The developers have said all along that they had no intention of spending that money on advanced DRM and would rather use it to improve the game. Piracy is inevitable, they believe, and it’s pointless trying to fight it. But sometimes a line has to be drawn, even by the most pirate-tolerant devs.

After a build of Project Zomboid was leaked to 4chan by someone from the game’s tester group, it seems that this month a modified version started doing the rounds on torrent sites. The version included an additional ‘Update’ button which downloaded the latest build, not from BitTorrent, but from the developer’s servers.

“We’ve always turned a blind eye to pirate copies, even on occasion recommending people who had problems with the legit version try a pirate version until the issues are resolved. We realise the potential viral benefits of pirate copies, and while obviously we’d prefer people to purchase our issue is not with those,” the developers say.

“However, these ‘auto updating’ versions of the game could screw us completely. We have a cloud based distribution model, where the files are copied all over the world and are served to players on request, which means we are charged money for people downloading the game,” they continue.

So, to mitigate the threat of excessive bandwidth consumption and rising costs, over the weekend the game was switched off for a day. A dramatic move maybe, but according to the developers it was one they were forced into but it could actually have been avoided – if only pirates had used BitTorrent instead.

“Whether piracy actually amounts to lost sales we’re not going to get into,” say the devs.

“The possibility that it raises awareness and promotes the game cannot be ignored, but the difference is offline versions on torrents, which we’ve been largely unconcerned about, do not cost us real money, only potential money, and even then we can’t really guess at what the net effect is.

“Likewise people who download the game through our website only download it when there is a new version, so once every week or so. These new pirate copies have an ‘update now’ button which will download the game every time it’s clicked, potentially every time the game is run by everyone using it.”

After Indie Stone took the game offline, they responded by releasing a free public tech demo, distributed using BitTorrent of course.

Despite the problems, the devs have asked fans of the game not to be “down” on piracy, and have highlighted reasons why people might have gone down that route, such as having no access to PayPal.

“We have no ill feeling toward those pirating the game or those distributing the pirated copies of the game. We’re mainly glad that people feel it’s worthy of pirating,” they conclude.

The situation has been spotted by Notch of Minecraft fame who chimed in on Twitter a couple of hours ago to add his opinion.

“Everybody stop pirating this game, please,” he wrote. “It’s very cool.”

Source: Zombie Game Taken Offline Because Pirates Didn’t Use BitTorrent

The reason for the raid is unclear at this point, but the Pirate Party believes that it’s unrelated to the party’s activities. The board of the Pirate Party has promised full transparency to assist with the investigation.

“At the moment, the Board does not expect delinquency on behalf of the Pirate Party. The investigation is not directed against the party or any of its subsidiaries, they are only involved as the server’s operators. The results are awaited with curiosity,” the Party said in a statement.

The information which the authorities provided to the Pirate Party suggests that the police were targeting a public service on a virtual server. The service has not been named, but there are concerns that the action to take the party’s entire server network down was disproportionate.

The timing of the raid is also unfortunate, as it happens just two days before the Bremen elections.

“The disconnection of all servers is a massive intrusion into the communications infrastructure of the sixth largest party in Germany. Considering the state elections taking place in Bremen in two days, this caused severe political damage, which the Board condemns decisively,” the Party continued.

“In relation to the ongoing investigations, it will have to be verified whether the issued search warrant was actually appropriate, especially whether the principle of proportionality was followed. After all, this action has led to a large-scale breakdown of the technical infrastructure of Pirate Party Germany.”

Although we can only speculate at this point, a plausible target of the raid could be the Piratepad service. Piratepad allows people to collaboratively draft documents, and unconfirmed rumors suggest that it was used to plan a DDoS attack against a French company.

Thus far, however, no official information has been provided about the nature of the French investigation. We will update this post accordingly as more information comes in.

Update: The Pirate Part released some additional information.

The servers were raided this morning 9:15 am following a warrant ordered by the Darmstadt prosecutor.

The investigation is not directed at the Pirate Party, but at unknown users of the Piratepad service who published an SSH Key which was allegedly used to attack a server of the French energy group EDF.

The Pirate Party stresses that the damage to their organization is enormous. Two days before the election their entire communication system was wiped out, and although the main page was brought back up, most services are still interrupted.

The Pirate Party further distances itself from the attacks on the websites of the German police, which started after the raid.

