Have you ever bought a game, and then not managed to get it working on your machine? Have you ever had to resort to downloading a 'no-cd' crack to get it to run? I know I have, and I know that the games industry considers me a massive pirate due to buying their software, then running it in a way they don't like.
Which makes this thread over on the Ubisoft forums all the more entertaining. When faced with a version of Rainbow Six: Vegas 2 that wasn't working on lots of machines, ubisoft did exactly what you would have done. They went and got a no-cd crack off the internet and released it as an official patch.
Here's the crackers code in the patch (apparently the name tag gives it away):
I'm not condoning piracy, even when you're pirating the pirates, but what I do like here, is that I'm sure everyone here has "pirated" in the black and white eyes of Ubisoft. But you know what you did wasn't wrong. You know you're not a pirate just because you didn't want to put your disk in your machine to get your game to work.
And today, by stealing that code, Ubisoft have acknowledged that piracy, at least when it concerns them, does indeed have shades of grey.
All respect goes to neilthecellist for revealing the story and Oby for bringing it to my attention.
If you feel like it, DIGG THIS HERE
UPDATE 4:34 AM: I've some more info on what the crack actually was for. According to MD_Sennet:
The Reloaded crack was required so the Direct-2-Drive customers could apply the new 1.03 patch, since the vanilla version of the patch UBI has on their website will not work on the D2D installations of Vegas2.
Skeptobot: Ubisoft found Pirating the Pirates.