"Cracked" Skyrim is not a "pirated" Skyrim ?!

[bben46]

Contrary to what a lot of people think, the Nexus is not the internet police, and we do not want to be the police. We also don't want to become just another pirate game site. Our longevity is partly due to our strong stand against piracy. If we start allowing pirates to openly use the Nexus, then we become a target for the real internet police. The game company lawyers who go after sites trafficing in and supporting illegal copies of their games.

 

In many cases piracy is it's own punishment - in order to sve a few bucks. they spend time trying to force their stolen game to work, they expose their computer to malware that is hidden in pirated versions, their pirate version lacks some part of the game that the pirate didn't think was important, the pirate version includes something that it shouldn't (a custom Ini file for example) and often it doesn't play well with mods. Then the mod authors get blamed because they don't make their mods pirate friendly. :rolleyes:

 

Cracks on the other hand are not necessaraly piracy ( but often are) some are as simple as making an ISO to use when playing a game that requires the DVD to be present. Even in the US It is legal to make a backup for your own use - it becomes piracy when you sell or give away that ISO to a friend. Other cracks are things like the 4GB patch - that are applied not to steal, but to enhance what you bought. There are other things that are often refered to as cracks that should be ligitamately called patches instead.

[soupdragon1234]

My own personal understanding, and I fully expect to get shot down in flames over this, is that any unofficial modification of the game's executable and that includes cracks, is technically breaking copyright or at least breaching the terms of the EULA even if it isn't actually pirating anything and as such many sites will not tolerate cracks at all. I would guess this may vary according the law of the country you're in but that seems to be the case for the UK in my non-expert opinion (I'm not a lawyer but my sister is so an interest in law may run in the family). Law here does not permit backups for personal usage either (they instead choose to turn a blind eye as no-one has been prosecuted to my knowledge). if anyone knows different I'd love to know.

 

I did write a cheat once for a game on a site that did not tolerate cracks that modified the game's data once it loaded into memory and I got away with that one, but any kind of modification of of the game executable itself would not have been tolerated. To be fair the site was very friendly with the game devs and got private previews of upcoming games and interviews with the developers.

Edited March 20, 2015 by soupdragon1234