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From: dclemans@mntgfx.MENTOR.COM (Dave Clemans)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Amiga Software Piracy (names, addresses, numbers and pictures)
Message-ID: <800@dclemans.mntgfx.MENTOR.COM>
Date: Wed, 15-Jul-87 12:49:31 EDT
Article-I.D.: dclemans.800
Posted: Wed Jul 15 12:49:31 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 18-Jul-87 04:39:44 EDT
References: <240@uscacsc.UUCP>
Organization: Mentor Graphics, Beaverton OR
Lines: 24
Summary: info about successful fights


Note that you don't have to find these kind of criminals alone.

As an example, about a year or a year and a half ago, a group of Atari ST
software publishers (representing about 75-80% of the Atari ST market)
got together with ADAPSO (?)  against a similar pirate BBS.  They won their
court fight easily.  If I remember right, I think a telephone hotline was
set up (at ADAPSO?) for people to anonymously report other such boards.

I imagine that part of the attraction of attacking pirates as a group is
that there is no single individual or entity that other pirates can go after.

On other peoples comments about the reliability of copy protection on the
Amiga; there has definitely been serious reliability problems.  I know of
one local dealer that was experiencing a 50-60% "immediate" failure rate
on copy-protected Amiga products.  (By "immediate" I mean that the customer
would find that the program wouldn't work right out of the box because of
the copy protection, or would stop working after being loaded once or twice).
Since they had a policy of not forcing their customers to not wait a couple
of weeks for replacement disks after they've already bought a product,
they let customers trade if possible (thus depleting the stores inventory),
or if that wasn't possible and they had a good copy of that program with
the information to allow it to be copied by a "copy" program, they would
rewrite the users master disk.