Ubisoft, the company best known for promoting consumer unfriendly DRM, has been caught distributing pirated songs in the "Digital Deluxe" edition of Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood.
The "Digital Deluxe" version of the eagerly awaited game includes the full music soundtrack for the game, but it appears the included MP3s have actually been downloaded from private BitTorrent tracker, Demonoid.
When Reddit user 'plginger' purchased and examined the MP3s in the deluxe edition of the game, he found in the ID3 the text "Encoded by arsa13". arsa13 is a well known member of Demonoid, and he had encoded, tagged and uploaded the Brotherhood soundtrack to Demonoid. The only song that arsa13 didn't upload, which the Digital Deluxe version includes, was not tagged.
So it appears Ubisoft downloaded the pirated version of the soundtrack, re-encoded it at a lower quality to boot, and then included these songs in the Digital Deluxe version, but forgot to change over the ID3 tags. There are also other possible explanations though, and Ubisoft has launched its own internal investigation into the matter.
This wouldn't be the first time Ubisoft used piracy for its own benefits, with the company previously using a NO-CD crack by cracking group Reloaded for the digital version of its Rainbow Six Vegas 2 game.
Discuss this news story in the comments section, or in this forum thread where you can also see a screenshot of the tagged MP3s in question:
http://forum.digital-digest.com/showthread.php?t=94661
Home
