Mr. Auriemma has posted the pdf file of the letter he received from the attorneys representing GameSpy Industries on his site. The file is found at:
http://aluigi.altervista.org/misc/75395-1.pdf .

I posted this to show yet another way the DMCA is being used, and, I think the letter may be of interest to anyone who hasn't seen one of these letters.

Also, the DMCA of course, is a United States law, and Mr. Auremma lives in Italty. Furthermore, the website altervista.org is registered with an address in Italy.

What will they think of using the DMCA on next?
~Code

The letter is not there anymore and it seems like the whole site was taken off.

darn, it was.... see if you can retrieve it from your computer Code

posted on gamespy

"GameSpy welcomes any and all help finding genuine bugs and security breaches on our servers. What we don't welcome are people publishing security hacks that have the potential to hurt our products. GameSpy products are supposed to be about having fun, but hacks and Denial of Service (DoS) attacks take the fun out of it. It doesn't simply hurt GameSpy; it hurts every person playing games with our products.
What this person did was more than reverse engineer two of our products, RogerWilco and GameSpy3D -- he was describing our backend services and publishing CDkey generation information without letting us know. At first we welcomed his bug alerts. We responded to him immediately and thanked him for his bug research, as we do with everyone who contacts us with bug information. We even sent him a thank you letter, which we have on file.

But then we found out he was also publishing how to brute force our RogerWilco CDkeys and had published hacks on other game CDkeys as well. He was doing more than reporting bugs; he was publishing game pirating techniques. He published how to attack our network. This is not the way ethical security researchers operate. It was at this point that we stopped our communication with him and asked him to remove the materials in question.

When we were first contacted, this person was associated with a small software security company. They asked if GameSpy wanted to pay a "consulting fee" to fix the hacks. However, these were not bugs; it was information about how our products work. When we brought this to the software security company's attention, they disavowed their relationship with that person and removed him from their servers.

Let me repeat: We welcome any bug alerts and will fix any and all security breaches that come to our attention. We find and fix nearly all of them before any external sources find them. It's all about playing games and having fun, people! That's why we do what we do! However, we won't pay "consulting fees" to people who create CDkey hacks of our proprietary software, then post the results if we don't pay them.

Gamers trust us. We have to protect them from any and all attacks on our network that affect gamers.

I welcome contacting me about this issue! Please send an email directly to me at marks@gamespy.com."

http://aluigi.altervista.org/misc/75395-1.pdf
I just went right to it.
http://aluigi.altervista.org/misc.htm
go down to where you see the
"Cease and desist letter from Gamespy's lawyers 12 November 2003 link"

Yeah, it's all "Errore 403", so I doubt we'll get any info on this (guess points to a higher authority?)

Keep digging.

you have to take the < br > tag off the end

Since when did Italy become the 51st State?

And maybe if software developers would stop charging ridiculous prices for their product, then more people would buy them instead of downloading them.

Code, I don't know why everyone is having trouble opening this file. I had none whatsoever. In any event, I uploaded the file to the yahoo site.

Here: http://tinyurl.com/utal

I had trouble at first. the problem was if you didn't get the removed right away and hit enter, it would automaticly go back to their search engine and you'd have to start all over.

anyway I wonder how they will enforce this. since they are not in the United states unless we have some kind of a treaty with Italy covering this

It's all so sickening could just puke on it all,My god they just don't stop why hasn't some one in some kind of power stop these idiots they are destroying the internet with bull not making it pleasureful to even be on a computer anymore. all this wonerful technology going to waste so sick.

Anyone who's played games on Gamespy's servers hates Gamespy. I just hope people find more bugs in their software...

kyodylee - THANKS !
As usual, you go the extra mile for folks..much appreciated!
~Code

hey, as this guy lives outside the US, he is free to ignore those charges. Why not? If it was about me, I would.

It appears to be a bullying tactic, since he lives in Italy, his site is registered in Italy...they are trying to scare him into compliance, but with the DMCA, you never know what American courts will do.

shall i add them to the peerguardian database

lol..up to you seraph

Well I'm afraid I'm gonna hafta take devils advocate on this one, partially atleast. I don't blame gamespy one bit for taking such strong action. I'de be pissed as well. It's one thing to copy something for your own personal use, but its another thing entirely to go hacking into other peoples networks and bypassing their security. However, why does the DMCA have any jurisdiction over there? Are we paying to police foreign countries now? In more than the coutnries we are at war with.

Actually purfus, that was my point about the jurisdicton of the DMCA. I read the guy in Italy's side, and the statement from GameSpy, and they both offer different positions on what he did or didn't do, and to be honest, the truth is probably somewhere in between.

My interest on it was the letter and the attempt to use the DMCA on someone in another country .

http://aluigi.altervista.org/papers/gamespystory.txt

An update on the story...Luigi tells how this thing developed.