It's actually a bit dangerous for ripping groups to do that if they're in countries friendly to western interests, because the media companies can initiate a tr

It's actually a bit dangerous for ripping groups to do that if they're in countries friendly to western interests, because the media companies can initiate a traitor tracing protocol to figure out where the leaks are coming from and then initiate prosecutions. Traitor tracing algorithms are well known in the literature and some are undetectable. When this game was playing out with BluRay, it wasn't possible for the media groups to directly attack the ripper makers because the primary developers were in Antigua which had a WTO ruling against the USA allowing Antiguans to ignore US intellectual property rights. I forget the political background. Later I think someone in China started doing it too. The point is though, that the tech converted (for a time) the problem from one of intractable scale to one of "if we get these two companies then the issue disappears because they're the only ones who have the knowledge". That opens up all sorts of new strategies for the media companies to pursue. They may not work, but, the situation is definitely not the same as before. BTW video game cracks don't have to be published with the game. They can just publish the patches to the game files without releasing any tools they created to make those patches.