MW3 Heist: Will The DRM Help? (Updated)

By now, many people may have heard of the Modern Warfare 3 heist in Créteil, south Paris, France over the weekend. This was executed by staging a collision between a car and the delivery truck, carrying 6000 physical copies, worth around 400,000 Euros. When the truck driver and his colleague got out of the truck to deal with the incident, two masked criminals then stole the truck by subduing them with teargas. There's no word on whether the truck's drivers were injured in the attack. A nasty little incident for sure for the hardworking staff, but thankfully nothing more dangerous was used.

It's not clear which gaming platform the copies were intended for, or if it was a mixture of all three. However, for the Steam platform at least, the only important thing in the box is the activation code which must authenticate over the internet with Steam's servers, so without this, the game is useless. On top of that, the disc isn't actually needed to install the game as the whole lot can be downloaded over the internet. So was there a batch number tied to the shipment and all the activation codes within the boxes. If so, it would be a simple matter for Steam to blacklist all 6000 activation codes. Note that while doing this would prevent anyone from playing those stolen copies, it likely wouldn't stop criminals from fencing those to unsuspecting buyers (or not so unsuspecting buyers) either in person or online on sites like eBay. Therefore, flogging dead copies is unfortunately not necessarily a barrier to profit for them. With a bit of luck though, they might cheese off the wrong people who might just pay them a little visit later and sort them out, no police required...

UPDATE

Techdirt has a great, sarcastic take on this story in Old Fashioned 'Pirates' Steal 6,000 Copies Of The New Call Of Duty Game. Here's a couple of excerpts:

In this day and age of digital goods, where the waters are constantly muddied by the use of phrases like "stealing" or "content theft" in place of "copying" or "infringement," it's refreshing to see a youthful group of go-getters shaming their basement-dwelling peers by leaving the house and, you know, actually stealing something.

And:

While stealing physical product would seem to be completely redundant in this age of "epidemic level" piracy, there's something to be said about putting in a dishonest day's work. Of course, these stolen goods will likely be useless, considering Activision will likely have already pinned down the serial numbers affected by the time Jean Q. Publique has purchased his copy via LeBay or whatever. While pirating in the physical realm allows you to wear kickass hoods and toss around tear gas, the pirated digital equivalent will contain none of the damning evidence (invalid serial numbers, tear gas residue) and all of the fun of the original. I mean, this is a Call of Duty game and you're going to want to get online, right? Nobody buys/steals CoD for the single player.