Abstract:
Recently, Denuvo’s parent company Irdeto submitted a complaint to the U.S. Federal District Court for the Northern District of California, formally suing voice38, the cracker. This is the first time Denuvo has directly initiated legal action against a game cracker since its establishment.
voices38 has cracked nearly 40 D-encrypted games in the past year, including a large number of 3A games such as "Black Myth: Wukong", "Hogwarts Legacy", "Dead Space: Remastered", "Doom: Dark Ages", "Resident Evil 9: Requiem", etc. The cracker uses the traditional patch method of directly modifying the DRM check inside the game, which does not require users to turn off the Windows virtualization function. The patch has been widely disseminated, and it has also set a record of releasing learning versions of 5 games in a single day.
Legally, Denuvo does not hold the copyright to these games. This lawsuit is based on DMCA Section 1201 of the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act, accusing the other party of circumventing technical protection measures and harming Denuvo's own business interests, rather than directly accusing game piracy of infringement. Since the true identity of voices38 is completely unknown, he is listed as an anonymous defendant in the complaint, and 10 unidentified related persons are also jointly prosecuted.
Denuvo has locked a batch of Reddit, Discord, and Steam accounts suspected to be related to the cracker, and plans to apply for court subpoenas from Valve, Reddit, and Discord to retrieve account network and registration related data in an attempt to dig out the true identity of the cracker. At the same time, two claims were filed with the court: asking for corresponding damages and issuing a permanent injunction to prohibit voices38 from continuing to crack any existing and future game works equipped with D encryption.
Foreign media stated that Denuvo chose litigation instead of iterative encryption technology to deal with high-frequency cracking, which reflects the huge pressure that voices38’s continuous output of cracking has put on Denuvo’s business. There are two possibilities for the follow-up direction of the case: the cracker is forced to stop publishing cracks due to legal pressure. Or the person has completed high-intensity identity concealment and continues to export crack patches to the outside world. Whether the cracker will release a new D encryption cracked version in the next few weeks will also be a signal to observe the direction of the case.
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