European pirates, guard your jugulars: intellectual property holders have released the hounds. Today, City of Heroes publisher NCsoft announced that it will actively pursue court orders to shut down illegally operating game servers in Eastern Europe; while the UK-based ELSPA disclosed that it had seized 85,000 discs worth of counterfeit Nintendo DS software.
Following successes against an internet cafe business named e-GLOBAL last year, wherein four cafes were raided and pirated software seized, NCsoft has turned an eye towards Greece and Russia, where its best-selling fantasy MMORPG Lineage II commands tremendous interest. According to the press release, NCsoft’s European office has already discovered “prominent illegal servers” operating in these countries, and is working towards legal solutions to what they deem breaches of international copyright law. Says Max Brown, NCsoft Europe’s Sales & Operations Director:
[These illegal game servers] seriously affect the player’s experience of our products and rob the company of potential revenue that is used to further enhance the player experience on official servers. NCsoft’s loss in revenue from e-GLOBAL’s operation is estimated in excess of six million Euros.
NCsoft’s concerns aren’t entirely financial; they also claim that unauthorized servers often force legitimate players to download illegally modified data that changes the online experience in unintended ways.
Meanwhile, the Entertainment Leisure And Software Publishers’ Association (ELSPA) IP Crime Unit joined a variety of law enforcement agencies and non-game related copyright protection groups in conducting a Sunday raid at a UK marketplace. Seizing 85,000 discs marked “Volume 9 DS Games,” each containing roughly 200 games apiece, they estimate the value of an individual disc at £6,000, or nearly 12,000 US dollars. According to the press release, “the disc is the first of its kind discovered in the UK.” If so, GameCyte wonders what happened to ‘DS Games’ volumes 1-8.
Spokespersons from the agencies conducting the raid say they plan to continue cracking down on counterfeiters with more such raids in the future.
While value estimates are easy enough to produce, claims of lost revenue where piracy is concerned should, as always, be taken with a grain of salt — since there’s no telling whether an individual would actually purchase the original, legal copy if offered at full price.
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