Phil Elliott
09:10 (BST)
07/08/2008
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Ubisoft sues OEM over Creed leak
Ubisoft has filed a lawsuit against the company it hired to reproduce discs for the PC edition of Assassin's Creed, for no less then USD 10 million on counts of breach of contract and negligence, plus fees, and for an undisclosed sum on a count of copyright infringement.
The suit is the result of a leak which Ubisoft claims came from US-based Optical Experts Manufacturing which led to over 700,000 pirated downloads of the title, as well as "irreparable harm" to its reputation, reports GameSpot.
It is alleged that an employee of OEM took a copy of the game home and uploaded it to the Internet around six weeks before the game shipped for the PC in April this year, and that OEM ignored a number of security protocols which would have prevented that from happening.
Ubisoft also claims that a bug which it had purposely introduced to the unfinished code (which was what was pirated) caused the game to crash partway through - but that this bug found its way into some reviews, causing customer confusion as to the reliability of the clean retail game.
Piracy on the PC platform is a hot topic in the industry worldwide, with some regions in Asia-Pacific and Europe so blighted by the problem that no PC packaged software market exists to speak of.
Piracy has also been cited as a reason for the decline in the PC gaming market - outside of MMOs - and part of the subsequent rise of console popularity.
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