Source: Pirate Party Servers Raided by German Police

The situation gets even more complicated when one realizes that ‘pirates’ are often legitimate customers too. As previously highlighted, music pirates are the ones who spend the most money on legitimate music. In a way, speaking out against pirates is speaking out against one’s biggest fans.

So how does a content creator approach such a multi-layered species when he or she spots one in the wild?

If we look at Chris Baker, app developer and owner of the The Fucking Word of the Day website, confrontational politeness might turn out to be a good choice. Yesterday, Chris spotted a potential pirate on the xSellize forums, who posted the following request:

“Can someone please crack The F-ing Word of the Day app. Please.”

Although many content creators would have cringed upon reading the message, perhaps tempted to shout the pirate down, Chris opted for a more peaceful reply to the poster “HiDefinition”.

“Hello! I’m the creator of the *** Word of the Day website and more particularly the F-ing Word of the Day App. First of all, this is a huge compliment! As a person who pirates content, I’ve always placed the moment people are pirating MY goods as the exact time of my arrival, as it were.”

Chris Baker goes on to explain that, although he has a decent job in New York, he’s by no means rich. The app and website are his pet projects and he works on them during his free time in the hope that the public might learn something. Then he continues with giving the prospective pirate his virtual blessing.

“What’s my point in all this? Go ahead and pirate the app. It cost me 1500 bucks to have programmed. It’s not even a month’s rent for me. But if you think the site is cool, and you want to pay for one eighth of a Stella Artois for me, hook me up with 99 cents. The rapture will be here soon, I could use the drink.”

The above might not have been the response HiDefinition had been hoping for, but it did make an impact. Suddenly, the prospect of getting a pirated App without paying didn’t seem as appealing as it did before.

HiDefinition replied:

“Wow, I wasn’t expecting the developer to comment. Sorry, about that. You know I was only looking to get the IPA for free only because I have no credit, credit cards, or any kind of banking services. However, your attitude has seal[ed] the deal for me. It might end up costing me a couple extra dollars in nominal fees to figure out how to pay for it but I’d be glad to contribute towards that Stella fund raiser you’ve got going on.

“Besides, I really appreciate your response and I fully support your work. I hope no one actually cracks your app [and] for sake of respect, consider my request revoked. Thanks again Chris and have a good one bro!”

It appears that with his polite reply, Chris eliminated at least one potential pirate. But that wasn’t the end of the matter. Instead of eagerly waiting for HiDefinition’s 99 cents, Chris offered to buy the App for him, asking for a positive rating in return.

Chris then concluded:

“I hope this comment thread goes down as one of the more unexpected things that happens to you online. I like the unexpected. And I like making people happy, even when something stupid like learning vocabulary is involved.”

The thread is memorable for sure, and shows that the blazing guns strategy might not always be the best one, especially not for indie content creators. This doesn’t necessarily mean that ‘pirates’ should be cuddled, but it might be a good idea to try a more balanced response every now and then.

TorrentFreak got in touch with Chris, who shared his remarkable encounter on Reddit, and he told us that he expected people to pirate his app and that it’s not a problem.

“I knew people would try to pirate my app and I’d rather have people trying to pirate my app than not pirate it. If no one is trying to pirate you, you’re irrelevant,” Chris said.

In fact, Chris admits that he too has pirated software since he was eight or nine. Whether it is the moral thing to do is not up to the developers he believes, it’s something every ‘pirate’ has to decide for him or herself.

“The morality of pirating an app will be a topic that gets debated forever,” Chris told us. “If a starving kid steals a loaf of bread to feed himself, is that wrong? If a starving designer pirates a copy of a 700 dollar version of Photoshop, is that wrong?”

“A creative storyteller could produce narratives that make you see both sides to each story,” he concludes.

Source: App Developer Fights Pirate With Politeness

“There’s a Rock Band called One Soul Thrust. They have a debut album, which I like (bought it off iTunes). However the first I heard of the band was when there were complaints that the band had gone Platinum – because of illegal Torrent downloads!” Borean explained.

Indeed, according to a press release from the band’s manager, Cameron Tilbury, the situation is very serious.

“The Canadian Recording Industry Association (CRIA) states that, to achieve Platinum status, an album must achieve sales of 100,000 copies/downloads of an album. Sales…that’s the key. A random polling of several torrent site’s downloads—ILLEGAL downloads—has shown that 1ST, the debut cd by ONE SOUL THRUST has been downloaded over 100,000 times,” he wrote.

