Microsoft Bans Halo 4 Pirates, and Some Idiots Absolutely Deserved It

This might come as a surprise to a lot of people (namely those of you who seem shocked that torrentfreak is cheering on Microsoft), but just because someone is generally anti copyright does not mean that they don't have soft spots for certain companies or certain franchises, or that they rank spoiling a blockbuster as a pretty crappy thing to do.

FYI this has absolutely nothing to do with TorrentFreak suddenly being anti-piracy. The only thing he's mad about is that the pirates are spoiling the game's story by publishing spoilers everywhere. It's not about the act of piracy itself, just the spoilers.<p>From Enigmax in the comments:<p>"The issue of the "copying and distributing" of information isn't what i'm complaining about, it's the idiots who want to ruin everyone else's enjoyment of what would otherwise be a first class experience."

I'm surprised that torrentfreak would take this view. Perhaps Microsoft needs better internal controls if they don't want their games to leak a month before release? Once it's leaked, you can't really blame people for playing the game and telling people about it. Information wants to be free, and all that.<p>What purpose does account suspension serve? People will just initiate a chargeback for their membership fees and create a new account with a new username. Or worse, switch to PS3 and forget all about Microsoft.

This article wants to be objecting to the mass-posting of Halo 4 spoilers, but for some reason it's written with an almost anti-piracy angle. This confuses me.

The real news here is that Halo 4 apparently has a story worth ruining?

So do they distinguish between pirated copies and honestly-bought copies, and ban appropriately, or do they take the blanket approach of banning anyone playing the game regardless?

Why is this news? They've had this policy since Halo 2. The only reason Halo 1 didn't have it was because it wasn't a live game.

With consoles linked to the home company so strongly these days, it's relatively unsurprising that Microsoft would do something like this. I mean, it's not like you don't know that your console's connected to them, right?