May be it was a misunderstanding? ISI did care of rF1 reactivations only for users who purchased directly from them, via coupon/Paypal. All the users who purchased via Trymedia, had to contact Trymedia for the activations reset. RF2, and now rF v1255c, are a different story, because the protection system is proprietary, so no third part companies are involved.
Yes it is stealing. Please tell me in your warped mind how it isn't stealing. This should be worth a good laugh and some insight to your character as well. X amount of dollars is X amount of dollars. What's the difference if you're stealing software from a developer or stealing gold from someones house for example? I'm sure this will go no where anyways I'll let you make a fool out of yourself with your response though.
If you steal somebody's house, that person no longer has his house. It's now in your possession. If you download a game, the game dev doesn't suddenly have less money in his pocket. He can't tell whether you downloaded it or not. Nothing changes for him unless it would be guaranteed you'd buy the game IF piracy didn't exist. If you didn't download the game maybe you would have bought it but that's not certain. Let's completely exclude stealing source codes and other know-hows because if you actually use those without permission, you are definitely robbing authors of money. I must make it clear that I'm not saying that pirating is OK. All I'm saying is that it's not always equal to stealing. So when RIAA (who are morally the biggest thieves, they just abide law, law which can be immoral in itself) posts analysis that says Movie industry lost $5 billion due to piracy, they are lying. They definitely did lose some money but it is impossible to count how much it was. As for myself I can tell you this - if piracy didn't exist, I would buy 1-2 games per year and MAYBE 2 movies on dvd per year, not more, because most new movies aren't worth 1 cent in my opinion. I can agree though with you that this discussion is completely pointless because nobody is gonna convince the other debater (as is the case in most internet discussions because both sides have infinite ways how to ridicule or troll the other side, or, in better case, find xy arguments that support his view because on internet you're never alone with your opinion..). Last word: I assure you I'm not breaking any law in my country because downloading copyrighted material is legal here; sharing it with anybody else is what's illegal everywhere.
Back on topic, has the OP sent the email and gotten a response back from ISI yet to see how they handle it?
Whatever makes you feel better about yourself. If you made software for a living I'm sure you'd have a different attitude. Maybe if you actually earned a living you might have a different attitude. I'm not surprised eastern europe is lawless and corrupt.
Not denying this country is corrupted, not sure what does it have to do with downloading though. I believe it's the same in some western EU countries as well (I'm 100% sure about Netherlands), I guess it doesn't work like that in any US state because well, USA is far from being free country, yet americans shout freedummm at every corner lol
Well Osella, there is freedom and there is law abiding freedom. The US doesn't believe it should be run as an anarchistic state, it would rather have laws to govern behavior so that everyone has a better chance to get along with one another. Unfortunately, the US is slowly moving more towards anarchy and lawlessness which will be the downfall of it. As to pirating software, you asked if you were guilty of stealing $1mil if a software product sold for that price and you downloaded it for free. Your argument was that you would likely not have purchased it anyways, so the company would not be out the money. The point of it is that the company has spent untold hours researching and producing the product and is trying to recover it's expenditures and make a little money while they are at it. Your getting the software by pirating it has introduced a copy that they might have been able to sell to help them make ends meet had you gotten it the correct way. To follow your arguments and your nation's laws regarding movies and music, no one would be able to recover investments to make products if the majority of people did download the software, so they would eventually stop trying all together. This would lead to no further development for future products and we would be stuck with what ever we had at the time that they gave up. Is this a real possibility? I believe it is, as there would be no incentive to further develop software knowing that your hard work is going for nothing. In all likelihood though, what will eventually happen is that software engineers will find a way to prevent the software from functioning in specific regions of the world where they allow people to steal software without fear of repercussions. Failing that, they will just give up and stop making software.
Sure I understand that if piracy didn't exist income of all devs would be higher than it is now. I'm not in favour of anarchy, I consider anarchists mostly children or naive people, laws are necessary. Profit is a huge motivation for developing something new, better than competitors, very few people would spend half their lives trying to create something revolutionary for free. It's not the only motivation though, scientists in general would invent something even if they weren't paid for them, when in 1950s first message was sent from one computer to another, nobody knew how important and money making internet once will be, they did out of pure curiosity. I believe on the other hand piracy helps the flow of information to some extent and so I'm not sure overall level of development and skill would be that higher if piracy didn't exist. Look at how many modders use latest 3dsmax for modelling, everybody knows Photoshop.. 3dsmax 2013 costs $3700. Don't tell me most most amateur 3d modders actually bought that. Some of them downloaded it for free, used it to create better models than they could make with cheaper sw, which caused there are overall more quality models than there would be if piracy didn't exist. Moves the overall standard higher and in turn motivates those who charge money for their models to create even better models, and this creates demand on developing better modelling sw. And devs of that modelling sw will always have money from pro modellers because pirating sw for commercial use is much more dangerous. Btw over here downloading is only legal for personal and nonprofit use, every school and office I saw always had all legit sw because fines for corps aren't that small and it's checked occasionally, average fine for 1 caught corp is 400 000czk ($20 000) iirc, a big company with 500 instances of pirated MS Office could be fined a few million czk probably. Real quality will always make money, now as for my country despite downloading being legal in itself, people still do buy legit sw here. It's less than number of downloaded pieces of course. It's really really difficult to predict and count how much money producers lose due to piracy exactly, how piracy slows down advancement of the whole world (if it even does that). Regarding my comment on freedom of USA, it seems to me freedom of all people is limited by having too capitalistic history, where money dictate everything. US government wouldn't give a f..k about megaupload, they closed it because RIAA and other gigacorps paid goverment how they should behave. Now if I should choose, I'd take pure capitalism over pure communism any day, the idea that everyone will share with everyone and only consume what is evident nonsense, but I think the best approach is something in between. Just look at public healthcare and elementary education in US, they are terrible, even in eastern europe those 2 are at higher level. Maybe too much politics for a sim forum, hope nobody minds, sorry if does, it is directly connected to piracy problematics which we discuss here though...
I hate to continue to be off topic here Osella, so perhaps we can carry this discussion on in pm's or something. I enjoy a good debate but hate hijacking threads, though I do tend to do that now and again.
I had someone else say that had happened to them a couple of years back, it didn't take long to clear up. Remember we handle activation now, not TryMedia. But we do have the soft 5 activations limit. If you want to bypass activation, it is simple. After you have activated on that machine: Just take a copy of your .rFactor folders from appdata (enter %appdata% in the start menu to find it quick), then after you format or whatever, just put the folder back in the same place on the new install. As long as there was no mass hardware change, you won't need to reactivate.