Now, 100,000 downloads is a lot, especially for a band like One Soul Thrust who have just 176 Twitter followers and a single short, non-musical video on their YouTube channel which at the time of writing has 79 views. Incidentally, the video is quite nice, since they have actually taken the time out to thank a radio station for playing one of their songs. However, the band are less pleased that people are apparently sampling their music using newer methods, i.e BitTorrent.

“We paid to create that album totally out of our own pockets. People think of illegal downloading not hurting anyone, but we’re real people too- with real mortgages, real family to feed and real bills to pay,” said lead-vocalist Salem Jones. “By downloading our album from pirate sites, people have stolen from us, our families, everyone involved in the production of our album, and their families.”

At this point, since we couldn’t find any torrents on any site (Borean tried everywhere too), we have to admit we were beginning to wonder if this 100K download claim was some kind of publicity stunt. Furthermore, since Wayne Borean and Tilbury were starting to publicly tear each other apart (and getting pretty personal at times) it seemed sensible to get to the bottom of this, particularly since the band’s manager claimed that the all-powerful CRIA is supporting the band’s stance.

Our initial discussions didn’t go particularly well. Despite explaining that we are a news site and what we were trying to find out, Cameron Tilbury initially refused to speak us. Instead he responded with a post on his site:

“We have been accused of lying and we have been abused for our position. We have also had requests for our evidence from torrent sites which actually support illegal downloading–and even more offensively, publish charts of the top illegally downloaded music, movies, etc [That's us, TorrentFreak, apparently]. We will not comply with people who’s only agenda is to support piracy. We feel that there is no way to win an argument with those people.”

Despite this hostility we pressed on, determined to get to the bottom of the story so we can report, since that’s what we do. In the end Tilbury provided the ‘evidence’ of the illegal downloading via some screenshots, one of which is shown below.

As many readers will now be aware, there is a huge problem. These results are completely fake and are generated from user input to draw traffic to site advertisers. You can type anything in the search boxes on some of these torrent sites (these apparently came from LimeTorrents) and anyone can appear to be pirated into oblivion, as the screenshot below shows.

We wrote back to Tilbury and explained our findings. We also asked him to comment on how he feels now that he realizes that people aren’t downloading the band’s music at all. He hasn’t responded to that question which is a real shame, because personally I think this is the most important part of the whole story.

I’m absolutely confident that there was no attempt to mislead with the band’s ‘piracy problem’ press release and that the band and their manager sincerely believed that 100K people had downloaded their album without paying for it. However, it would be intriguing to know what happened, when emotions of supposedly being ripped off by 100,000 pirates were replaced by other, perhaps more confused feelings.

In response to the initial crisis, lead-vocalist Salem Jones had said that while the piracy was unacceptable, the band were “flattered that people could love our music that much.” Does it now follow that band aren’t flattered? Dare I venture that they’re now quietly disappointed? Would it be better for 100K new fans to have sampled their music after all, rather than continuing with the relative obscurity they currently enjoy?

I’m going to end this piece with an unusual request because, to be brutally honest, I feel sorry for this band. All good musicians want to be heard and One Soul Thrust have just ‘lost’ 100K fans overnight. From what i’ve seen they seem really nice guys (and girl) and are completely innocent in all of this and although their music isn’t my scene, it sounds fairly decent to me.

At the time of writing they only have 176 Twitter followers, 324 on Facebook and their solitary video on YouTube has 79 views.

Please give the CRIA and the Balanced Copyright For Canada Facebook page something interesting to talk about by adding, following, Tweeting and re-Tweeting the band right now. Get creative and feel free to post any links where you mention them on other sites (Reddit etc) in the comments. A ten-fold increase in a day or two shouldn’t be too hard.

Update: Well, it seems whoever operates the band’s Twitter account, be it them or their manager, have responded to our calls to support One Soul Thrust around the Internet with the following message:

To say this is a huge disappointment after our efforts is an understatement. Really sad about this. Not all publicity is good publicity you know. Ask Jacqueline Howett.

Source: CRIA Watches Massive Music Piracy Crisis Devastate Unknown Band

“There’s a Rock Band called One Soul Thrust. They have a debut album, which I like (bought it off iTunes). However the first I heard of the band was when there were complaints that the band had gone Platinum – because of illegal Torrent downloads!” Borean explained.

