Activision/Billizard have taken a strong stance on early leaks and piracy of the upcoming release of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2.  The video game, which is on pace to set all time sales records based on pre-order figures is a seriously hot commodity in the days and weeks leading up to its grand unveiling.  A personal friend of mine who is a manager of a GameStop in Texas described to me how any store caught selling the game before its November 10th street date would be fined $1,000 for each copy sold early.  And rumor mills are circling that individuals caught playing the game early online will be temporarily banned.

Robert Bowling, Infinity Ward Creative Strategist, set the record straight on his Twitter feed (@fourzerotwo), stating that, “ANY store selling MW2 early is in violation of street date. There are no “special permissions”. That said, we won’t punish players for it.”  An hour later he specified, “Any players who purchased a legit retail copy will not be reset [i.e. player stats] or banned.  Only modded/pirate versions will be.”

Rumor mills and store fines are one thing, but the other side of the coin is the struggle content creators often find themselves in with pirates when they are about to release a new product into the wild.  The most famous of any of these events occurred in 2003 when Valve’s Software Director Gabe Newell revealed on the Half-Life 2 forums that Valve had been hacked and the source code for the video game Half-Life 2 had been stolen and promptly shared around the Internet.

Licensing, cost, DRM, etc are all things that can be debated, and many of the issues surrounding software truly need a contingent to arrive at the table to rightly improve current models of service delivery, what you are allowed to do with your license, and costs in the new digital age.  But theft is simply something that cannot be tolerated, and something that there is no work around.  Taking something without the owners permission is not acceptable.  It is the owners choice to distribute their creation freely or to assess a charge for the use of their creation.  This will be a hard lesson coming for some too eager “entrepreneurs” in the days leading up to Modern Warfare 2.

In the last week, two unique accounts of criminal activities have occurred surrounding the game.  The first in LA, where a young man stole a crate of XBOX 360 Modern Warfare 2 Bundles at a video game box store where he worked.  He was tracked down through a Craigslist posting by IPCybercrime.com of Dallas, TX whom Activision/Blizzard had hired to investigate.  The man and a friend were selling the stolen goods for $500 a pop a week before the release.

The second major incident came when IPCybercrime again tracked down an individual on an XBOX 360 ISO website.  Following a listed email address on the site to Facebook they found a match containing a posted phone number on the account.  This eventually led Miami-Dade detectives to set up a “buy-bust” sting uncovering an individual who was selling pirated DVD’s of the game complete with on disk graphics making it look like the real deal.  Authorities also discovered that the culprit had been selling modified Xbox 360′s with 250Gb Western Digital hard drives with hundreds of pirated games included on the drive.

You can find the full story here.  It’s a really fascinating read and certainly shows that some video game publishers may be about to start sending the dogs after the underground video game pirates.  Others however are trying something a bit different.

Trials, a dirt bike game, was recently uploaded to torrent sites by their own developer RedLynx.  The version uploaded was sort of a demo without being a demo.  It gave those who picked up the torrent the full game experience, but it removed the leaderboards, which was described by CEO Tero Virtala as the “soul” of the game.  RedLynx has sold 150,000 copies of the game and has 150,000 players showing up on its leader boards.  The drug dealer “give them a taste and they’ll come back for more” business model seems to be playing itself out with some success.