Ubisoft Teams Up With Mystery Rights Holder To Remove Fun Fan-Made 'GoldenEye 007' Maps From 'Far Cry'
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We have seen our monumentally absurd permission and copyright culture kill off all sorts of cool fan projects. Perhaps no industry is impacted by this more than the video game space, where you have the combination of rabid fans of particular games and franchises coupled with an above average level of technical skill in exhibiting that fandom. This combination sees an absolute ton of fan-made projects, including ports of games to different hardware, fan-made games, and even the re-creation of old games within new ones. It should be obvious that all of this carries very little monetary risk for the game makers, and, in fact, often times could be a boon, and yet it is all too common for publishers and developers to sic lawyers on their own fans rather than figuring out a way to coexist or benefit from them.But sometimes this nonsense gets down to an absurdly granular level. Such appears to the be the case with one YouTuber going by Krollywood, who spent hundreds of hours recreating the maps for the classic N64 game GoldenEye 007 in Far Cry 5, only to have those maps removed by Ubisoft in response to a copyright claim.You could find and play these levels yourself by hopping into Far Cry 5’s arcade mode and punching in Krollywood’s username. As of this writing, you no longer can. Ubisoft removed them all from Far Cry 5, a move that Krollywood described as “really sad,” noting that he probably won’t be able to restore them since he’s “on their radar now.”“I’m really sad—not because of myself or the work I put in the last three years, [but] because of the players who wanna play it or bought Far Cry just to play my levels,” Krollywood told Kotaku in an email today. Ubisoft hasn't responded as of this writing as to who made the copyright claim, but it appears the rights are held by MGM, the film studio that put out the movie of the same name. Notably, it's unclear just how valid a copyright claim would even be. Ubisoft owns the code used to make the game and used by fans to make new levels. Krollywood recreated the levels, rather than borrowing any digital assets from the original. Also, the maps were not for sale; they were free to download.But even if we granted that MGM or someone else could make a valid copyright claim on these maps... why the hell bother to do so? What precisely is the threat being staved off here?Players just want a taste of nostalgia, and MGM has a track record of shattering the plates before they’re even delivered to the table. (Recall GoldenEye 25, the fan remake of GoldenEye 007 remade entirely in Unreal 4 that was lawyered into oblivion last year.) MGM has further neglected to do anything with the license it’s sitting on—for a game that’s older than the Game Boy Color, by the way. At the end of the day, shooting this latest fan-made project out of the sky comes across as a punitive move, at best.“In the beginning, I started this project just for me and my best friend, because we loved the original game so much,” Krollywood said. “But there are many GoldenEye fans out there … [The project] found many new fans and I’m so happy about it.” Sadly, it appears happiness is not on the menu at present, to keep the analogy going. Instead, the only dish served is cold, hard copyright.
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posted at: 12:00am on 30-Jun-2021
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'Malicious' Actor Is Wiping The Data Of Countless Western Digital My Book Users
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Owners of the Western Digital popular My Book external hard drives aren't having a particularly good week. The company is advising customers to stop using the devices for now after customers mysteriously found their data deleted. According to complaints over at the company's website (first spotted by Bleeping Computer), many users say they woke up to find that the content of their external USB-connected storage drives had been completely wiped. Worse, they couldn't log in to the device's administrative systems to run any kind of diagnosis on the drives:"I have a WD mybook live connected to my home LAN and worked fine for years. I have just found that somehow all the data on it is gone today, while the directories seems there but empty. Previously the 2T volume was almost full but now it shows full capacity.The even strange thing is when I try to log into the control UI for diagnosis I was-only able to get to this landing page with an input box for owner password. I have tried the default password admin and also what I could set for it with no luck. There seems to be no change to retrieve or reset password on this landing page either." The problem appears to have begun at around 3PM on June 23, at which point these devices started receiving a remote command to perform a factory reset. This appears to still be happening on a staggered basis. The Western Digital announcement sent out to customers suggests that a malicious actor has found a way to compromise the devices, and is deleting data for their own amusement:"Western Digital has determined that some My Book Live devices are being compromised by malicious software. In some cases, this compromise has led to a factory reset that appears to erase all data on the device. The My Book Live device received its final firmware update in 2015. We understand that our customers' data is very important. At this time, we recommend you disconnect your My Book Live from the Internet to protect your data on the device. We are actively investigating and we will provide updates to this thread when they are available." There's been absolutely no indication given of when customers can expect a fix. Western Digital stopped supporting the My Book Live in 2015 for cost reasons, leaving millions of devices with dated firmware and vulnerabilities. According to user threads at the company's website, some Western Digital MyDrive users who say they disabled all cloud functionality to protect themselves, say their data was wiped anyway. Since much of this data is encrypted, recovering it may prove to be a long shot, meaning that many users who thought they were being smart by backing up their essential files, will have likely lost everything permanently.It's not that hard for an everyday consumer -- inundated with an endless sea of obligations -- to miss the handful of notifications (if they even existed) that their devices are now neither supported nor secure. Given the millions of shitily-secured network routers and IOT devices that are being connected annually, the scope of the problem (and our collective apathy to it) really can't be overstated. If you know somebody who uses this hardware for backups and storage, you might want to give them a nudge.
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posted at: 12:00am on 30-Jun-2021
path: /Policy | permalink | edit (requires password)
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