Indeed, according to a press release from the band’s manager, Cameron Tilbury, the situation is very serious.

“The Canadian Recording Industry Association (CRIA) states that, to achieve Platinum status, an album must achieve sales of 100,000 copies/downloads of an album. Sales…that’s the key. A random polling of several torrent site’s downloads—ILLEGAL downloads—has shown that 1ST, the debut cd by ONE SOUL THRUST has been downloaded over 100,000 times,” he wrote.

Now, 100,000 downloads is a lot, especially for a band like One Soul Thrust who have just 176 Twitter followers and a single short, non-musical video on their YouTube channel which at the time of writing has 79 views. Incidentally, the video is quite nice, since they have actually taken the time out to thank a radio station for playing one of their songs. However, the band are less pleased that people are apparently sampling their music using newer methods, i.e BitTorrent.

“We paid to create that album totally out of our own pockets. People think of illegal downloading not hurting anyone, but we’re real people too- with real mortgages, real family to feed and real bills to pay,” said lead-vocalist Salem Jones. “By downloading our album from pirate sites, people have stolen from us, our families, everyone involved in the production of our album, and their families.”

At this point, since we couldn’t find any torrents on any site (Borean tried everywhere too), we have to admit we were beginning to wonder if this 100K download claim was some kind of publicity stunt. Furthermore, since Wayne Borean and Tilbury were starting to publicly tear each other apart (and getting pretty personal at times) it seemed sensible to get to the bottom of this, particularly since the band’s manager claimed that the all-powerful CRIA is supporting the band’s stance.

Our initial discussions didn’t go particularly well. Despite explaining that we are a news site and what we were trying to find out, Cameron Tilbury initially refused to speak us. Instead he responded with a post on his site:

“We have been accused of lying and we have been abused for our position. We have also had requests for our evidence from torrent sites which actually support illegal downloading–and even more offensively, publish charts of the top illegally downloaded music, movies, etc [That's us, TorrentFreak, apparently]. We will not comply with people who’s only agenda is to support piracy. We feel that there is no way to win an argument with those people.”

Despite this hostility we pressed on, determined to get to the bottom of the story so we can report, since that’s what we do. In the end Tilbury provided the ‘evidence’ of the illegal downloading via some screenshots, one of which is shown below.

As many readers will now be aware, there is a huge problem. These results are completely fake and are generated from user input to draw traffic to site advertisers. You can type anything in the search boxes on some of these torrent sites (these apparently came from LimeTorrents) and anyone can appear to be pirated into oblivion, as the screenshot below shows.

We wrote back to Tilbury and explained our findings. We also asked him to comment on how he feels now that he realizes that people aren’t downloading the band’s music at all. He hasn’t responded to that question which is a real shame, because personally I think this is the most important part of the whole story.

I’m absolutely confident that there was no attempt to mislead with the band’s ‘piracy problem’ press release and that the band and their manager sincerely believed that 100K people had downloaded their album without paying for it. However, it would be intriguing to know what happened, when emotions of supposedly being ripped off by 100,000 pirates were replaced by other, perhaps more confused feelings.

In response to the initial crisis, lead-vocalist Salem Jones had said that while the piracy was unacceptable, the band were “flattered that people could love our music that much.” Does it now follow that band aren’t flattered? Dare I venture that they’re now quietly disappointed? Would it be better for 100K new fans to have sampled their music after all, rather than continuing with the relative obscurity they currently enjoy?

I’m going to end this piece with an unusual request because, to be brutally honest, I feel sorry for this band. All good musicians want to be heard and One Soul Thrust have just ‘lost’ 100K fans overnight. From what i’ve seen they seem really nice guys (and girl) and are completely innocent in all of this and although their music isn’t my scene, it sounds fairly decent to me.

At the time of writing they only have 176 Twitter followers, 324 on Facebook and their solitary video on YouTube has 79 views.

Please give the CRIA and the Balanced Copyright For Canada Facebook page something interesting to talk about by adding, following, Tweeting and re-Tweeting the band right now. Get creative and feel free to post any links where you mention them on other sites (Reddit etc) in the comments. A ten-fold increase in a day or two shouldn’t be too hard.

