Abstract:
After Denuvo recently filed a lawsuit in the federal court in California, cracking expert voices38 gave a brief public response: "Everything is normal and everything will continue as usual."
Looking back at the background of the case, Denuvo’s parent company Irdeto officially submitted a complaint on September 14. This is also the first time in Denuvo’s history that it has directly sued crackers. The complaint accuses voices38 of cracking the Denuvo anti-tamper protection system of nearly 40 commercial games, including 3A masterpieces such as "Black Myth: Wukong", "Hogwarts Legacy" and "Dead Space: Remastered". This lawsuit is based on the anti-circumvention clause 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of the United States DMCA, claiming that the cracking behavior harms Denuvo’s own business interests.
Since voices38’s true identity is completely unknown, court documents labeled him as an “unknown individual or entity” and added 10 anonymous associated defendants. Denuvo plans to apply for subpoenas from Valve, Reddit, and Discord to retrieve the network and registration information of relevant accounts in an attempt to confirm the identity of the cracker. It also plans to apply to the court for damages and a permanent injunction to prohibit the cracker from continuing to bypass Denuvo's protection system.
Foreign media analysis pointed out that if voices38 is outside the jurisdiction of the United States, or can continue to maintain a high degree of anonymity, then this lawsuit may only remain on the written level, and it is difficult to have a substantive binding effect. This case has also become a landmark event in the industry - anti-tampering technology manufacturers directly launched a legal confrontation with anonymous crackers. The direction of the verdict may affect the future development trend of the anti-piracy technology field.
voices38 has extremely high production efficiency in the past year. It has set a record of releasing crack patches for 5 D-encrypted games in a single day. The patches do not need to turn off the Windows virtualization function and have a wide spread range. It is unclear to the outside world whether voices38’s statement is simply a lie, or whether it means that cracked versions will continue to be output in the future. The next developments will become a key point to observe.
Comments