“The Case of the Pirate“ Lineage “”: How It Will Be

    At one time, on the Habré , the seizure of several Lineage game servers was reported . And now, Kommersant found out that the seizures were carried out in criminal cases. As the note says, “this is the first case in the history of the distribution of Lineage 2 in Russia and the third in the history of role-playing online games.”
    As for the second case, I don’t know, but I watched the first closely. Knowing our judicial system, I’ll try to predict a little the development of events in the case with the “ruler”.

    The first case of a "pirate online game"was excited about the operation of the Ragnarok online server. Of course, no piracy was even close there: the game emulator, written by enthusiasts on its own, worked on the server. In the States, the developers of the original Ragnarok tried to run into these enthusiasts, but did not succeed. In Russia, they were more fortunate.
    Maybe you think that the investigation ordered an examination of the server parts, original and self-written, found that they are different, and calmed down on this? Well, it appointed an examination, and the whole Runet was read with a rapture from the excerpt with rapture:

    “Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. In this table, the comparison was as follows. The contents of the file of one program, in the form in which it is presented in the dialog box of the UltraCompare program, was copied and transferred to one column of the table sheet of the Microsoft Excel program. Presumably coincident data of the same file of another program was transferred to the adjacent column of the same table sheet. At the same time, the Microsoft Excel program automatically distributes the text among the cells of the table, taking into account the tabs placed in the text, that is, the text in both columns of the table will be equally broken only if the tabs of both texts coincide. Next, in the cells of the third column of the table containing the file data of both programs, the “MATCH” function was inserted from among the built-in functions of the Microsoft Excel program. This function checks the identity of the contents of the cells of the table containing two texts and returns TRUE if the contents of the cells match, or FALSE if the contents of the cells do not match. such a comparison takes into account the sequence of characters, the order of punctuation marks, the number of spaces, the placement of tabs, uppercase and lowercase letters, that is, the value TRUE can be obtained only if the contents of the cells being compared completely coincide. The complete coincidence of the table cells indicates that the contents of the compared files are completely the same, that is, the files themselves are the same (the files "binkw32.dll", "cps.dll", "dbghelp.dll", "granny2 were checked in the same way. dll "," ijl15.dll "," mp3dec.asj "," mss32. dll "and" mssfast.m3d "are available in the file structure of both programs). Also, these files were listened with the help of the WinAmp program and I can only confirm that these files also coincide by ear, the music is played using the same instruments (voices) in one key and in one rhythm. ”

    Have you tried comparing dll files with Microsoft Excel? But the experts of the State Unitary Enterprise “Informzashchita” - they tried, and they did it. The full text of the examination is here .
    So, the expert found the client part of the “Ragnarok” on the seized server, compared it with the Russian client part, and came to the conclusion that it was changed in a pirated way. No wonder: these were really different programs. "Expert" compared different versions of clients.
    Then there was the court, which in its verdict did not notice that the examination was, in fact, about different programs. Rather, he noted - and wrote in the verdictthat "the client part of the program worked as the server side." The position of the “victims” in the case is also noteworthy: in their opinion, the combination of client and server programs is a single complex, and the illegal use of this “complex” occurs even when you write a program that replaces one of its parts. As you know, this approach is very promising for the "piracy fighters".
    The result of all this was, of course, a guilty verdict. It is upheld on appeal.
    (More links about this case are here ).

    Roughly the same thing is likely to happen with the "ruler":

    “According to detectives, the suspects created sites, registered them on the servers of hosting providers, and then placed pirated versions of the game on them. At the same time, the pirates, modifying the Lineage 2 program code, slightly changed the appearance of the game and passed it off as their own product. ”

    That is, the version that these are different programs is most likely not even considered as a consequence. Rest assured, they will prove "illegal modification." Using Winamp and Microsoft Excel.
    In addition, “damage”, “according to preliminary estimates of detectives, amounted to more than 100 million rubles.” This is very bad, this is the third, difficult part of Article 146 of the Criminal Code. It can also be taken into custody, especially if you move the closed server somewhere abroad, as the owners of one of the seized sites were going to do. With the wording "continued to engage in criminal activity." It’s nothing that the damage is “inflated”, it is such a lot of “pirate” cases: sometimes “pre-release” works are estimated at millions of rubles per disk , and the investigation and the court obediently harass it.
    In addition, judging by the blog entries of one of the “defendants”, he is somehow not serious about this all. The last entry there is dated to the beginning of March, I hope that this is simply because there is nothing to write, and not because a friend is under arrest. And he has already secured a criminal record under article 146 (possibly another 272/273), unfortunately.
    In general, I have bad news for all owners of the "line". If you have a server in Russia, move it. As for the servers running in provider LANs, I don’t know, but it’s much easier to catch a “pirate” than it is on the “big” Internet, most of the sentences for torrents, “donkey”, DC ++ and so on are made precisely because of distribution in LANs .

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