Digital rights management software provider Denuvo is taking an anonymous prolific game pirate to court in the United States, accusing him of violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act by circumventing anti-tampering technology in 26 games, including Black Myth: Wukong, Resident Evil Requiem and Doom: The Dark Ages.
On Monday, September 14, the company filed a DMCA complaint against an individual or group called “voices38” in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. Torrent Monster have gotten their hands on the filing, in which Denuvo claims that voices38 “circumvented DRM restrictions in copyrighted works, by removing protections that allow copyright owners to restrict access to their works and by allowing pirated versions of those copyrighted works.”
This isn’t a traditional copyright infringement claim against piracy, as Denuvo obviously doesn’t own the copyright to the games in question – rather, they’re invoking a section of US copyright law that prohibits the circumvention of digital locks on copyrighted works, or the distribution of tools and instructions for overcoming such protections. Denuvo is seeking damages as well as an injunction against the removal of anti-tampering software from “any past, present or future video games.”
Denuvo’s major difficulty is that they don’t know who “voices38” actually is, beyond identifying a Discord handle, a Reddit account, and a few Steam profiles that they believe are used by the cracker. They refer to the accused as “an unknown person or entity”, alongside 10 other anonymous accused.
Torrent Freak suggests that Denuvo files the complaint in part so it can seek permission to subpoena Valve, Reddit, and Discord for more information about the affected user(s). Beyond that, if Denuvo wins its case, the lawsuit could serve to deter other pirates or make it easier to remove anti-Denuvo software download links. Whoever the “voices38” are, they don’t seem very bothered by this legal action so far. Here is a comment on Reddit supposedly from the cracker: “Everything is fine. Everything will continue as usual.”
Although Voices38 cracks can be used for game hacking, that is not why many of you are trying to get rid of Denuvo. The latter’s anti-tampering protection works by obfuscating and encrypting the code, which can impact game performance.
There’s a lot of debate online about how big the performance drop really is, mind you. In 2023, Denuvo promised to implement an independent testing initiative and destroy its reputation for frame rates, but I don’t know yet if that happened. The most serious objection to Denuvo DRM is that the software may require online verifications to work, posing a threat to the preservation of the game.