Update: Well, it seems whoever operates the band’s Twitter account, be it them or their manager, have responded to our calls to support One Soul Thrust around the Internet with the following message:

To say this is a huge disappointment after our efforts is an understatement. Really sad about this. Not all publicity is good publicity you know. Ask Jacqueline Howett.

Source: CRIA Watches Massive Music Piracy Crisis Devastate Unknown Band

Internationally, Piratbyrån is mostly known for launching The Pirate Bay in the fall of 2003, just a few months after the group itself was founded. Since there were no Swedish BitTorrent sites at the time, Piratbyrån decided to launch the first Scandinavian BitTorrent community, using the then relatively new BitTorrent protocol.

By the end of 2004, a year after the site launched, the tracker was already tracking a million peers and more than 60,000 torrent files. Around the same time the founders also became aware that it wasn’t just Scandinavians showing an interest in their site.

Because of increasing worldwide popularity, The Pirate Bay team completely redesigned the site, which became available in several languages from then on. Around the same time The Pirate Bay became separated from Piratbyrån, with the latter focusing more on other ‘copyfights’ that had to be won.

In the years that followed Piratbyrån engaged in discussions about the role of intellectual property in the digital age, giving a voice to millions of file-sharers who believed that copying is not a crime. Now, nearly 7 years after it was founded, Piratbyrån’s role has been played out and the group has decided to disband.

The discussions about file-sharing that Piratbyrån wanted to have, are already won,” former Pirate Bay spokesperson and Piratbyrån member Peter Sunde told TorrentFreak. “The projects that needed to start have already been finalized. Piratbyrån was a temporary group for a temporary reason.”

The final decision to disband the group came after Ibi Kopimi Botani, a prominent member and co-founder of the group, passed away. Without one of its greatest minds, the group would never be the same again, Piratbyrån’s member felt.

“The discussions about abolishing Piratbyrån have been going on for years already, but this weekend a beloved friend and member died, and we decided it was time to move on for real, since the group could not be the same without him anyhow. It felt like a good time for passing this part of life,” Peter told TorrentFreak, who added that the group was about much more than being the founders of The Pirate Bay.

“Without Piratbyrån there would have been no Pirate Bay of course, but Piratbyrån has accomplished so much more than just that,” he said, a position shared by all of the group’s members. Marcin de Kaminski, who announced the end of Piratbyrån in a blog post, is proud of what they’ve accomplished in all those years.

“The most longlived project which has originated from Piratbyrån is obviously The Pirate Bay, but when it comes to great accomplishments I would like to point out how Piratbyrån were forerunners in one of the most obvious clinches of our time,” Marcin told TorrentFreak.

“By proudly standing up for the ideas of a whole generation of internauts and taking the fights no one else did, Piratbyrån worked as catalyzers when it came to understanding the current evolution of culture, clusters and chaos,” Marcin said. “While other actors have been trying to deliver answers, Piratbyrån has been very focused on targeting problems of the present by searching for the right questions.”

All the right questions have been asked now, and the group believes it has served its purpose. File-sharers are more vocal than ever before, they can stand up for themselves now and continue to challenge the corporations that promote intellectual property abuse.

Just copy what Piratbyrån did and evolve.

Article from: TorrentFreak.

Following an investigation conducted by anti-piracy group Antipiratbyrån, on Wednesday and Thursday police swooped on four individuals. Searches were carried out in Stockholm and at two locations in Västerås where servers were found.

Although one individual was later released, the suspects – all men in their forties – are suspected of having connections to the Scene servers known as “Darkside”.

According to Henrik Pontén of Antipiratbyrån, the three were responsible for servers which are claimed to house 130tb of both Swedish and foreign movies.

“Dark Side has a huge capacity,” Pontén told DN. “This is the biggest case we know of to date, certainly the biggest in Sweden, but possibly also in Europe.”

Antipiratbyrån, who had been monitoring Darkside and gathering IP addresses and other information for some time, handed the investigation over to police in February.

“[Wednesday's] police operation was yet another important step to stop organized piracy. This type of action has a direct and dramatic effect on the number of infringements,” said Pontén in a statement. “By extension, it means that the cultural workers get an opportunity to get paid for their work and we consumers have access to a continuing culture production.”

According to prosecutor Frederick Ingblad, who was recently involved in the numerous raids against Direct Connect users and is part of a new piracy task-force, there have already been some confessions from those arrested.

