Is this a pirated copy?

[Brundlefly]

On ebay, someone is selling Russian copies of Civ IV Warlords with Russian lettering on the front. The distributor is called "neogames".. I was wondering if they are an authorized distributor of Warlords. I dont get any response from Firaxis or Take Two when I ask them this question... Apparantly, this Russian version cannot be patched.

[Solver]

Link?

Probably pirated. The official distributor of Civ4 in Russia is a company called 1C.

The tricky part is that, quite possibly, these pirated copies are actually legal (for sale and ownership) under Russian law, which can be a bit... unusual when it comes to copyright.

[DrSpike]

Yes, the Russians are a law unto themselves.

I'd buy a proper copy though.

[Brundlefly]

Originally posted by Solver
Link?

Probably pirated. The official distributor of Civ4 in Russia is a company called 1C.

The tricky part is that, quite possibly, these pirated copies are actually legal (for sale and ownership) under Russian law, which can be a bit... unusual when it comes to copyright.

The link to the ebay item will not help - there is no picture of the cover..

The game comes in a dvd case with the picture of the warlords front cover on the front and cyrillic lettering on front.. the word "neogame" is written on the front cover as well.. when you go to install, the instructions are all in cyrillic, so non-Russians have to rely on intuition to make the right choices to install the game..

http://neogame.ru/ is the neogame website.. I dont see anywhere on the site that you can purchase games, but then i dont read cyrillic..

[Solver]

Yeah. It's one of those very dubiously legal companies that sell games at 1/4th the price, and that they may only be legal thanks to legal loopholes.

Oh well.

[DrSpike]

Clearly we should just ban all Russians from Civ.