled to notice that geeks are among the most fervent supporters of DRM, copy-protection, spyware and other restrictive technologies. Witness the many gamers who have StarForce installed on their systems. Witness the many iTunes lovers (myself included) who've bought into the DRMed songs Apple offers.

It's sad to realize that we are heading straight into a DRM/copy-protection nightmare, and the worst part is that we're fully aware where we're going. Gamers are leading the way. They seem to be fully content to have anti-copying and anti-cheating software running in the background while they play World of Warcraft or Half-Life. It seems that these companies are using our geek tendencies (must...play...new...game!) against us. Is this the beginning of the end of our freedom on the net?

Boinging for justice

[spyrochaete]

Boing Boing might in fact have a strong case vs Starforce here. Precedent was set by Kyle Bennett of HardOCP when he successfully defended [slashdot.org] vs Infinium Labs last year. I think what won him the case was his freedom of press rights. I wonder if Boing Boing could countersue for slander as Starforce contests his journalistic integrity.

Re:The FBI?

[Bogtha]

I think he should send a letter back to the company asking for verification that the email isn't just the ramblings of some unaffilated nut.

More importantly, make sure it's addressed to the directors of the company. I'm sure they won't appreciate their PR manager making a PR disaster even worse.

Boycott Starforce

[Pyrosz]

http://www.glop.org/starforce/ [glop.org] I just picked up X3: Reunion without knowing that it included this Starforce software. I would not have purchased it had I known this. I will be writing both Egosoft and the publisher about this. Here is a reply by Egosoft on their own forums to concerns about Starforce:

Starforce is picked by the publisher, not Egosoft. You should be writing this to either Deepsilver or Enlight, depending where you are. So no, you've not proved that Egosoft used Starforce. The publisher did. Likening Starforce to the whole Sony/root-kit thing is a little silly, as Starforce is clearly named as the CP in the game's manual. You're told it's gonna install. Almost all discussions on CP turn into discussions of piracy, and as a result this thread is being pre-emptively locked. If you have a problem with the CP, feel free to register your game and post the issue in the sticky in the Tech Support forum.

Perfect. Just Perfect.

[Maxwell'sSilverLART]

This is absolutely perfect. StarForce is accusing Doctorow of slander and/or libel (probably libel, as his remarks were published). Now, if he wants to press that case, Doctorow will have the opportunity to validate his claims in court. If he fails, he'll be found liable (of libel), and punished accordingly--as it should be. If he succeeds, plaintiff (StarForce) will lose, and will get the additional bonus of having their software be demonstrated in court as malware.

As an additional bonus, if StarForce loses, Doctorow can countersue, also for slander and/or libel--if you accuse me of lying, and I'm not, it damages my reputation.

As long as Doctorow is confident in his claims, his only thought should be "bring it on."

Re:Here is a picture of Dennis Zhidkov

[Billosaur]

And apparently he's spends a lot of free time pissing gamers off:

Starforce Posts Thier Objections to Toms Hardware [subsim.com]

This may seem familiar (from C|Net): StarForce Response [com.com]

Can you say whacko? Ooooopppss! I may be attracting a lawsuit or at least a visit from the FBI...

Re:The FBI?

[Anonymous Coward]

These guys only exist because they call up game companies, give a slick speech with terms like "50% sales loss due to piracy" and the like, and convince them to use the software.

In years past when I was into gaming and had a fairly popular web site devoted to it, I had quite a few discussions with folks from game companies, esp. Epic and Apogee.

Epic's president (my senile old mind can't remember his name, bless him; it's been several years now) was thoroughly paranoid about piracy.

He was paranoid because while in college, he "pirated" all his software, he said. There's a good chance you can find posts from planetcrap.com from him on the "wayback machine" (archive.org) about this if anybody wants to find it.

So no, these guys don't have to give any slick speeches convincing the ganme companies piracy is rampant, they already believe that for every game sold there are ten pirated.

(Sorry about the A/C; mcgrew from the now defunct "Springfield Fragfest" (now a porn site, I believe) here. Almost MRC="terrify".)

Interview with Starforce

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

Below: Their side of the story
So what if it reads more like a press release... but of particular interest is this: There is no legal concern because before a user loads a game, he or she has agreed to accept the conditions of the end-user licensing agreement, typically known as a EULA. These are also known as click and go, or click and accept agreements. When you accept, you are saying I will load this game or application at my own risk, and have read and understood the terms. Or there will be a disclaimer that protects the publisher from damages of any kind due to their products' use. Our product is licensed to our customers, and becomes part of their product, so the user by accepting the terms, is giving approval.
It seems to me that one could read that to say that they are knowingly installing software that can damage a computer, and that the manufacturer is not liable. But anyway, I'm curious about the wording on that license -- since this is third party software, I wonder if it's still covered.

Re:Yay, more useless litigation...

[IamTheRealMike]

If Cory really said the things the summary claims he said, then he way overstepped the line between criticism and libel. IIRC StarForce actually have a competition or prize around for anybody who can reproducibly demonstrate their software harming a system after a bunch of rumours started about how it damages CD burners etc - so far the prize has gone unclaimed and in fact they even raised it after it'd been out a while and nobody had been able to do it. They also claim they did extensive internal testing for months with as many CD burners as they could get their hands on after the rumours started coming out, yet were unable to duplicate the (many) different claims. Given that it's their main product I can well believe they would do this!

StarForce is a funny thing, it's rapidly taking over the copy protection market because it's generally considered to be the best out there right now, I think defeating it requires you to do some complicated 6-step dance that culminates in you actually unplugging some of your hardware (ie there's no one-click generic crack).

Given the extremely vague nature of what Cory has posted I'm not surprised they are suing. Is it right for them to sue? Probably not, our society should be less litiguous. But seriously - they've written some software and this guy is equating it with bots and adware programs, which it isn't at all, and he's also claiming it has serious bugs but not backing up his claims with any proof either.

He might as well have claimed that StarForce enjoy being Evil because they're Russian while he was at it. It would have been about as worthwhile as his other comments.

Re:Yay, more useless litigation...

[IamTheRealMike]

That's interesting and I would like to see this article.

However, given that the claims people were making against StarForce were specifically that it physically broke drives, I'm not surprised that was a part of the rules ... otherwise it would have turned into $10,000 for any bug report going which I doubt many software companies would be willing to make.

Clearly their software shouldn't interfere with legitimate CD/DVD burning and I'd hope they'd fix that though if the claims are true (could well be, especially if it's a weird hardware specific bug).

Re:the problem with "don't buy"

[technos]

Look around amongst your peers, mention "Sony rootkit" or "DRM" and check how many blank stares you receive.

I work about the last place you'd expect to be tech savvy: A railroad, surrounded by union truck drivers, most of which are pushing retirement age.

I'd say most of them own a home computer. Of the ones that own a PC, most could reinstall the OS without trouble. They all know about spyware, and I've heard at least one "AdAware vs. Spybot" zealotry argument. At least one of them reads /., and I've traded mp3s with a few of em.

I could walk into the break room and say "Sony rootkit" and probably three quarters of them would know exactly what I was talking about.

The reach is getting bigger, boys and girls. The second their digital TVs break, or their mp3s no longer work, the blue collar slice of America will know and complain, rest assured.

Re:Simple Fix - Don't Buy

[w1ll0w]

It's weird, they have icewind dale heart of winter on the list of released games. I used to work at interplay and was a programmer on that title. I don't ever remember use using this stuff. I guess it could have been for a european release, they wouldn't even take a game unless it used macrovision. I wonder how many other games on their list are false. Anyone else work on any of these games and not use starforce?