Spunky said:
Correction, cracking games is not illegal. When you buy a game, you're buying the rights to the game. You can do whatever the hell you want to your installation of that game. Hell, you paid for it.
It is, however, illegal on these boards.
You aren't buying the rights to the game and no, you can't do whatever you want with it. You know that modifications are considered illegal? Though most game companies don't really mind but there are some that will sue you for what you're worth if you modify any part of their product. Not to mention a number of game companies have made it extremely difficult to create modifications for their products.
Cracking a game is illegal. The only reason why the quote stated that it's illegal to distribute it is because if the crack was made by someone who kept it to themself without ever releasing or mentioning it, they wouldn't be suspected of anything. Now if you go and distribute it, that's a different story.
Wikipedia.org said:
Distribution of cracked software ("warez"), or patches to circumvent software protection on software (commonly known as "cracks") is generally an illegal (or more recently, criminal) act of copyright infringement
You just can't say cracking isn't illegal and that distributing cracks is. It's like saying downloading a copyrighted song (for free from a P2P program) isn't illegal but distributing it/sharing it is. If it's not illegal if you don't distribute it then why is it illegal if you distribute it? Cracking a game is cracking a game, no matter how you place it. Those who distribute cracks are more noticable and are more prime targets (and more noticable) than someone who didn't distribute it, but either way it's still illegal. That's how they try to stop things like this though, they try to find the souce of it which usually ends up being a couple of programmers/hackers/whatever.