It seems as though some stores in Australia have been selling advance copies of the game a few days before the official release date.

Over the weekend, a Warez group called “RELOADED” has managed to crack the copy protection on the game and now it is being downloaded by hundreds of cheapskates over bittorrent.

Spore Cracked by “RELOADED” Group [Game Viper]

We got an email from an anonymous tipster yesterday, indicating that the US version of Final Fantasy XII had been leaked in ISO form to various torrent sites. We checked when we heard it, but didn't come up with anything that looked legit.

Doublechecking today, it certainly appears to be for real. Commenters on Digg are confirming the validity of the torrents and that it is a leaked, legitimate copy of the US version of FFXII... 30 days before release.

Obviously, we're not informing you of this so you can rush out and download it, but more so you've got the proper background when heads at Sony or Square-Enix roll. And we're betting at least one coconut will. Florian Eckhardt

Ask the Kotaku Scouts, and ye shall receive. A reader whom I shall dub "Hamswaddle the Fierce" to protect his salty identity has written in to assure me that Introversion's swaggering is misplaced. To further protect Hamswaddle's precious alter ego, I have also obscured his voice with my handheld iPatois, which came bundled with a Buccaneer setting:

Avast! As Elizar be askin' fer stories o' the bounding main, I be givin' ye me own tale o' Introversion, honest as true.

'Tis ship-shape! If there be some yellow-bellied sneakery to stop honest gennelmen o' fortune from downloadin', they be weak as seasick chorus girls.

Any crew worth their salt be releasin' torrents emblazoned with their own pers'nal skull n' bones, so if there be unmarked versions they will very likely be under seeded and \, or e'en given the Black Spot. Puts a chill in me beard, it do!

Y'see, with certain crews ye be gettin' quality goods every time, tharfore Introversions' methodoggery seems a wee backwards. But sakes, I applaud their clever ways, an' give 'em full marks for effort.

'Tis an ironic thing... Soon as I test-sailed the buccaneerin' version of the game, I enjoyed it so much that I stepped out and bought the bleedin' thing with good coin!

A whole passel o' seadogs nowadays use the ol' Torrent as their own pers'nal demo station, digging up the whole trove and deciding if they are worth the 'orrible price. Be ye unsure if a game is worth the 50 bones? Plunder it, test the blessed thing, then make yer decision. 'Tis only good sense.

Thanks for your contributions, Hamswaddle. May the rest of your voyages be as pleasant and rewarding!Eliza Gauger

GamesIndustry reports on gamedev Introversion's anti-piracy methods:

"You can't stop peer-to-peer file sharing, so the best route to combat it is to subvert it," revealed Tom Arundel, sales and marketing director at Introversion.

"We will release a version of our game that looks like it's been hacked at the same time as a pirated version gets out," he said.

"Our version looks like the real game, but is in fact a demo. After the third time of downloading the demo, the P2P user will be very, very frustrated, and will do one of two things - give up or buy the game from us. We subverted the Bit Torrent network for Darwinia very successfully this way," he revealed.

I always wonder how the developer's interpretation of "successful" measures up to the pirates'. If anyone cashed in a pegleg discount on Darwinia and got away with it, let me know. Eliza Gauger

More here [GamesIndustry]

Amongst myriad other changes in World of Warcraft's 1.10 patch lurks a somewhat more insidious one. WoW's patching system works off of the Bittorrent protocol. In previous patches, the patcher would only upload while you were downloading the latest patch, or kept the WoW updater window open. However, this is no longer the case — the Blizzard forums are full of reports that the Blizzard Downloader is now constantly running, regardless of whether or not you close the Download Patch program. In other words — you're paying Blizzard so they can suck up your bandwidth for you.

Although Blizzard's usual gaggle of fopping fan boys point out that Blizzard draining your upload bandwidth is "part of the terms of service"... hey, guess what! Terms of service aren't legally binding contracts. What disturbs us about this is more along the lines that this change was made with little to no warning. Although it's easy to say "it's just 5k here or there, who cares?" you need to remember many people still have bandwidth allotments from their ISP every month, which counts against upload as well as download. Blizzard making this change is basically a drain on a lot of people's checkbooks without their permission.

Ultimately, we tend to side with the Blizzard forum poster who said: " No you can't use my bandwidth for your stupid bit-torrent crap. Buy some file servers." It is completely unacceptable that an MMORPG as rampantly profitable as World of Warcraft expects its users to do its digital distribution for them. That they sneakily tried to alter what was once a free agreement to help upload a file to another player into a compulsory obligation on the part of the player is really crappy. The good news, though, is that Blizzard has caved to forum complaints and updated their downloader FAQ with instructions on how to stop the Downloader from continuously starting up.

Pls Explain Strange Game Behavior [Blizzard Forums]