Comment: Illegal peer to peer gamer counts the cost of file-sharing

By Desire Athow
Security ProPortal.com
October 28, 2008

The news that a Dream Pinball 3D enthusiast has been fined £6,086 in damages, plus costs of £10,000 has been greeted with both satisfaction and dismay from Mike Dager, CEO of Arxan Technologies Ltd.

Dager explained, "It is good that game makers like Topware Interactive are following the lead of the business software and music groups in taking a strong stance to protect the intellectual property that they have worked so hard to create. It is rather sad however that software, games and music are not being effectively protected by developers. Banks don't send their vans full of cash out into the world unprotected, and neither should valuable content like games go out online without protection to stop people from easily ripping it off.

"Historically most anti-piracy and copy protection applications defend the content but not themselves. Modern technologies guard the content of software and also work to guard themselves through defending, detecting and reacting against all types of attacks, even healing themselves, calling for help or just shutting the program down."

Software and content vendors should investigate technologies that fortify and guard their software and creative works to increase the time that value can be extracted from intellectual property and keep control over the software.

Dager concluded, "Investing in protection like this offers a far more cost and time effective solution that going to court after the damage is done."