Whoa, this news came out of nowhere. This morning the Department of Justice and the FBI have confirmed that they have seized three Android App pirating websites. These are well known pirate websites that are taking away the hard earned dollar of our developers. Sites listed today include: applanet.net, appbucket.net and snappzmarket.com and this is only the start.
A press release from the DOJ confirms all the details, and explains just what these sites were doing — although I’m pretty sure you all understand just fine. The three sites listed above were hosting hundreds or thousands of paid copyrighted Android apps and were allowing the illegal distribution of said apps. All three are now in the governments control.
We are also seeing a few other popular pirate sites such as Blapkmarket.com hitting the fan too. They aren’t listed by the DOJ and FBI, but surely isn’t up and running as of this morning. During the FBI’s sting operation they downloaded hundreds of paid apps and were then issued 9 warrants — although some of the sites were hosted overseas.
Pirating is nothing new. From the music and video industry to now Android. This has been a growing problem for months and months and it appears that the DOJ is finally starting to take action. This is the first of its kind against the growing Android app world, and surely there will be more to follow. There was no mention of arrests in the case but we’ll be hearing more soon.
Buy those apps and support our developers guys!
[via CNET]
huh? stupid as shit
not all games got ‘free’ or test version to check them. and those bigger productions in most cases cost more than 1 or 2$. so it was good way to check if they’re wortth their price
I sort of agree. It’s just way too easy for people to just leave the cracked game there once it’s installed and never buy it. But the 15 minute “trial” they offer to test apps before refund is WAAAAYYYYY too limiting, I’ll agree with that, so other solutions to test apps must exist. I usually just end up buying the app, copying it with root explorer, refund, crack, test and uninstall if it doesn’t suit me. Downloading illegally, I do the least possible.
Fuck who ever is Against piracy, wall street showed us how lil our governments give a shit about us its all about the rich and corperations for them. So I say steel it all and fuck anyone who’s trying to make you pay more to live your life. First tell the congress to bust wall street for their piracy then fuck it come get me still then eat shit f.b.i
Please stop writing publicly until you learn how to spell words and punctuate sentences.
fucking english teacher nazi…troll elsewhere..punctuate this..the man got his point across and we could gve a fuck about an english lesson. U Douche!!!
I am against piracy. But all my work is open source, some Apache 2 and some GPL. If a programmer has closed, proprietary source, evaluate and buy or don’t. There are free and open source alternatives to almost anything one can imagine. So if you are for piracy, I am 1) saddened by your ignorance and 2) hope, for your sake, someone from the fbi doesn’t read your comment(s).
The best solution to piracy is to offer a generous free trial, encourage the user to create content in your app, and then, at the end of the trial, make it easy to continue using an in-app purchase to unlock the same content as was available during the trial. Most people are not going to go to the trouble of pirating an app that they can use right away for free as a trial. Just as they need the trial to know if it is worth buying, they need the trial to know if it is worth the trouble (and moral hazard) to illegally download and then side-load. And once they have generated some user content with the trial, they’ll be reluctant to start over by installing a new, pirated version.