Article from: TorrentFreak.

Today, the UK Treasury decided to publish several data sets detailing how the tax money of UK citizens was spent in the last two years. Thanks to the Internet it is easier for the Government to be transparent about such issues, and thanks to BitTorrent the public can help with distributing the files.

“For too long the previous Government acted as if the public had no right to know where their hard earned taxes were spent. Today we have lifted that veil of secrecy by releasing detailed spending figures dating back to 2008,” Danny Alexander, Chief Secretary to the Treasury commented.

Although the four torrent files that have been posted don’t link to huge files (between 32 and 78 MB uncompressed), it is good to see that the Government isn’t shying away from using BitTorrent. If anything, this move will boost BitTorrent’s image. This is much needed since all the press about lawsuits have made BitTorrent synonymous with piracy for the majority of the mainstream public.

The torrent files have been posted today on data.gov.uk and the public is welcome to share them on The Pirate Bay or other high profile torrent sites. As a tracker, Amazon’s S3 service has been added, which most likely means that there will be always some high speed seeds available for the files.

By using BitTorrent to share information with the public, the UK government is in good company. NASA too uses BitTorrent for their ‘Visible Earth’ project, a massive library of high resolution images of the earth. In addition, several Universities use BitTorrent powered systems to update their computers.

Perhaps it’s time for Hollywood to look into BitTorrent as well, it sure sounds like a great technology to share films on the Internet.

Article from: TorrentFreak.

Both users and site admins have been pleased with Facebook so far, and some sites are ‘liked’ by over a hundred thousand people. Unfortunately, it seems that Facebook itself is not very happy with all torrent site fan pages.

KickassTorrents, one of the hot newcomers in the BitTorrent scene, decided to join Facebook just three weeks ago. In just a few days the page collected more than 25,000 fans, but the fun didn’t last long as it was quickly removed (Google cache).

The founder of KickassTorrents told TorrentFreak that he received an email from Facebook stating that his fan page violated the Terms of Use and as such was removed. No explanation was given on what the violation actually was or what action should be taken to prevent this from happening in the future.

It is hard to tell what Facebook’s motivation for removing the page was. The page was used solely to update and inform fans and there were no links to torrent files posted. However, it would not be a big surprise if the association with a torrent site is enough reason for Facebook to remove a page.

In the past, Facebook has taken an aggressive stance towards file-sharing related services. The social networking site has previously blocked The Pirate Bay’s “Share on Facebook” feature, and it later threatened the LimeWire developers that it will do the same to them if they didn’t disable the share feature in their client.

After banning The Pirate Bay a Facebook spokesperson told TorrentFreak: “Facebook respects copyrights and our Terms of Service prohibits placement of ‘Share on Facebook’ links on sites that contain any content that is infringing.”

With KickassTorrent’s fan page things are different though, as it didn’t link to infringing content at all. The founder of KickassTorrents has been left in the dark about why his page was removed and assumes that it’s related to the ‘torrent site’ brand.

If this is indeed the case, Facebook is not very consistent as many other torrent sites are still using the service without running into trouble. But then again, they are known for their inconsistency as dozens of sites still carry the ‘Share on Facebook’ buttons too.

Facebook was asked for a comment but they have yet to respond.

Article from: TorrentFreak.

Due to DRM problems with Rainbow Six: Vegas2, Ubisoft uploaded a patch which they said would fix the problem. However, an enterprising individual ran it through a HEX editor and discovered that the fix was not Ubisoft code, but actually a no-CD crack released by the Scene group RELOADED.

Now, just under 2 years later, it seems that Rockstar have some similar embarrassing questions to answer.

According to a game buyer on the official Steam forums, the executable for Max Payne 2 available via the digital distribution platform has a rather unexpected easter egg inside.

Apparently, if one examines the code with a HEX editor, the ASCII logo of the Scene group Myth can be viewed, as per the screenshot below;

A clearer version of its ASCII logo included in Myth’s NFOs can be seen below;

At this point it is unclear why the logo exists in the release. Myth was a Scene group which ceased to exist after it was targeted in the FBI “Operation Site Down” raids in 2005. The speculation is that rather than program a no-CD version, the easy route of using a ready-made crack was taken by Rockstar instead.

It’s unlikely the company will explain, but we’ll try to find out.

Article from: TorrentFreak.