Ubisoft Sues Disc Replicator in Assassins Creed Leak

By Joe Haygood | August 7, 2008

Ubisoft has filed a lawsuit against Optical Experts Manufacturing (OEM), a company responsible for duplicating the Assassins Creed master for retail box copies.  The main argument in the complaint is that a copy of the game that was sent to OEM for copying was taken by an employee and uploaded to BitTorrent.

Ubisoft investigated and tracked down the earliest released torrent on the major torrent index sites and found that it was linked to a person that works at OEM.  Further investigation estimated that 700,000 downloads had been completed off of that original torrent upload, leading Ubisoft to ask for damages in the amount of $10 million.

No further comment was made by either side in the argument, and the case has not been set with a trial date as of yet.

via ActionTrip

The upsetting part of the story is that the people that make these discs gain a living off of the stamping of these discs, so why would an employee want to jeopardize the income stream?  More importantly, why would he use an account so easy to track down to his identity?  This to me is another reason I feel that digital distribution has to happen to all PC games and it has to be done in a uniform way.  Some may be against it, but incidents like this only help support industry views that they cannot make money off of the PC platform, especially when the theft comes from the inside, like this did.